A foreign policy expert, not known for emotional or blunt language, told me rejecting the Iran deal was “the stupidest thing Trump has done in foreign policy.” Shows the US doesn’t care what its closest allies think and is no longer a responsible steward of international security
CNN’s Amanpour: “I would describe pulling out of this deal [nuke deal] as possibly the greatest deliberate act of self-harm and self-sabotage in geo-strategic politics in the modern era.” @camanpour
President Spanky thinks he can bully his way around world leaders like he bullies his wives and contractors. The contractors sued him; his wives (2) divorced him. The world leaders will not want to be involved in any treaties or political alliances with America. The world today is based on international trade so isolationism is not going to help the United States. He and the conservatives who voted for this disasterous canker-brain want to take America back to the mid 1800s
If there was any doubt that President Trump intended to repudiate the international agreement that placed limits on Iran’s nuclear program, he dispelled it on Tuesday.
As expected, Trump announced that he would not waive economic sanctions as the United States is required to do under the 2015 agreement, rejecting the advice of America’s closest allies and turning a blind eye to his own defense secretary’s conclusion that the agreement has allowed for robust monitoring of Iran’s activities. -- LATimes
Trump just abandoned the Iran deal. Does he have any idea what to do next?
Tuesday, President Trump announced that the United States is pulling out of the agreement to constrain Iran’s nuclear program — which was negotiated in 2015 by the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and the European Union — and said the United States would reimpose strict sanctions on Iran.
This decision is deeply uninformed, utterly illogical, inimical to the interests of the United States, taken for the pettiest of personal reasons and done with absolutely no plan for what to do next. In other words, it’s pure Trump.
Upon announcing his decision today to reimpose sanctions and essentially abandon the agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Trump said, “If I allow this deal to stand, there would soon be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East,” as though by pulling out of the JCPOA we’re forever keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons — if anything, the exact opposite of what’s happening.
[5 big consequences of Trump’s Iran blunder]
"...as alarming as the action the president took was, so was the deceitful and demagogic speech in which he attempted to justify it. It was virtually indistinguishable from the sort of rant he delivered a year and ago on the campaign trail, utterly uninformed by the sort of wisdom and appreciation of complexity that experience confers on most occupants of the Oval Office.
So much for learning on the job. And much as we would like to think the president was motivated by a belief, however wrongheaded, that tearing up this agreement would somehow lead to a better one, it is hard to escape the suspicion that he was more influenced by a compulsion to besmirch the legacy of his predecessor."
In another Trump corruption scandal:
NBC:
"Stormy Daniels' attorney claimed Tuesday that President Donald Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen received $500,000 from a company controlled by a Russian oligarch, deposited into an account for a company also used to pay off the adult film actress.
Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenatti, also detailed other transactions he said were suspicious, including deposits from drug giant Novartis, the state-run Korea Aerospace Industries, and AT&T — which confirmed it paid Cohen's company for "insights" into the Trump administration.
If true, Avenatti's claims, made in a dossier posted to Twitter, could add a new dimension to the federal investigation into Cohen.
NBC News has reviewed financial documents that appear to support Avenatti’s account of the transactions."
2 comments:
This move will play well with his base -- the knuckle-dragging Breitbart-reading Deliverance mutants who pronounce it "Eye-ran" -- and it's another Obama achievement trashed. Those considerations are the only ones Trump cares about or even really perceives.
France, the UK, and Germany have already issued a joint statement of determination to persevere with the agreement. This is another step toward a world where other countries get things done by working around the US, not with it. US companies which had planned expanded investments in Iran, such as Boeing, will not be happy. Those opportunities will now be scooped up by European or East Asian companies instead. Sanctions by the US alone will not be very effective. They worked before because most other major countries were on board.
We have to hope that Rouhani and other moderates in Iran will be able to prevent the hotheads there from overreacting. That's what the hotheads in the US, such as Bolton, want -- an escalating cycle of provocations that will strengthen them and make war more likely. The rest of the democratic world has to show that it can make the agreement work and sideline Trump.
Trump says that by breaking America's word, he is teaching the world that America keeps its promises. That's because he spells "America" T-r-u-m-p.
But the world knows how much my country's word is worth, and prospective nuclear nations can see what happens when Iran agrees to not go nuclear (with verification), and what happens when North Korea demonstrates that it has nuclear bombs. Those countries aren't dumb.
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