The Trump administration is pulling out of the agreement that halted Iran’s nuclear missile program, despite several entreaties from world leaders that to do so would cause mass chaos.
President Donald Trump had kicked the issue to Congress six months ago, and Republican leaders acted swiftly to sweep it under the rug. Now, at the same time that the leader of the United States is at risk of giving over mass concessions to the totalitarian hermit king of North Korea after replacing the heads of his foreign policy and national security team with a right-wing former congressman and a man who thinks we should nuke Iran and North Korea, on top of the looming trade war with China and maybe a few of our allies, there’s a not-insignificant possibility that U.S. Middle East policy could be turned upside down as our biggest adversary in the region is incentivized to restart its nuclear project.
These are, in other words, anxious times for Americans looking abroad. But there was a very peculiar happening a week ago that made a few stop biting their nails to smile. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu alleged that his intelligence had found a "dilapidated warehouse" in Iran's capital containing half a ton of evidence of the country’s “secretive” past nuclear program.
Netanyahu, the head of state of the most critical nation in the region, compiled his groundbreaking findings in a slideshow with a solid white background and Times New Roman font and delivered a presentation himself on live English-language television.
One slide featured the words “Iran lied” taking up the full screen; on another, a red circle pointed out the secret “Atomic Archive” of files about the nuclear program on what appeared to be the Google Earth image of a facility in Tehran. In the middle of the address, Netanyahu pulled back a curtain on-stage to reveal a bookshelf full of three-inch binders that were stuffed with 55,000 pages of information, as well as a cabinet full of as many CDs.
But Netanyahu’s grand discovery was news only to him; after all, why would the United States have initiated the deal that stopped Iran’s nuclear program if it didn’t already there was a nuclear program to stop? Many have speculated that the premier was had a target audience of one; his American counterpart has a well-known penchant for television clips, particularly the kooky, inexplicable kind that Netanyahu performed Monday. Another possibility is that he was distracting from the dispute on Israel's border with Palestine that has killed at least four and injured more than 950.
Iran responded that Israel will "regret" its "surprising response" to the allegations. But perhaps Bibi was just hoping to lighten the mood with a practical joke, only to find the world taking it too seriously.
