Interesting article written today.

Too long to paste whole thing. Read more at link.

JCPOA advocates claim Trump left the U.S. and the entire world vulnerable by leaving the Iran deal. The JCPOA, they say, was working. This is not true and hasn’t been true since the very beginning of the deal, at least not on the terms sold to Congress and the U.S. public. From the start, Iran was given secret loopholes that made it appear they were meeting the publicly stated terms of deal. Among other recent violations: The Iranians have exceeded the amount of uranium they’re allowed to enrich; they’ve exceeded the levels of purity of enriched uranium; they’ve violated the types of centrifuges they were allowed to spin; and injected uranium into centrifuges they were not allowed to use for enrichment.

Perhaps most tellingly, Iran’s nuclear archives, which Israel seized from a Tehran warehouse in January 2018 and made public months later, show that the regime never gave up its intentions to build a military nuclear program, despite promises in the JCPOA to never pursue nuclear weapons.

There is, however, a case to be made that the deal was serving its purpose. But that interpretation requires a markedly different understanding of the JCPOA than what the Obama administration sold to Congress and the American public. The point of the deal was not to stop Iran from ever building a bomb but to prevent the Iranians from doing so until Obama left office.

The Obama administration went to extravagant lengths to hide the obvious, hidden in plain sight. It’s all spelled out in the JCPOA’s so-called “sunset” clauses, the restrictions on the nuclear program that were designed to evaporate after Obama moved into private life.

In 2023, the U.N. ban on assistance to Iran’s ballistic missile program will end. The ban on the manufacture of advanced centrifuges will begin to expire, shortening the amount of time it will take to build a bomb. Perhaps most importantly, in 2025, the U.N. snapback mechanism allowing the U.S. to reimpose sanctions will expire, meaning that we would need to persuade Russia and China to restore international sanctions on Iran. The effect is that there is nothing short of military action to stop the Iranians from marching toward the bomb. It was Obama who said that by years 13, 14, or 15 of the deal Iran would be within a hairbreadth of a nuclear bomb By 2031 with all nuclear restrictions lifted, the Islamic Republic will have a full-scale nuclear weapons program.

The Iranians agreed to pretend to restrictions only because the Obama administration bribed them handsomely. There were several money streams the former White House poured into the regime. One was sanctions relief, worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Last month Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said that in leaving the JCPOA and reimposing sanctions, Trump cost the regime $200 billion. The Obama administration provided another source of income by unlocking escrow accounts when the deal was implemented in January 2016, flooding the regime with some $100 billion in previously frozen oil receipts.

The most infamous payoff was the $1.7 billion in cash the administration shipped off to the IRGC on wooden pallets in exchange for U.S. citizens held hostage by the regime. The White House said that there was no “quid pro quo,” that it was Iran’s money to begin with—$400 million the pre-revolutionary government had deposited in 1979 to buy U.S. arms, plus interest. But the U.S. had already used the $400 million to compensate terror victims of the Islamic Republic. That was Iran’s money. The $400 million the Obama administration used to “pay back” the Iranians belonged to the U.S. taxpayer.

The administration argued that the U.S. had to pay the ransom in cash because Tehran had been cut off from the financial system and there was no other way to transfer the funds. That was not true. The Obama administration had wired payments to Iran before and after the wooden pallets episode. The Iranians wanted cash so it would be harder to track their terror financing.

The Obama administration even paid the Iranians when they violated the deal. The Iranians overproduced reactor coolant, (heavy water, a key ingredient in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons) in violation of the JCPOA, and the administration offered to buy it for $10 million to keep them in compliance. But that wasn’t enough for Tehran—or the White House. In exchange for giving up the nuclear-related material they had promised not to have in the first place—the heavy water—the regime then demanded more nuclear material in exchange. And the American administration agreed: In January 2017, Obama greenlighted the shipment of 130 tons of uranium to Iran.

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/296902/obama-passed-the-buck-trump-refused-to-play