By Kathryn Blackhurst, LifeZette
President Donald Trump “did what he clearly advertised” by withdrawing the United States from the Iran nuclear agreement because “it’s in our security interests to get out of this flawed deal,” national security adviser John Bolton said Tuesday in an exclusive interview on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”
Trump disappointed Democrats and frustrated U.S. allies Tuesday when he withdrew the U.S. from the Obama-era nuclear deal. He also signed an order reimposing sanctions on Iran that had been in place prior to the deal. Despite the backlash, Bolton argued Trump made the right move by fulfilling one of his key campaign promises.
“Look, the fact is the deal has been flawed from the beginning. I think the president laid that case out in his statement today,” Bolton told host Laura Ingraham. “He gave the Europeans and others a chance to fix it. It was not doable because the flaws go right to the foundations of the deal.”
“So he did what he clearly advertised he was going to do as far back as the 2016 campaign — pull the United States out of the deal. Why? Because it’s in our security interests to get out of this flawed deal,” Bolton continued.
The national security adviser spent a significant portion of the interview highlighting multiple ways in which he believes Trump’s staunchest critics got it wrong and emphasizing the president’s continued willingness to work with allies on addressing Iran’s nuclear program and stamping out the country’s support for terrorism.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry bemoaned Trump’s decision in a statement Tuesday, saying that it “weakens our security, breaks America’s word, isolates us from our European allies, puts Israel at greater risk, empowers Iran’s hard-liners, and reduces our global leverage to address Tehran’s misbehavior, while damaging the ability of future administrations to make international agreements.”
Bolton pushed back on Kerry’s criticism, noting that the former secretary of state’s main objective “was to get a deal. So it’s not surprising John Kerry’s objective today was to keep the deal. It’s the wrong objective. The objective should be to prevent Iran from getting deliverable nuclear weapons.”
The Iran nuclear deal, in its current form, “not only didn’t accomplish that objective — in many ways it facilitated Iran’s efforts,” he argued.
“So what President Trump did by pulling out of the deal is get back to what the real objective should be — stopping this dangerous regime from threatening us and our friends around the world with nuclear weapons,” Bolton added.
Despite Trump’s Tuesday decision, the U.S. still is committed to working “with the Europeans and others not only on the nuclear issue, but on Iran’s ballistic missile development, its continuing support for terrorism, and … military activities that jeopardize our friends like Israel and the Arab States in the region,” he said.
But any actions the U.S. takes must “do something effective about Iran’s malign influence in the Middle East and not paper it over and pretend that we’ve actually stopped them.”
In response to Trump’s critics’ claims that the president made his decision with insufficient information and a lack of open-mindedness, Bolton said Trump reached his decision only after sifting through a variety of viewpoints and arguments.
“[Trump] has listened to everybody who wanted to talk to him, up to and including over the weekend with Prime Minister [Theresa] May of Great Britain,” he said. “He gave every one of them a chance to try to fix the deal, and unfortunately they didn’t come close because the deal itself is inherently flawed.”
“Iran should not have uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing capabilities. That’s what we’re going to ask of North Korea. That’s what we ought to be thinking of,” Bolton said.
Trump announced the United States’ withdrawal from the Iran deal shortly after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in North Korea to continue negotiations to denuclearize the peninsula. Although many of Trump’s critics worried that the Iran deal announcement would thwart Pompeo’s negotiations, Bolton argued otherwise.
“President Trump said this sends North Korea a signal that we’re not in these discussions with Kim Jong-un just to have a deal. We’re in them to denuclearize North Korea,” Bolton said. “It’s an indication of how serious President Trump is.”
This article was used with permission from LifeZette.
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