Cant make this stuff up
Trump (the "great negotiator") blew up NAFTA and replaced it, well, with NAFTA 2.0 (very little substantive change)
Trump blew up the Iran deal and, well, we are back to the Obama plan?
EX A: Pompeo offers to talk to Iran with "no preconditions."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/world/middleeast/us-iran-mike-pompeo.html
Huh? This was the Obama policy and the right crucified him for it.
"Mr. Pompeo had previously insisted that Iranian leaders comply with a dozen demands before the United States would lift sanctions or re-establish diplomatic and commercial ties with Tehran. Iran’s leaders consider the demands unacceptable."
Ridiculous. Ex B.:
What is the offer? Basically, Obama's plan, but worse????:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/us/politics/trump-iran-nuclear-deal.html
"That may be the result of a president who knew what he didn’t like — a deal negotiated under Mr. Obama, in which key restrictions on nuclear fuel production expire starting in 2030 — before determining how he wanted to replace it.
(In other words, great campaign sound bit but you need an actual policy)
“They were so committed to leaving the deal, because it had been negotiated by the Obama administration, that they did it without thinking through the predictable consequences,” said Vipin Narang, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who tracks nuclear proliferation issues.
“The old agreement had flaws — many of them,” Mr. Narang said. “But by ripping it up, they opened up a Pandora’s box,” because so many in Iran also had chafed at the deal because of the nuclear production it gave away.
Now Mr. Trump is confronted with the consequences of his decision. His declarations on Wednesday and Thursday that he did not want war with Iran were intended to calm the waters, and show that, no matter what his most hawkish advisers recommend, he is not steaming toward some inevitable conflict."
Mr. Obama’s essential bet was that in 15 years Iran will have different leadership, perhaps more interested in integrating with the world than keeping a bomb-making capability. So he brought into the negotiation a nuclear scientist in his cabinet, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.
Mr. Moniz, the former head of the M.I.T. nuclear physics lab, sat for months with his Iranian counterpart, who had done his graduate studies at M.I.T. They bonded, and emerged with an agreement that Energy Department scientists certified would assure Iran would need a year or more to “break out” and manufacture the fuel needed for a nuclear weapon — until the 15-year clock ran out.
Now Mr. Trump’s negotiators have decided they need the same thing — but it must be permanent.
and here it is summed up:
For Mr. Trump, this is a familiar pattern. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” in 2017, when it was testing missiles and nuclear devices. But as soon as he met Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator, Mr. Trump declared that the nuclear threat was over.
That was nearly a year ago, and Mr. Kim since has never ceased producing nuclear material, and likely nuclear weapons, according to American intelligence reports.
No doubt the Iranians noticed.
