Iran Protests Could Lead to Trump Killing Nuclear Deal

The most recent anti-government protests raging across Iran have given President Donald Trump a new reason to kill the nuclear deal, which many see as a risky move that could give Tehran advantage.

Trump and his senior officials have already denounced the Iranian government in a statement and are considering targeted sanctions and other measures but the president now has the opportunity to take an even more severe step against Tehran, that is to scrap the Iran nuclear deal.

Namely, in about two weeks, he will decide whether to keep waiving sanctions against Tehran lifted with the 2015 nuke agreement, which have to be renewed every four months.

Despite numerous threats by Trump to withdraw from the deal, he has until now taken the advice of his national security team not to do so in order to avoid serious diplomatic drawbacks from such a decision. However, some say that now the president may very well opt to kill the nuclear deal and stop waiving sanctions.

“He’s not going to want to waive sanctions and keep money flowing to dictators when there are people protesting in the streets,” Richard Goldberg, a former Senate Republican aide who helped design Iran sanctions, said, according to Politico.

While many agree, there are also numerous Middle East experts who dispute such an assumption and caution that withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal would equal throwing the country’s leaders a lifeline.

“I would not walk away. It basically diverts attention back onto us. We have an interest in keeping the spotlight on what the Iranians are doing, not shifting it to a step that we took,” said Dennis Ross, a Middle East adviser to three presidents of both parties.

Ross, who supports non-nuclear sanctions against Tehran, also warned that top Iranian officials would happily exploit a decision by Trump to walk away from the nuclear deal.

“Reimposing all the nuclear sanctions allows the regime to say they are standing up to pressure from the outside. They want to turn this into a nationalist issue. We want to raise the costs of a crackdown. Don’t give them a reason to focus on us,” he said.