Tom Basile: Iran tensions -- Trump still cleaning up Obama's mess (but Democrats won't admit it)
By
Tom Basile | Fox News
While Democrats in Washington and much of the news media spend their time obsessing over the 2020 campaign and telling the world that our president is everything from being mentally unfit to a criminal,
Trump has been dealing with a host of major foreign policy challenges either created or ignored by the Obama administration.
The
ISIS takeover of Iraq and its infiltration across more than a dozen countries was the first. Handling China’s unchecked economic and military advances in the Pacific, Africa and even cyber espionage here in the U.S. is another.
Chaos in
Libya is still unabated.
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But Obama’s sweetheart deal with Iran is perhaps the thorniest of them all.
Critics would rather bash Trump than acknowledge Obama’s naïve strategy of Iranian appeasement was a failure.
For all the claims by the left that Trump is irrational, he understands that you can only bargain with rational actors. Iran doesn’t fit the bill.
Trump made clear this week that he’s willing to play hardball with Iran if they continue on their current trajectory. Calling off the strike just minutes before execution wasn’t indecision. It was a calculated move meant to send a message that the U.S. will not be intimidated back into negotiations by a radical Islamist government with a history of aggression.
Obama wanted his Iran deal at all costs, and those costs were steep. It amounted to access to more than $100 billion, ending most sanctions, opening the country to foreign investment, among other benefits for the regime.
Of course, a key component of the deal meant that fifteen years from signing, the whole thing went out the window anyway and Iran could proceed with their nuclear program.
This was in exchange for Tehran’s thin assurances that they would limit uranium enrichment to 3 percent and reduce the number of centrifuges needed to advance their nuclear program from 19,000 to 6,000. This week it was confirmed that Iran will exceed the uranium stockpile limit codified in the agreement.
The monitoring and accountability regime put in place to ensure compliance was never robust enough to work. This point was raised repeatedly by experts during negotiations and by even more than a dozen Democratic Senators in 2016 (some of whom are now running for president) but the Obama administration just
