'Path to War': Chorus of Critics Warn Against Trump Sabotage of Iran Nuclear Deal

With President Donald Trump reportedly set to declare that the Iran nuclear deal is “not in the national interest of the United States” as early as Friday, a chorus of lawmakers, policy experts, and advocacy groups are sounding the alarm, warning that any move to undermine the accord would “open up a nuclear Pandora’s box in the Middle East” and place the U.S. on a “path to war with Iran.”

“The Trump administration is putting us on the path to war. Trump’s foreign policy is a disaster and must be stopped.”
—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)”A failed certification would be the first step to unraveling the Iran nuclear deal and taking us to a new, devastating war of choice in the Middle East,” Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said in a statement Wednesday. “Congress would be empowered to kill the accord through the front door by snapping back sanctions, or to kill it through the back door by moving the goalposts on sanctions relief.”

Parsi goes on to note that a quick glimpse at those rallying behind Trump’s efforts to kill the deal—from former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton and the hawkish Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)—should be enough to conclude that the president’s expected move is a bad idea.

“The only voices in support” of Trump’s decision, Parsi observes, “are old Iraq war champions and a new age of uber-hawks eager to fracture the accord and bomb Iran.”

Click Here: collingwood magpies 2019 training guernsey

Echoing Parsi’s warnings in a letter (pdf) to the White House on Wednesday was the Nuclear Crisis Group (NCG), a team of former ambassadors and national security experts dedicated to highlighting and helping to deescalate nuclear threats across the globe.

NCG notes that the Iran deal—formally known as the the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—was a “groundbreaking diplomatic agreement [which] provided the means for Iran to demonstrate that its nuclear activities were permanently and verifiably peaceful.”

By moving unilaterally to scrap the agreement against the advice of many members of his own cabinet, the other nations that signed the deal, and most of the world, Trump is “undermin[ing] the credibility of the United States in all manner of negotiations, making it unlikely—to take just one dangerous example—the standoff with North Korea will be resolved by peaceful means.”