Speaking on Fox & Friends on Tuesday morning, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dismissed claims by defenders of the Iran nuclear deal that if the United States leaves the deal it would be disastrous, saying, “It’s going to be just fine.”
Rice stated:
The Iranians were lying about their nuclear weapons program for decades. It says to me that the 2015 nuclear deal — the real issue is verification — when you know that you have a country that has lied repeatedly, obviously, why trust them now? And so my concern about the nuclear deal has been the verification regime. If anything, this just makes it even more clear that you can’t have a verification regime that gives the Iranians weeks to clean up the site before you can go in and see it.
Asked about pulling out of the nuclear deal, Rice responded:
Well, I actually think if we pull out now it’s not going to be the disaster that everybody’s talking about; I would not have signed this deal. I don’t think it was a very good deal. I think we were in a hurry to get a deal and we left a lot on the table, and as you said, they got a lot up front. The allies love this deal, and I certainly hope that in their meeting with President Trump that Macron and Merkel talked about ways to improve the deal if we’re going to stay in it, but if we get out of this deal it’s going to be just fine. The Iranians, I think, will try and stay in because they do want that investment eventually to start flowing. And by the way, the reason the investment isn’t flowing is that we still have sanctions on Iran because of terrorism, and that makes companies very wary of going into Iran and finding out all of a sudden that they were funding the IRGC.
Rice doubled down on CBS This Morning:
First of all, the reason that we have been so concerned about Iran is that we know that they lie and cheat about their nuclear weapons programs, and they’ve done that going back into the early 2000’s. … The Iranians were developing secret weapons at secret sites … you have to worry about verification measures with the Iranians, and the verification measures in the 2015 agreement were not very strong. They had, for instance, long periods of notification, long periods of dispute resolution, and so when you know that a country lies about its nuclear weapons, a verification regime that is weak is really problematic.