A nation must think before it acts.
President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the Iran nuclear deal — has elicited the predictable responses from the usual suspects. President Obama says that President Trump’s decision undermines the “principled, fact-based, and unifying leadership that can best secure our country.” John Kerry claims that the decision “weakens our security, breaks America’s word, [and] isolates us from our European allies.” Hillary Clinton says “Our credibility is shot.”
Pursuing this theme, Susan Rice, President Obama’s national security adviser, contends: “When the United States unilaterally abrogates an international agreement in the absence of any breach, we undermine international perceptions of our reliability and responsibility.” And another Obama national security aide, Ben Rhodes, writes that “Trump’s action … severely undermines the credibility of the United States to uphold international agreements that we sign which will endure after he is gone.”