Most of you are aware that President Donald Trump has taken the steps required to withdraw from the Obama-Kerry-engineered arrangement whereby Iran would be delayed—maybe—from getting nuclear weapons instead of getting them sooner.  Among those steps are a 90-day window within which several existing business arrangements can be wound down before a set of sanctions gets reinstated and a 180-day window within which the rest of the business arrangements can be wound down before another, more stringent, set of sanctions gets reinstated, or added.

Now we have the European signatories, Great Britain, Germany, and France decrying the withdrawal and insisting that we should have stayed in the thing.  Never mind the evident weaknesses in the JCPOA (including in particular an inability to inspect thoroughly and on a no-notice basis, so we have no way of confirming that Iran is complying at all) and the additional factors of concern—that Iran is actively pursuing a missile delivery system for its nuclear weapons, actively funding its client terrorist entities around the Middle East, and directly fomenting unrest and open rebellion around the Middle East.

We should have been willing to renegotiate rather than withdraw.  This is disingenuous.  Great Britain, Germany, and France have had the 16 months since Trump’s inauguration to renegotiate; they’ve refuse to do so.  Even French President Emmanuel Macron, who claimed to be willing to renegotiate, turned out to be only talking; he made no concrete proposals.  Never mind that Iran has said it will not renegotiate.

Meanwhile, Great Britain, France, and Germany are conducting their separate negotiations with Iran.

Now we also have Progressive-Democrats decrying the withdrawal and insisting that the Trump administration should use those windows to conduct negotiations (with the Progressive-Democrats, too) with a view to improve the JCPOA and plug its weaknesses and address those additional factors of concern.  Never mind that Iran has said it will not renegotiate.

Never mind, either, that the Progressive-Democrats have already had those same 16 months in which to renegotiate, and they’ve refused to do so.  All these worthies have been willing to do is insist that the JCPOA be kept intact, until very lately—and even lately, on claiming that the thing’s weaknesses could be plugged, they’ve declined to offer any solutions, only to make demands to…talk.

Trump took a lot of heat for not acting immediately on his inauguration to keep his campaign promise to withdraw from the JCPOA.  Instead, he gave our European partners and our Progressive-Democrats those 16 months to negotiate and arrive at a better arrangement vis-à-vis Iran’s nuclear weapons programs and its serial and concurrent misbehaviors.  They refused.

It’s no wonder that the United States had to act unilaterally, and that this administration has had to act in the face of active Progressive-Democrat obstruction.