Saturday, November 12, 2016

There had better be more to this, or I'm p-----

Since Tuesday, LITD has been cataloguing the good and bad moves the Squirrel-Hair team has been making. (Myron Ebell and John Bolton, good; waffling on complete repeal of the "A"CA, talking up infrastructure spending, Bannon on transition exec committee, bad).

This one is real bad:

A senior adviser to President-elect Donald Trump said the new US leader will “review” the Iran nuclear agreement, but will stop short of ripping up the landmark international pact.
Walid Phares, one of Trump’s top foreign policy advisers, also signaled that Trump might not move the US Embassy to Jerusalem immediately and indicated he would make negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal a priority right off the bat.
The comments appeared to represent a break with some comments made by other Trump advisers and the president-elect himself, and highlighted persisting confusion over what the contours of a Trump administration’s foreign policy may look like.

Speaking to BBC Radio on Thursday, Phares said the nuclear deal, which Trump has railed against and vowed to dismantle, would instead be renegotiated with Tehran.

“Ripping up is maybe a too strong of word, he’s gonna take that agreement, it’s been done before in international context, and then review it,” he said, according to a CNN recording of the interview.
“He will take the agreement, review it, send it to Congress, demand from the Iranians to restore a few issues or change a few issues, and there will be a discussion,” Phares added. “It could be a tense discussion but the agreement as is right now — $750 billion to the Iranian regime without receiving much in return and increasing intervention in four countries — that is not going to be accepted by the Trump administration.”
As I've said in a few posts this week, I'll be gracious and cautiously optimistic for a little while. Perhaps there is a context to Phares's remarks that is not yet apparent.

There damn well better be. This was a cornerstone of what S-H campaigned on.


1 comment:

  1. Iran deal smashing might be his cornerstone but he's a builda and he's got to get mucho pesos from Mehico and get cracking on that Exceptional Great Wall signifying more do t tread on us. Just tunnel under.

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