Trump, If You Nix the Iran Deal, You'll Be Gravely Endangering Israel

President Trump is expected to announce today or tomorrow that he is taking the first step to bury the Iran nuclear deal. That 2015 agreement pushed Iran’s nuclear program back from a few months away from a bomb to over a year. By “decertifying” the deal, Trump will hand the ball to Congress, inviting it to reimpose sanctions on Iran. That would mean, in effect, unilateral American withdrawal from the agreement, freeing Iran from its current constraints and allowing it to resume its quest for a bomb.

For all its flaws, the nuclear agreement is the one major hurdle preventing Iran from becoming a second North Korea — a rogue state with nuclear weapons. Before acting, Trump should talk directly to those who have the most to lose: the leaders of Israel’s national security establishment who put their own and their colleagues’ lives on the line every day. If he does, he will discover that a vast majority believe that decertification will endanger America’s greatest friend and ally in the Middle East. As former Israeli prime minister and noted Iran hawk Ehud Barak recently said, this would be a “mistake” that would “serve the Iranians.”

Even many of the agreement’s most severe critics acknowledge that it imposed on Iran the most intrusive verification and inspection regime ever negotiated. Thanks to these provisions, U.S. and Israeli intelligence officers have high confidence that we would discover any serious effort to cheat. It has also provided the U.S. and its allies with valuable information about targets that would be destroyed by military attacks if Iran were to attempt to violate the agreed constraints and dash toward a bomb.