Retired Israeli Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from 2015 to 2019, denounced President Donald Trump’s decision in 2018 to pull the U.S. out of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran in a series of interviews with veteran Israeli journalist Ben Caspit, who reported on it in Al-Monitor yesterday. Asked whether the U.S. pullout was a strategic mistake, Eizenkot answered, “Yes, I think the American withdrawal from the nuclear agreement in 2018 was a strategic mistake given that it freed the Iranians of constraints, split up the agreement’s enforcement mechanism, and even though the Americans left, the others [five world powers] remained. The Iranians were in shock for the first few months and then they started enriching uranium and violating the agreement, with legitimacy to do so by the U.S. withdrawal. This resulted in reduced sanctions, barely any oversight, the Chinese and Russians did not cooperate, and that is why I think it was a mistake. I thought so in real time, too.”
Eizenkot explained that after the agreement was complete in 2015, the IDF turned its attention from Iran’s nuclear program to neutralizing other threats, primarily the tunnel threats from both Hamas and Hezbollah. “And then Trump withdrew from the nuclear [agreement]. It hit us like a bolt of lightning on a clear day,” Eizenkot said.
