The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill

Trump shredding Obama’s failed deal is just the beginning of winning in Iran

by Sebastian Gorka, opinion contributor - 05/08/18 3:15 PM ET

The fate of Obama’s JCPOA Iran deal was clear when Donald J. Trump became America’s 45th president.

The new commander-in-chief inherently knew that President Obama’s so-called “legacy “deal actually facilitated our enemies in Tehran, as it released more than $140 billion to the mullahs, had no effect on Iranian ballistic missile capability, created a risible inspection regime, and included a sunset clause which meant that nuclear weapons acquisition by Iran was simply delayed, not in fact prevented.

{mosads}And after Prime Minister Netanyahu gave his commanding performance on Iran’s secret AMAD Program that had only one goal — obtaining nuclear bombs for Iran — today’s decision was a forgone conclusion.

But what now?

The original Iran deal was predicated on a very simple — and unbelievably naive — concept hatched during the Obama years: that the Sunnis of the Middle East, including jihadist groups such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State, were in ascendance and that empowering the Shia regime in Iran would provide a counterbalance.

This, despite the fact that the mullahs in Tehran have the same goal as Sunni extremists: to take over the region and attack American interests globally.

The issue is not which of our enemies to empower, but how to ensure that none of them achieve their goals.

President Trump unleashed our military and so made the Islamic State’s “caliphate” collapse in upon itself. Now he is in a position to make sure Iran is likewise forced back to a status from which it cannot act as before, in a way that destabilized the whole region and threatened America directly. This will not be done by another multilateral “deal” built on lies or phantasmagoric expectations.

Iran is a dictatorship, albeit a theocratic one but still a dictatorship. As such, its leaders lie. That is the nature of inhuman regimes of any political stripe. Whether it was Hitler making promises of “peace” in Munich, or Khrushchev’s secret missiles in Cuba, or the Soviets’ lies about their “nonexistent bioweapons program,” this is the nature of the beast.

North Korea has only caved to potentially historic peace talks with South Korea and America because of our reimposition of crippling sanctions, both unilateral and multilateral, and because we have a president who spoke with new candor, promising at the United Nations no less, that America will destroy Kim’s regime if he continues to threaten us.

This is the language dictatorships understand and to which they respond. And this is, in part, why the Iran deal was a threat to us all.

No one can defeat America, but America can endanger and undermine herself — and that is exactly what President Obama and his secretary of State, John Kerry, did with the JCPOA. And if anyone was surprised that Kerry became the champion of this monstrosity, then they are unfamiliar with his history of undermining America abroad and at home.

John Bolton may be President Trump’s new national security advisor, but today’s decision is not about violent, externally initiated regime-change.

It is about waking up to the extant threats we face and dealing with them in the appropriate fashion. It is about a world that is always safer when America leads and does so in ways that comport with our founding and eternal principles. The JCPOA decision is also about much more than Iran or the Middle East. It is about a non-politician who is now the most powerful man in the world and who sees things as they are, unencumbered by ideological blinders, the need for some narcissistic “legacy” or caving to the persistently wrong advice provided by the so-called experts of “the swamp.”

Today is just the beginning. Now President Trump must use the “Pyongyang method” to ensure that Iran deems its plans untenable and so surrenders to a world where its behavior will no longer be permitted to continue.

Sebastian Gorka (@SebGorka), Ph.D., is a national security strategist with Fox News and former deputy assistant and strategist to President Trump. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War.”