Slate - "Trump is a Gift to Iran"
The president's efforts to undermine the nuclear deal are only helping Tehran
The Iran Trap
Trump is stuck with Obama’s nuclear deal. And his efforts to undermine it can only help Tehran.
By Fred Kaplan
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2017/07/trump_is_stuck_with_the_iran_deal.html
President Donald Trump is having, even by his standards, a very bad week. On Monday alone, quite apart from the continuing Russia scandal, he found himself blocked from fulfilling his dreams and campaign promises to repeal the two landmark achievements of the Obama years—the Affordable Care Act and the Iran nuclear deal.
In the former, Senate Republican leaders couldn’t muster enough votes, even within their own party, for an alternative plan that was drawn up in secret and would snatch health care from more than 20 million Americans. In the latter, Trump was met with—and, at first, tried to resist—an unpleasant surprise: The Iranians, it turns out, are in full compliance with the accord’s quite stringent terms. The deal, which Trump and other critics had denounced as dangerous and unworkable, is working.
Shortly after the deal was signed in July 2015 by Iran and six other nations (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China—plus Germany), the U.S. Congress passed a bill requiring the president to report every 90 days on whether Iran was keeping its end of the bargain. Monday was the most recent 90-day deadline.
In June, as the deadline approached, the White House was dealt a crushing blow by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been monitoring the deal under the most intrusive inspection regime ever negotiated in an arms-control accord. The IAEA concluded—in its own detailed, point-by-point report on the matter—that the Iranians have so far followed the accord to the letter.
snip - more at the link above