If:
- As U.S. Air Force General John Hyten says, Iran is not violating the terms of the Iran nuclear agreement, officially the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (“JCPOA”); and
- Iran is also, per General Hyten, “rapidly deploying and developing a whole series of ballistic missiles and testing ballistic missiles at all ranges”; and
- The development of these missiles at most violates “the spirit” of several United Nations resolutions, but not the JCPOA,
then, maybe the Iran nuclear agreement really isn’t all that good of an agreement, as Donald Trump likes to say. But, while that tells us either those who negotiated it did a poor job or they couldn’t get any more and wound up overselling what the agreement actually accomplished, or both, that doesn’t tell us we should terminate the agreement now.
That means, first and foremost, getting our defenses against such weapons and missiles in place and ready. Which is also what we need to do vis-à-vis North Korea.
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1 Even if, as was his wont, Barack Obama never submitted the agreement to the Senate for ratification as a treaty. President Obama did agree to a process whereby Congress could have disapproved the agreement. But even in that case, President Obama retained the right to veto any such disapproval, and any such veto would have required a 2/3 vote in both houses of Congress to override.
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