Last Updated May 8, 2018 3:41 PM EDT
Despite lobbying from European allies, President Trump moved forward Tuesday with his campaign promise to pull out of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. He made the announcement from the White House, where he denounced the deal as “defective at its core.”
Mr. Trump said the 2015 agreement that included Germany, France and Britain was a “horrible one-sided deal that should never ever have been made.” He added that the U.S. “will be instituting the highest level of economic sanction.”
Moments later, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said he has ordered the foreign minister to negotiate with the other countries that remain in the nuclear deal. In a national address from Tehran, Rouhani warned there was only a short time to negotiate with them and that his country could soon “start enriching uranium more than before.”
“Iran is a country that adheres to its commitments and the U.S. is a country that has never adhered to its commitments,” he said.
The nuclear agreement had lifted most U.S. and international sanctions against the country. In return, Iran agreed to restrictions on its nuclear program, making it impossible to produce a bomb, along with rigorous inspections.
The French president’s office said Tuesday that France, Britain and Germany “regret” the decision to leave the accord, calling it a threat to global efforts to contain nuclear weapons. French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted that the “nuclear non-proliferation regime is at stake” because of Mr. Trump’s announcement.
Former President Obama called the decision a “serious mistake,” and warned it will erode America’s global credibility.
“The JCPOA is working – that is a view shared by our European allies, independent experts, and the current U.S. Secretary of Defense,” Obama said in a Facebook post, referring to the Iran nuclear deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. “The JCPOA is in America’s interest – it has significantly rolled back Iran’s nuclear program. And the JCPOA is a model for what diplomacy can accomplish – its inspections and verification regime is precisely what the United States should be working to put in place with North Korea.”
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the decision, calling it “historic.” Netanyahu, a leading critic of the deal, said leaving it unchanged would be “a recipe for disaster, a disaster for our region, a disaster for the peace of the world.” He said Iran’s aggression has grown since the deal, especially in Syria, where he says it is “trying to establish military bases to attack Israel.”
Earlier, Israel’s military said forces were on high alert and ordered bomb shelters open in the Golan Heights after spotting “irregular activity of Iranian forces in Syria.”
Back at home, House Speaker Paul Ryan also hailed the Tuesday announcement and said that “from the beginning, the Obama-era Iran deal was deeply flawed.” Ryan said Iran’s hostile actions since the deal was signed have only reaffirmed that it remains dedicated to sowing instability in the Middle East. Ryan said he would have preferred to fix the agreement rather than abandon it and that it was “unfortunate that we could not reach an understanding with our European partners” to do that.
He also said Mr. Trump is “right to insist that we hold Iran accountable both today and for the long-term,” adding that he hopes the U.S. will continue to work with allies to address actions by Iran to destabilize the Middle East.
Reaction from Democrats in the U.S. has also started pouring in. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, called the U.S. withdrawal “a mistake of historic proportions.” Breaking the Iran deal increases the danger that Iran will restart its nuclear weapons program, which threatens Israel and “destabilizes the entire Middle East,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s action “isolates the United States from the world at a time when we need our allies to come together to address nuclear threats elsewhere, particularly in Korea,” he added.
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