The end of the deal

For someone so frequently denounced as a liar, Donald Trump keeps an awful lot of promises. In the 2016 election campaign, he promised that he would take the United States out of the ‘terrible’ Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the ‘Iran deal’. Last October, he insisted that the Iran deal be renegotiated. In January, he warned that he was recertifying the deal in its original form for the last time, and again called for its renegotiation. On Tuesday, he kept his word.

The despair with which this decision was met — especially by Britain, who sent Boris Johnson to plead on Fox News for the President to change his mind — seems to overlook an important point. The deal isn’t working. Not because Obama’s deal was ‘terrible’ to start with, though it did have gaps wide enough for an intercontinental ballistic missile, but because it simply hasn’t worked as intended. The deal has turned out to be strategically counterproductive not just to American interests, but those of America’s regional and European allies.