Jeffrey Lewis writes: Oct. 15, 2017. Put it in your calendar.

By that date, President Donald Trump must yet again certify that Iran is in compliance with the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Indeed, owing to the infinite wisdom of the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” the U.S. Senate, the president must make such a certification every 90 days. Trump has done so twice, although each time at the last possible moment and only following a knock-down, drag-out fight in which a bunch of globalist cucks, also known as Trump’s national security team, implored him not to walk away from the agreement. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump said, “If it was up to me, I would have had them noncompliant 180 days ago.”

Which is a weird thing to say because, you know, it is up to him whether to certify that Iran is in compliance. If Trump simply does nothing, Congress can reimpose sanctions on an expedited basis, which it would almost certainly do, thereby possibly collapsing the agreement.

The Iranians, of course, have noticed this little carnival of bellicosity. Both President Hassan Rouhani and Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the nuclear energy program, recently said that if the United States reimposes sanctions, Iran could quickly resume a limited number of nuclear activities. These statements were widely misquoted, as Ariane Tabatabai notes, but they remind us that Iran is contemplating its options.

So it is time for a stark warning: If the United States walks away from the JCPOA, Iran could have a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) much more quickly than you might think, possibly before Trump leaves office.

The United States walked away from the Agreed Framework with North Korea in 2003. Three years later, North Korea exploded its first nuclear weapon. This summer, North Korea started testing long-range missiles that can carry those nuclear weapons to cities in the United States like New York and Los Angeles.

If the United States walks away from the JCPOA, Iran could do the same thing — only faster. This is admittedly a worst-case scenario, but as you may have noticed last November, unlikely, even unthinkable things occasionally do happen. [Continue reading…]