It is an act of wanton vandalism for Donald Trump to jeopardise the future of the Iran deal – Thornberry

“The nuclear deal agreed with Iran in 2015 was one
of the crowning diplomatic achievements of this century to date; a crucial step
in stopping Iran from becoming a nuclear power and creating a North Korea-style
crisis in the heart of the Middle East. As the IAEA has repeatedly
demonstrated, and as the US State Department accepts, Iran has fully complied
with every dot and comma of that deal.

“So it is an act of wanton vandalism for Donald
Trump to jeopardise the future of that deal today, and to move the goalposts by
linking it to important but utterly extraneous issues around Iran’s wider
activities in the region. It is also totally disingenuous to suggest that the
deal just needs to be fixed, when the only evidence that it is any way broken
is inside Donald Trump’s head.

“Yet sadly, this kind of reckless and thoughtless
behaviour is what we have come to expect from this President. From the Paris
climate change deal to US membership of Unesco, he has demonstrated a flagrant
disregard for the institutions and agreements that bind the international
community together in the shared pursuit of a better future. That is not what
we expect from the President of the United States, and it is high time for the
British government to tell him so.

“Because yet again, this shows that the strategy
of kow-towing and hand-holding operated by the Prime Minister and Foreign
Secretary has utterly failed, and they have once more allowed our so-called
closest ally to treat them like fools. When he fooled Theresa May and Boris
Johnson on climate change, we can say shame on him, but now the same pair have
been fooled on Iran as well, we can only say shame on them.”