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As details emerge regarding the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the United States and Iran, President Donald Trump appears to be pushing the idea that the war was justified because it prevented Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
However, the MOU doesn’t contain any enforcement mechanisms for preventing Iran from obtaining such weapons. It only requires the country’s leaders to pledge that they won’t do so — a promise they had already made multiple times before the war started.
Trump promoted his line of thinking at a press briefing during the G7 summit in France on Wednesday.
“This agreement is about one thing: that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon,” he said to reporters. “Never, ever, ever.”
“The rest of it is irrelevant, frankly,” Trump said regarding the agreement between the two countries.
The president’s statement appears to signal that he’s primarily concerned with the portion of the MOU on nuclear weapons, and that it will become the administration’s main argument for why the war was necessary.
Indeed, Trump reiterated the notion in a Truth Social post later in the day, claiming, “mostly what people wanted to talk about, is the fact that Iran will not have a Nuclear Weapon.” A Trump administration official also told CNNthat the deal was largely about getting Iran to “commit…to destroying the nuclear dust.”
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Yet the MOU itself makes no mention of the destruction or removal of nuclear materials that the country currently possesses. Instead, the document only states that “the Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons,” punting the matter of its stockpiles to future negotiations.
That is exactly where Iran’s nuclear ambitions stood before the war began.
Days before the U.S. and Israel launched their unprovoked war on Iran, Iranian officials repeatedly stated that they were only interested in peaceful uses for nuclear enrichment.
“Our fundamental convictions are crystal clear: Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon; neither will we Iranians ever forgo our right to harness the dividends of peaceful nuclear technology for our people,” Iran’s foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi said around that time.
Indeed, even members of the Trump administration seemed to acknowledge that, when the war began, Iran posed no threat to the U.S.
Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned from his position due to Trump’s decision to start the war.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Kent wrote in his resignation announcement, adding that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.”
Promoting the war on the basis that it resulted in a deal requiring Iran to promise not to obtain nuclear weapons will likely be a hard sell to the American people, who have been largely opposed to the war since its start.
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