Obama's Iran deal was already going from bad to worse

Victor Davis Hanson:
When Donald Trump withdrew from the so-called Iran deal in early May, almost all conventional wisdom in Washington was aghast.

The Left thought nullification would fast-track Iranian proliferation, incite more Iranian terrorism and adventurism, estrange our allies, and alienate a possible new friend.

Many on the conservative side (aside from Never Trumpers who are against anything Trump is for, including their own prior policies) thought it would have been wiser to back out slowly, or at least to have waited first for the duplicitous Iranians to get caught in clear violations, or to coordinate a joint withdrawal with the Europeans.

Few of these critics ever quite understood that the deal was already a stinking corpse, long overdue for burial. Iranian cunning and the strategic thinking about the asymmetrical deal had always aimed at the following trajectory:

Ostensibly postpone a bomb now, at a time when the regime was facing growing unrest and near bankruptcy from sanctions — and thus was in no position anyway to build an arsenal of bombs and missiles.

Keep occasionally cheating to ensure the apparatus for bomb-making was successfully hibernated — and therefore easily restarted at a future date.

Enjoy hundreds of billions of dollars in new commercial income over the next ten to 15 years to quiet domestic unrest, and to bank enough cash to go fully nuclear in the future.

Forge the so-called Shiite Crescent to the Mediterranean, by dominating Bashir al-Assad’s weak Syria, exploring anti-Sunni possibilities in Yemen, and bulking up Hezbollah’s Lebanon, while stocking a huge arsenal of preemptive missiles based near Israel. Hope that Iran’s regional strategic stature would only improve over the next decade.

Expect natural breakthroughs in technology to make future bomb-making easier and cheaper when the accord expired.

There is no wonder, then, why almost every news story about the Iran deal has confirmed the wisdom of getting out of it.
...
Hanson goes on to list recent developments which show the wisdom of walking away from one of the worst deals in history.  What I find interesting is that the same Democrats who thought we should stay in a deal which allowed Iran to build nukes in the future while it builds delivery vehicles and tests them in present accuse Trump of being soft on North Korea for striking a deal that requires complete denuclearization, and destruction of its missile program.  If they cannot tell the difference between teh two deals they need to pack it in and retire from Washington.

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