Promise Kept: Donald Trump Announces Decision to Withdraw from Iran Deal

President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the Iran deal on Tuesday, keeping his campaign promise to end the agreement reached by former President Barack Obama.

“This was a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made,” Trump said. “It didn’t bring calm, it didn’t bring peace, and it never will.”

The president announced his decision in a speech at the White House in the Diplomatic Room as Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Vice President Mike Pence looked on.

Trump signed a memorandum to end the deal, reinstating the nuclear sanctions against Iran originally put in place by the Obama administration.

“America will not be held hostage to nuclear blackmail,” he said.

Trump’s decision signals a major blow to the Obama administration’s signature foreign diplomatic agreement reached in 2015 with the rogue regime.

He described the deal as “decaying and rotten” and “defective at its core” recalling it as a “great embarrassment” to all American citizens when it was signed.

“A constructive deal could easily have been struck at the time,” Trump said. “But it wasn’t.”

He denounced the Obama administration for sending billions of dollars to a “regime of great terror” including vast sums of cash. He denounced Iran for using that money to further sponsor terrorism and violence in the Middle East, pointing out that the regimes military budget had grown 40 percent since the deal was reached.

“At the heart of the Iran deal was a giant fiction: That a murderous regime desired only a peaceful nuclear energy program,” he said. “Today, we have definitive proof that this Iranian promise was a lie.”

Trump repeatedly trashed the deal during his campaign for president, describing it as a terrible deal that should have never been enacted. At the White House on Tuesday, he said he was determined to keep his promise made to the American people.

“Today’s action sends a critical message,” Trump said. “The United States no longer makes empty threats. When I make promises, I keep them.”

Key allies in Europe face their own decision of what to do with the deal whether or not to keep the elements of the deal intact with Iran, choose to reimpose sanctions, or allow it to die.