Yesterday President Trump came out swinging against John Kerry. On Twitter, Trump accused the former secretary of state of engaging in “shadow diplomacy” to save the endangered Iran Deal.
Kerry was the architect of the Iran Deal, which lifted sanctions on the Islamic Republic in exchange for their agreeing to restrict their nuclear program. The weaknesses of the Deal have been a major focus of Trump’s political platform.
As Deal-maker in Chief, Trump seems to believe he could do a better job of fixing the delicate Iran situation. And maybe he could; the Iran Deal is very flawed both in concept and in execution.
For one thing, it requires the US government, specifically the White House, specifically President Trump, to sign a new “sanction waiver” every 120 days. It’s designed this way because the tyrannical Obama government knew they could never get such a weak deal past Congress. So they built the Deal this way in order to bypass the need for approval by legislators.
But this feature of the Deal also means that, as long as the Deal stands, Trump is reminded every three months of his failure to keep one of his major campaign promises. He, of course, hates this and is looking for a way to fix Obama’s mistake as soon as possible.
Additionally, the Iran Deal’s enforcement mechanisms are weak. One of Trump’s main desires is to increase the power of the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency; we’ll call them the nuke inspectors, for simplicity’s sake). Trump wants the nuke inspectors to be able to gain immediate access to Iranian nuclear facilities whenever the leaders of the West demand it.
Effectively, we’re just taking Iran’s word for it when they claim they don’t want to build a bomb designed to blow up all of Israel. Being able to pop our heads in and check up on their progress whenever we want doesn’t seem like too much to ask, given the circumstances.
But under the Iran Deal as it stands, the nuke inspectors will have to give the Iranians up to 24 days of advance notice before being allowed into their facilities. And sure, the leftist media nutjobs love to point out that the Iran Deal allowed us to put up 24-hour cameras in Iranian nuke facilities.
But those cameras went up in only one single facility. Iran could easily move production of weapons-grade nuclear material to another facility, one of the many without any cameras, and the nuke inspectors would have to give them a month’s worth of warning before being allowed in to check.
Some experts think a month’s warning is still a short enough time to detect violations. Others disagree. I tend to believe that a month is a long freaking time to give the Iranians, who are known liars and schemers, to cover up their tracks. It’s a major gamble, especially with nuclear war hanging in the balance.
The real problem with the Iran Deal, though, is that it was always meant to be lenient. Even when we had Iran on the ropes, their economy weakened enough to allow us to bring them to the table, Obama and John Kerry went easy on the Islamic Republic. The last administration handed the Iranians a softball deal, because they doubted their ability to enforce a stronger agreement.
In effect, even though we could try to re-sanction the Iranians if they are found to break the deal, we couldn’t do so effectively without the approval of the Russians and the Chinese. (Both of whom are becoming increasingly friendly to Iran.) Both Russia and China have said they won’t reinstate sanctions if the U.S. revokes the Iran Deal.
So, to sum up, we spent decades building a successful system of international sanctions against Iran and then threw them all away for a deal that lets us regularly inspect one facility and forces us to give the Iranians a month’s warning when inspecting other sites.
People like John Kerry would call that a win. But, of course, John Kerry is a spineless chump who hates what America represents to the world. And now it’s being reported that he’s going behind the President’s back to try and salvage the awful Iran Deal that he got us into in the first place.
John Kerry has done enough to damage America’s geopolitical standing. And Donald Trump is right. If Kerry really is doing “shadow diplomacy” to try and save the Iran Deal, the White House ought to arrest him for treason and put him under lock and key. (In fact, a 200 year old law called the Logan Act might actually allow them to do so!)
John Kerry had his 15 minutes in power, and now they’re over. If he continues acting against the interests of the U.S. people and the current U.S. government, he should be treated accordingly.