Of course, Iran , Korea or anyone else who wants to go down this road can, with some justice, make the same accusation against the original nuclear powers in relation to their commitment under Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control”.
Conservatives have never forgiven Hans Blix and the UN Inspectors for failing to discover the imaginary weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. A good inspector would have been able to find WMDs whether they were there or not, that’s what we pay them for.
Taking this at face value, that’s two misses out of… 10 attempts? 20? 100? The denominator matters here.
I don’t know what the denominator is in this case (and I’m not convinced it matters very much when a miss can result in a rogue state with nuclear weapons). We have an example in this thread of a win for the IAEA (North Korea’s nuclear program in the '90’s), so I suppose they’re 1/3 from the examples we have before us, but I suspect that’s an incomplete accounting on both sides.
I guess I’m hesitant to throw out an organization that apparently most of the international community trusts based on a handful of flubs. Although reading that first link, I don’t quite see how that counts as a “flub”.
Neither counts as a flub, of course, since in both cases IAEA lacked access and therefore couldn’t do its job.
In the case of Iran, however, IAEA does have access, and can do its job - all thanks to the deal.
So, we pull out of the Iran deal, IAEA loses access, without supervision Iran develops nuclear capability, then the conservatives chalk it up as another failure on IAEA’s part.
Don’t forget “and get to nuke Iran into a glass parking lot”!
No, it’s an incomplete accounting on one side. Again, neither Libya nor Syria were under UN inspection mandates. It’s like blaming the FBI for failing to foil a bank robbery in London.
Yay, let’s increase the chances both that Iran gets a nuke and that we start a war. Good job, Trump.
My hope is that even if Congress decides to take the Americans out of the deal, the rest of the parties involved will still honour it. Let the Americans whine from the sidelines, while the rest of us get rich together.
If not, however, and the Americans not only manage to shred the deal altogether, but also begin to get the old “coalition of the willing” gang back together again to start pounding the war drum once more, then I hope Iran does get a nuke after all, and that post-haste. By then, it may well be the only way to prevent a calamity that’d make Iraq look like child’s play.
This is just going to result in the USA being further separated from the international community; the agreement with Iran has as much chance of falling as the Paris agreement on climate change, or the international cooperation with regard Syria - the world moves on without the USA.
I agree. The rest of the world didn’t really have Iran’s nuclear program as a top concern until recently, mostly because the evidence that Iran’s nuclear program had malign intentions was either not there or somewhat questionable.
So the US does the hard work to get everyone - including Russia and China - all rowing in the same direction. Now, the reasons to believe that Iran’s nuclear program is a threat are much, much weaker than they were even two years ago. Yet the US seeks to start rowing in a different direction? Ain’t nobody going to follow. And with the rest of the world easing sanctions on Iran, it’s quite clear that even if the US implements new, super duper sanctions on Iran, Iran’s economy is likely to grow no matter what Trump wants to do. And economic growth was the main thing Iran wanted out of this deal anyway!
Throw on top of that that everyone else knows full well that Trump literally has no understanding of what the deal is or what it does. See for example, when Trump met with Macron, Trump repeatedly insisted something to the effect that the deal allows Iran to have a nuclear weapon in five years. Which is simply not true, no matter whether you think diplomacy with Iran is a good or bad idea as a matter of principle.