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The U.S. is pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, Presidential Donald Trump has announced. To those who hated the deal and Trump’s supporters, this marks the erasure of a major mistake. To those who supported it — and that includes European countries — it conjures up five words: let the serious consequence begin.

President Donald Trump has announced that the U.S. is withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, keeping a campaign promise, but ignoring the advice of America’s allies.

The president said he is removing the U.S from the Iran nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and will reimpose economic sanctions on Iran at “the highest level of economic sanction” and target “any nation that helps Iran in its quest for nuclear weapons” with sanctions, too.

Trump announced his decision at the White House after a last-ditch effort by European allies to urge Trump to stay in the agreement and build upon it. Trump instead argued the deal was so bad that it had to be discarded to move forward.

“It is clear to me that we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement,” Trump said. “The Iran deal is defective at its core. If we do nothing, we know exactly what will happen.”

The Huffington Post:

Trump told French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday morning that he would be pulling out of the deal, The New York Times reported.

It is not immediately clear what will happen next. The 2015 nuclear agreement was negotiated among Iran, the U.S. and five other countries — the U.K, France, Germany, China and Russia, which urged the U.S. not to withdraw. Last month, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif suggested that if the U.S. pulled out of the nuclear accord, his country could also exit the deal and resume its nuclear program at a “much greater speed.” Iran has no reason to continue to abide by the agreement if the economic benefits “start to diminish,” he said.

But most of the economic benefits Iran receives through the nuclear deal do not come directly from the U.S., which maintains a primary embargo against Iran. When Trump previously waived sanctions, he suspended secondary sanctions, which penalize other countries for doing business with Iran.

“If you take away U.S. sanctions relief, you are taking away probably the most powerful incentive the Iranians had to do their part,” said Richard Nephew, a former State Department official who worked on Iran sanctions policy.

When Trump threatened to pull out of the nuclear agreement last year, the European Union’s ambassador to the U.S., David O’Sullivan, warned that the EU could invoke a blocking statute that would protect European businesses from U.S. secondary sanctions. Theoretically, this means that Iran could continue receiving economic benefits under the 2015 deal and would be compelled to maintain the restrictions on its nuclear program.

But implementing this blocking mechanism or other steps to preserve the deal would be technically difficult and diplomatically risky for European countries.

“It’s going to be a herculean task,” said Reza Marashi, a National Iranian American Council analyst and former State Department official who just returned from two weeks of meeting with officials and experts in Europe.

“The real meat on the bones would take at least a year to implement, and They have no plan for anything… they’ve spent most of their energy trying to figure out a way for Trump to stay in.”

It’s also unclear whether Tehran would be willing to uphold its end of the deal with the U.S. in violation. Ahead of Trump’s announcement, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani warned that Iranians could face “some problems” in the coming months.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors the use of nuclear energy, has verified Iranian compliance with the agreement multiple times since 2015, most recently in March. Defense Secretary James Mattis, an outspoken critic of the Iranian government, testified before Congress on April 26 that the nuclear deal provided “robust” measures to inspect Iran’s nuclear program and verify that it is complying with the deal.

Trump has called the Iran nuclear agreement the “worst deal ever” and has long pressed his advisers to come up with an alternative strategy to contain Iran’s nuclear efforts. When his advisers failed to deliver, Trump ordered Congress in October to pass legislation that would unilaterally change U.S. commitments under the deal. Two Republican lawmakers briefly tried but failed to attract enough supporters. So Trump turned to the Europeans with an ultimatum: Find a way to fix the deal before May 12, when sanctions waivers would need to be extended, or the U.S. will walk away.

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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