Trump's breaking with the rest of the world should not surprise anyone. Being unique and trailblazing a different path can be very appealing to a narcissist like Trump as well as to some of his supporters. Only for many of my fellow evangelicals who support Trump, going in the opposite direction the world goes is done more out of certain phobias than out of a need to feed one's own ego.
We could attribute this breaking away from the rest of the world to what James Comey said about Trump: that Trump has no external reference that would control his behavior. But I don't believe that assessment is entirely true. Trump's approach to taxes and regulations show that Trump can be guided by the expectations of others. There, Trump is directed by his need/desire to satisfy the wants of his fellow financial elites despite the negative ramifications his policies have for others.
So we could say that Trump's breaking away from the Iran nuclear deal is done in part to satisfy a select group of people: Netanyahu and his supporters. Here we should note that Netanyahu has been sounding the nuclear alarm about Iran for a little more than 2 decades. This points to the need for a strong PR case to be made against Iran to justify, in the eyes of the public, the breaking away from the Iran deal. And so an additional charge must be made about Iran: Iran is the 'leading sate sponsor of terrorism.'
But such a charge is not true and not for the understandable reason asserted by Joseph Mussomeli at the Imaginative Conservative blog (click here for his article). For while Mussomeli claims that Saudi Arabia should be given that title, the real winner is not the state that just sponsors terrorism, but the state that practices it as well: the U.S. The 2003 invasion of Iraq fit the definition of terrorism from Rumsfeld's warning of 'shock and awe' to the actual invasion. For the violence threatened and used was all about politics: implementing regime change in Iraq. And thus our intervention there provided the epitome of terrorism: the threat of or use of violence against civilians to further political ends. Our 2001 attack on Afghanistan, as well as our overthrow of the Libyan government, saw the U.S. work with terrorist forces. And the current use of drones to assassinate civilians without due process in several different nations in the region must also be defined as terrorism.
The American public, however, has been trained to believe that terrorism is something done by those not wearing American uniforms or the military uniforms of our allies. But to the innocent recipients of our attacks, our actions easily qualify as terrorism. Just as Martin Luther King Jr. called the American government the 'greatest purveyor of violence in the world today' (click here for the source), we could easily say that the U.S. is the leading supporter and practitioner of terrorism today.
Now what has been witnessed leading up to some other U.S. actions/interventions/invasions, is that war must be preceded by demonizing the target. And certainly Iran is an easy nation to demonize on its own merits, but its faults don't merit military actions. Thus, on the one hand, we have Trump the narcissistic authoritarian resorting to the rule of force. Here we should note that the U.S., under Trump is not just leaving the Iran deal, it is considering resorting to sanctions against European businesses that deal with Iran (click here).
But there is another side of the story here besides Trump, it is Netanyahu and Israel. Netanyahu is under criminal investigation for corruption (click here). Certainly a war can divert people's attention from those charges and a being a leader in a victorious war effort could possibly make the Israeli people more tolerant of any crimes Netayahu may have committed.
But I don't think that possible criminal charges is a driving force in Netanyahu trying to get allies to oppose Iran and the Iran deal. Rather, when examining past Israeli actions against neighboring nations over the past few decades, it seems that Israel has not only been following a part of the Bush Doctrine, it may have invented it. For the Bush Doctrine allows for preemptive attacks on all parties perceived as posing an imminent threat (click here). The two-fold problem becomes what qualifies as an imminent threat and who is to hold the nation that conducts preemptive attacks accountable. The unilateral declaration made by Bush, despite the language stating that the U.S. would work with the U.N., really emasculates the U.N. because it is the U.S. that has declared itself to be the ultimate judge of all other nations. With Israel, it has declared itself to be the ultimate judge of all other nations in its region. And its history of attacks don't support the notion that they are responding to a military threat only. Sometimes they appear to attack because they are opposed to having rivals in nuclear development.
One of Israel's complaints about Iran was its enriching of uranium. Israel wants prohibit Iran, and other nations in the region, from enriching uranium period while the Non Proliferation Treaty, which Netanyahu calls 'dubious,' allows Iran to produce low-enriched uranium (LEU) for power plants (click here). At the same time, Israel is known to possess a significant number of nuclear weapons. Here we should note Israel has a pattern of trying to prohibit other nations from developing, especially in terms of nuclear power. Israel has attacked the nuclear facilities of nations in the region before (click here to read about the 1981 attack on Iraq) despite the lack of proof that these facilities were creating weapons grade materials.
Not long after Trump's announcement, Israel attacked Iranian positions in Syria. Of course if Israeli military bases in other nations were attacked, the Israeli government would interpret such actions as an act of war requiring a military response. But it seems that if Iran retaliated for the Israeli attacks, then Israel would interpret those responses as an act of war and that would most likely draw the U.S. into the fray, especially if Israel needed help.
It is the notion of maintaining a certain supremacy that is driving Netanyahu's approach to Iran and thus Trump's withdrawal from the Iran deal. Apparently, Israel does not see its close friendship with the U.S. as providing a enough deterrent for aggression expressed by Israel's neighbors. And so it has armed itself with nuclear weapons while seemingly trying to prohibit any of its neighbors from developing even peaceful nuclear technology. That leaves the question of whether the scuttling of the Iran deal because of Israeli concerns is due more to protecting U.S. strategic interests or protecting Israel. Regardless, the real question here is that because technology makes the proliferation of WMDs inevitable and the current way of supporting either U.S. strategic or Israeli security are making the increase of present and future enemies more likely, is attempting to sabotage the Iran nuclear deal a wise action?
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