As Hot Air reports, the State Department has certified Iran as being in compliance with the nuclear weapons agreement. The decision has raised some eyebrows since not only do many outside analysts believe that Iran is continuing to develop nuclear weapons clandestinely but that President Trump has promised to tear up the agreement. Also, Iran remains a state sponsor of terrorism. To be sure Trump has ordered a review of the agreement, but for right now it remains in force.
The explanation of this decision is very simple. The United States is engaged in a minor war against ISIS and a potential full-scale shooting war against North Korea.
Declaring Iran in breach of the nuclear agreement would mean that the United States would have to do something about it beyond the resumption of sanctions. With the American military depleted during the Obama years, the judgment was likely that Iran was one war too many for right now.
Of course, as Hot Air suggests, the promise to review the agreement places some pressure on Iran. The Trump administration can either declare Iran in violation of the agreement, providing presumably some proof or withdraw from it altogether. If Iran sets for to moderate its behavior, such a decision could be postponed indefinitely.
However, Iran will never moderate its behavior so long as the mullahs are in charge.
Just as North Korea is making trouble because its leader, Kim Jong-un is insane, Iran is a threat to peace because its leaders believe that God wills it to be so. All the Trump administration has done is bought some time while the American military proceeds with a buildup and the matter in North Korea is settled one way or another.
Trump can and likely will exercise one option that President Obama declined to do. He can start supporting Iranian dissident groups, both inside and outside the Islamic Republic, who are striving to replace the theocracy with a secular republic, perhaps with the Pahlavi Prince as a constitutional monarch. Money and resources can be made available to help Iranians who yearn to live in an ordinary country where people are not threatened with being whipped to death for making music videos.
Obama betrayed the Iranian freedom fighters because he sought a rapprochement with Iran, perhaps climaxing with a presidential visit to Tehran similar to Nixon’s visit to China. Trump, to his credit, is under no such illusions that such a thing is possible.
A campaign of support for the Iranian freedom movement would apply pressure to Iran as well. Even if such did not lead to regime change, that would serve Trump’s grand strategy as well.
