BICOM

US President Donald Trump has announced that the US is leaving the Iran nuclear deal – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Trump said that his administration would now “be instituting the highest level of economic sanction” against Iran and emphasised that sanctions would also apply to other nations – including its closest allies – that did business with Tehran. “America will not be held hostage to nuclear blackmail,” he said.

The US Treasury announced that the process of imposing sanctions on Iran will be implemented over a period of months. “Sanctions will be re-imposed subject to certain 90 day and 180 day wind-down periods. At the conclusion of the wind-down periods, the applicable sanctions will come back into full effect,” the department explained in a written statement.

Trump is a long term critique of the deal that was struck by his predecessor President Barack Obama. Yesterday he repeated those criticisms, saying that the JCPOA is a “horrible one-sided deal that should never ever have been made” and that “the deal lifted crippling economic sanctions on Iran, in exchange for very weak limits on the regime’s nuclear activities”.

He concluded: “We cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement.”

In a rare public intervention since leaving office, Obama described the decision to abandon the Iran nuclear deal as “misguided” and a “serious mistake”. “The reality is clear. The JCPOA is working,” he said. “That is a view shared by our European allies, independent experts, and the current US secretary of defence. That is why today’s announcement is so misguided. I believe that the decision to put the JCPOA at risk without any Iranian violation of the deal is a serious mistake.”

The US decision was welcomed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said “the deal would have allowed Iran to enrich enough uranium for an entire arsenal of nuclear bombs”.

He urged the international community to take further steps in three main areas: putting an end to “this bad deal” and preventing Iran from manufacturing an arsenal of nuclear bombs; reinstating international sanctions following Trump’s lead; and blocking Iranian aggression in the region, particularly in Syria.

Saudi Arabia, along with Bahrain and the UAE, also welcomed Trump’s decision. According to a statement on Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television, “Iran used economic gains from the lifting of sanctions to continue its activities to destabilise the region, particularly by developing ballistic missiles and supporting terrorist groups in the region”.