Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to discuss multiple options for scuttling the Iranian nuclear deal with President-elect Donald Trump, “60 Minutes” reports.
Netanyahu is a staunch opponent of the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, and has already pledged to work with Trump to dismantle the Iran deal after the president-elects’s inauguration. Critics, including the Iranian government, say dismantling the deal will be exceedingly difficult because it is also signed by the other permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany.
Netanyahu publicly clashed with President Barack Obama over the Iranian nuclear deal, traveling to the U.S. to protest the deal before Congress in 2015. Trump called the deal a “disaster” on numerous occasions throughout the campaign, terming it “the worst deal ever negotiated.”
“There are ways, various ways of undoing it,” Netanyahu told CBS Sunday. He elaborated that he had “about five things in my mind” in ways the U.S. could withdraw from the deal, but would not reveal them before speaking with Trump.
“The problem isn’t so much that Iran will break the deal, but that Iran will keep it because it just can walk in within a decade, and even less … to industrial-scale enrichment of uranium to make the core of an arsenal of nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told reporters Dec 5.
Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis was reportedly forced out of the military in 2013 for echoing similar concerns.
Mattis did not oppose the deal itself, but instead asked provocative questions about the long-term impact of the deal. Questions he posed to Obama and his team included, “What do you do with Iran once the nuclear issue is resolved and it remains a foe? What do you do if Iran then develops conventional capabilities that could make it hazardous for U.S. Navy ships to operate in the Persian Gulf?” When officials would answer or demur he would say, “And then what?”
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