RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON—Donald Trump as president will be positioned to swiftly pull the U.S. out of the Obama administration’s landmark nuclear agreement with Iran, as he suggested during his campaign.

A much harder task for Mr. Trump, however, is to convince other global powers to join him and dismantle a deal that President Barack Obama says has diminished the threat of another war in the Mideast and opened a path for reduced tensions in the region.

During his campaign, Mr. Trump said the Obama administration negotiated badly. He alternately said he would scrap the deal and that he would renegotiate its terms. “My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran,” he told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in March.

Tehran has been found to have briefly violated its pledges twice since the deal was reached in mid-2015, according to U.S. and European officials. Yet international commitment to the agreement remains strong, and the parties who negotiated it—China, Russia, France, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S.—have pledged to promote it.

European Union foreign ministers are set to reiterate on Monday their strong support for the full implementation of the accord.

The Iran deal isn’t a treaty, wasn’t formally signed, and wasn’t ratified by the U.S. Congress. It was approved by the United Nations Security Council, but not under procedures that obligate member states to observe its terms under threat of penalty.

Any partner—including Iran—could summarily cease to stick to the agreement, which resulted in Tehran scaling back its nuclear capabilities in return for the lifting of most international sanctions.

“The agreement is valid only as long as all parties uphold it,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Wednesday.

Many of the deal’s terms already have gone into effect. As part of the agreement, Iran has reaped billions of dollars in repayments of money held up by the West during years of sanctions, and has resumed trade with other countries in transportation, aviation and energy. The benefits it already has garnered couldn’t be pulled back, diplomats and experts have said.

Tehran, in return, already has shipped out most of its stockpile of enriched uranium and mothballed thousands of centrifuge machines. CONTINUE AT SITE

U.S. President Barack Obama is rumored to be planning a lame-duck anti-Israel move after the election of his successor next Tuesday, and before the handing over of his White House keys in January. In other words, there is reason to believe that the outgoing leader-from-behind of the free world is set to recognize a Palestinian state.

Though, as the Syrian civil war proves, bolstering one party to a conflict does not always translate directly into attacking the other, in the case of Jerusalem vs. Ramallah, the dichotomy is crystal clear.

By now, only extremists refuse to acknowledge that Hamas, the terrorist organization running Gaza — while running it into the ground — is not a statehood-yearning entity willing to forfeit its aim of annihilating all infidels in its path, Israel chief among them.

But there are still many diehard two-state-solution seekers, both in Israel and abroad, who cannot relinquish the fantasy that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party — the guys ruling the West Bank — are still potential partners. Even those who blast the PA for inciting youth to violence; denying Israel’s ties to the Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem; and now launching a campaign to sue Britain for the 100-year-old Balfour Declaration — which expressed support for the Zionist enterprise, well before the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 — conclude that it is “urgent” to create a Palestinian state. And that Israeli settlements are an obstacle to that imperative.

On October 31, Secretary of State Kerry continued his remarkable campaign to drum up business for Iran. Speaking at Chatham House in London, here is part of what he said:

Iran deserves the credit of having met its part of the bargain, and it’s important for us and the rest of the world to meet ours, to make sure that the lifted sanctions are in fact not still impeding the ability to be able to do business, and to grant that Iran gets the benefit of the bargain that they made. And that is just plain, simple, good faith in international relations

…. Because it’s important for people to understand that we have worked hard to make sure that we have lived up to every component of what is required of us here. And I wish that some of the larger banks were, in fact, ready to make loans and engage in opening accounts, because they can. They’re allowed to, but they’re still remaining somewhat risk averse for various reasons….

[W]e agreed to lift certain sanctions. So OFAC, the Office of Financial Accountability has come out and made it very, very clear that if you do due diligence in the normal fashion, no extra due diligence, just normal due diligence for whoever it is you’re opening an account or for ever – whatever lending you’re about to do, and later it turns out it was some unforeseeable entity that pops up, you will not be held accountable for that. And so what we’ve done is we’ve been trying to reduce the level of risk so that people will begin to engage in a broader range of lending. Why are we doing that? Because the deal we made was that sanctions would not continue to interfere with their ability to do a normal course of business, and regrettably because of some of the uncertainties about OFAC or some of the uncertainties about who’s doing what, it hasn’t been. And we’re trying to change that.

I must say though that we’ve made good-faith efforts way beyond what we agreed to do, I mean, like this meeting. I mean, I never anticipated I’d be sitting in the banks to try to get them to do this. But we have reached out way beyond what anything within the four corners of the agreement in order to try to make sure that it delivers in full.

Despite the innumerable ways in which Iran has demonstrated bad faith–from its continuing support for terrorist groups to its detention of American sailors in January to its arming of the Houthi rebels in Yemen with missiles with which they have attacked American ships–Kerry wants us to bend over backwards to help their economy. It isn’t enough to remove sanctions that prevent banks from lending to Iran; Kerry has become a cheerleader now urging banks to make more loans whatever the risks. This is not in fact giving Iran the benefit of the bargain it struck, which exists in the letter of the JCPOA agreement. It is going much further. In fact it is going so far that Kerry is now giving banks bad advice–advice that is directly contradicted by U.S. Treasury officials.

Most of us, including several democratic lawmakers, cringed when Obama inked the Iran deal but those of us who are familiar with the malevolent nature of the Iranian regime, recoiled in horror when we learned that Obama transferred $400 million to the Iranians in exchange for four American citizens held captive by the mullahs on trumped up charges. The $400 million was part of a larger installment totaling $1.7 billion, ostensibly to settle claims Iran had against the United States stemming from aborted Iranian arms purchases dating back to the Shah. Obama claimed that this was money that was “owed” to Iran and the settlement, which included $1.3 billion in interest, saved the U.S. taxpayer “billions” because the Iranians were demanding even more at the Hague tribunal, where the claim was being adjudicated.

The timing and method of the cash transfers were disquieting to say the least and raised serious questions of legality as well as broader geo-political concerns. The Americans were freed only after Iran received its $400 million. The payment, which was airlifted in the dead of night in an unmarked cargo plane, was made in untraceable cash, stacked on wooden pallets. The Iranians demanded Swiss Francs and Euros rather than Dollars and a pliant Obama agreed to the Islamic Republic’s dictates. Gleeful Iranian leaders were quick to announce victory and claimed that the payment was indeed a ransom, contradicting the administration’s adamant denials.

Even within the administration there was confusion about whether the payment was in fact a ransom. State Department spokesman Mark Toner came very close to acknowledging this fact when he noted that the $400 million was used as “leverage” to ensure the Americans’ safe return. The White House however, quickly repudiated the State Department’s characterization.

Even if one were to believe the story peddled by the administration, the mere appearance of a quid pro quo payment potentially exposes the U.S. to extortion and hostage-taking. The Iranians certainly believed it was a ransom payment and more likely than not, every two-bit dictator on the planet saw it that way as well.

But there are deeper more troubling aspects to this convoluted story. In his January 17, 2016 address to the American people, Obama tried to put a positive spin on his dealings with the Islamic Republic but as noted by Rick Richman in an excellent article featured in Mosaic, the deal struck with the Iranians was rotten to its core and the administration deliberately kept the American people in the dark about various aspects of the shady arrangement.