From this morning's New York Times editorial:
"In 2015, a group of world powers signed on to relax some international sanctions if Iran gave up the most worrisome aspects of its nuclear program and agreed to robust inspections. The nuclear deal wasn’t a peace deal. It was an agreement to resolve the nuclear issue peacefully. In 2018, the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from that agreement, convinced that a new set of far more oppressive sanctions would cripple the country enough to humiliate it into accepting new terms more favorable to the United States.
But President Donald Trump’s gambit failed. The new sanctions have crippled the country. But they also prompted the Iranian government to restart nuclear work that it had given up. Other nations, including China, which worked closely with the United States and European powers to forge the nuclear deal with Iran, have grown weary of U.S. unilateralism and could resume doing business with Iran, one way or another." (our emphasis)
Among his multiple failures, incompetent buffoon Donald "Mango Mussolini" Trump's withdrawal from the carefully constructed, multi-national agreement was one of the most consequential, certainly in the foreign policy / national security realm. It released Iran from international inspections and compliance, and permitted other nations to cut their own deals with Iran. Corrupt right-wing Israeli Likudnik Bibi "Bomb Bomb" Netanyahu had inappropriately lobbied Republicans in Congress directly in 2015 to overturn the agreement, finally realizing his goal during Trump's regime. Now that the world has seen that the U.S. can reverse itself on treaties from administration to administration, this may be a long slog to get the agreement back on track to quell Iran's nuclear ambitions.
