Nine months later, Trump’s Iran-deal withdrawal is a clear success

Since the U.S. withdrawal, evidence of the JCPOA’s weaknesses and of Iranian cheating has grown stark. “Despite getting out of the Iran nuclear deal, despite the sanctions, we have little doubt that Iran’s leadership is still strategically committed to achieving deliverable nuclear weapons,” national-security adviser John Bolton told Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month.

Other new evidence of the JCPOA’s weakness and Iranian cheating includes the Iran “nuclear archive,” a huge cache of Iranian documents on its nuclear-weapons program. Stolen by Israeli intelligence in early 2018, they show that in 2015, in a declaration of its nuclear-weapons-related activities (the declaration was a prerequisite for Iran to receive sanctions relief under the JCPOA), Iran lied to the IAEA. The documents indicate that Iran was planning to construct five nuclear-missile warheads and constructed a secret underground tunnel complex at the Parchin military base, where it was developing nuclear-weapon components. “With current level of inspections, Iran could have an active nuclear weapons program today and IAEA would not know,” The Institute for Science and International Security said on January 14, in a tweet about the significance of the Iran nuclear archive documents. “That is one reason why Israel’s recent actions to seize a portion of the archive and expose a secret nuclear-related warehouse are so important.”