In a dark speech in the spirit of his inaugural address, Donald Trump painted a picture of global carnage to justify his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement intended to prevent exactly that.
“America will not be held hostage to nuclear blackmail. We will not allow American cities to be threatened with destruction,” he said, adding that Iran would not be permitted to gain access to “the most deadly weapons on earth.”
If echoes of 2002-2003 and weapons of mass destruction weren’t already flagrant enough, Trump said the Iran nuclear agreement was built on “a giant fiction” that Iran sought only to build “a peaceful nuclear energy program.” And then he went there, using warmed-over intelligence from a speech given by Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu last week to suggest that Iran was in contravention of the agreement.
“Today we have definitive proof that this Iranian promise was a lie,” Trump said of Iran’s nuclear energy program. “Last week, Israel published intelligence documents, long concealed by Iran, conclusively showing the Iranians regime and its history of pursuing nuclear weapons.”
None of what Netanyahu presented in his flashy speech was new to U.S. intelligence officials, and the only thing it proved is what the U.S. already knew: “that Iran once had an unauthorized nuclear program.”
But by saying, “Today we have definitive proof,” Trump deliberately sought to blur the line between present and past. Trump’s new national security adviser John Bolton is apparently trying to revisit the glory of his mushroom-cloud days in the George W. Bush administration.
After the speech, Bolton was quoted as saying, “We're out of the deal. We're out of the deal." Perhaps he was simultaneously skipping around the White House too.
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and now-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have all confirmed that Iran is currently in compliance with the deal. In fact, here’s then-CIA Director Pompeo at his confirmation hearing on April 12.
"With the information I've been provided, I've seen no evidence that they are not in compliance today," he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.