TEMPO.CO, Washington - President Donald Trump on Tuesday pulled the United States out of an international nuclear deal with Iran, raising the risk of conflict in the Middle East, upsetting European allies and casting uncertainty over global oil supplies.
Trump said in a televised address from the White House that he would reimpose U.S. economic sanctions on Iran to undermine
“a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.”
The 2015 agreement, worked out by the United States, five other world powers and Iran, lifted sanctions on Iran in exchange for Tehran limiting its nuclear programme. The pact was designed to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb.
But Trump complained that the accord, the signature foreign policy achievement of his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, did not address Iran’s ballistic missile programme, its nuclear activities beyond 2025 or its role in conflicts in Yemen and Syria.
Trump’s decision intensifies the strain on the trans-Atlantic alliance since he took office 16 months ago. One by one, European leaders came to Washington and tried to meet his demands, while pleading with him to preserve the deal.
By the middle of last week, however, it was becoming increasingly clear to some diplomats that Trump would not be moved. “We felt like we were going through the motions,” said a person close to the negotiations.
Even Trump’s top aides had not been seeking aggressively to talk Trump out of withdrawing because his mind had been made up, a White House official said.
The Trump administration kept the door open to negotiating another deal with allies, but it is far from clear if the Europeans would go for that and if they could convince Iran to accept it.
The leaders of Britain, Germany and France, which were signatories to the deal along with China and Russia, said in a joint statement that Trump’s decision was a cause for “regret and concern.”
A Western diplomat was more pointed.
“It announces sanctions for which the first victims will be Trump’s European allies,” the diplomat said, adding that it was clear Trump did not care about the alliance.
Abandoning the Iran pact was one of the most consequential decisions of Trump’s high-stakes “America First” policy, which has led him to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, come close to a trade war with China and pull out of an Asian-Pacific trade deal.
It also appeared to reflect the growing influence within the administration of Iran hawks like new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton. Both favoured getting out of the deal but did not need to press their case as Trump had already made up his mind, a senior White House official said.
Trump had reluctantly been granting Iran sanctions relief every few months and by middle of 2017 was already furious at aides for trying to persuade him to stay in the deal, a source said.
Bolton told reporters on Tuesday that Trump did not withdraw from the agreement until now “because he gave repeated opportunities to try to fix the deal.”
REUTERS
