White House takes aim at one of Trump’s most consequential mistakes

Exactly six years ago yesterday, the international nuclear agreement with Iran was implemented. Six years later, the JCPOA policy is effectively gone, and efforts to reach a new agreement are going nowhere fast. The result is an increasingly obvious national security threat.

As Politico reported, President Joe Biden’s team is increasingly eager to shine a light who’s responsible for this mess.

At a briefing last week, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki whether the president is satisfied with the ongoing diplomatic efforts. Her response she was eager to contextualize the latest developments.

“[N]one of the things we’re looking at now — Iran’s increased capability and capacity, their aggressive actions that they have taken through proxy wars around the world — would be happening if the former president had not recklessly pulled out of the nuclear deal with no thought as to what might come next,” Psaki said.

“And if you look at that step and the impact of that — the fact that the former president ripped up the nuclear deal meant that Iran’s nuclear program was no longer in a box, it no longer had the most robust inspection regime ever negotiated, no longer had the tight restrictions on nuclear activity…. Because of the last administration pulling out of the nuclear agreement, now Iran’s program has been rapidly accelerating.”

This has the benefit of being true.

Circling back to our earlier coverage, Joe Cirincione, whose expertise in international nuclear diplomacy has few rivals, wrote a piece for NBC News last spring explaining that international negotiators have been tasked with trying to “undo the damage Donald Trump caused when he left an agreement that had effectively shrunk Iran’s program, frozen it for a generation and put it under lock and camera.”

I continue to believe this is an underappreciated truth. As we’ve discussed, the Iran deal did exactly what it set out to do: The agreement dramatically curtailed Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and established a rigorous system of monitoring and verification. Once the policy took effect, each of the parties agreed that the participants were holding up their end of the bargain, and Iran’s nuclear program was, at the time, on indefinite hold.

And then Trump took office.

One of my favorite stories about the Iran deal came a few months into Trump’s term, when the then-president held a lengthy White House meeting with top members of his national security team. Each of the officials told Trump the same thing: It was in the United States’ interest to preserve the existing JCPOA policy.

The Republican…