May 11, 2018
Earlier this week, President Trump announced that the United States is withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, a/k/a the “Iran Deal”).
Norpac strongly opposed the JCPOA at the time it was reached in 2015 because, among other things, (a) it did not, as its supporters asserted, cut off all of Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon, (b) it did not address Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism, (c) many of the constraints the agreement imposed on Iran’s nuclear program will sunset in eight years, (d) it failed to include any ability to respond to low level breaches by Iran of the deal (of which there have been many), (e) it lacked inspections at military sites, (f) it allowed Iran to continue its research into more advanced centrifuges and (g) it failed to prohibit development of ballistic missiles, whose primary purpose is to deliver nuclear bombs.
We applaud President Trump for seeking to address these issues and reach a multilateral agreement to fix these and other problems with the JCPOA. We also applaud his pointing out the obvious: that the JCPOA has seemed to encourage Iran’s support of terrorists and murderous regimes, rather than causing it to moderate its behavior.
In the post-JCPOA world, we hope that the President restarts negotiations with our allies soon with the aim of both reaching a multilateral agreement that addresses both the nuclear issue and Iran’s malign regional aggression.