In 2018, President Donald Trump made a calamitous foreign policy decision: withdrawing from the highly successful Iran nuclear deal. The agreement was working: Nuclear material was shipped out of Iran, enrichment activities were restricted, and inspectors were given unprecedented access to verify compliance. Mr. Trump’s abandonment of the agreement and his “maximum pressure” approach were utter disasters. That policy strengthened Iranian hard-liners, unleashed Iran to enrich nuclear fuel to unprecedented levels and stoked tensions between the United States and Iran.
John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s onetime national security adviser, now wants to sabotage a new agreement under the pretense of constitutional concerns [“The Senate should insist Biden submit his Iran nuclear deal to a vote,” op-ed, March 23]. Congress will likely review a deal, just as it did in 2015, under the terms of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act. This is unlikely to satisfy Mr. Bolton.
A majority of Israeli security experts have repudiated the “maximum pressure” approach. Tamir Pardo, former director of the Mossad, called the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran deal a “strategic mistake.” Gadi Eisenkot, former chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, said abandoning the deal “brought Iran to the most advanced position today with regard to its nuclear program.” Aharon Haliva, head of Israeli military intelligence, asserted that the Iran deal is better than the no-deal scenario. Congress would be wise to heed the words of these experts and ignore the reckless advice of anti-diplomacy hawks such as Mr. Bolton.
Dylan Williams, Washington
The writer is senior vice president for policy and strategy at J Street.