The Algemeiner reports: Iran fears it could be the “big loser” from Donald Trump’s surprising victory over Hillary Clinton in Tuesday’s presidential election, an expert on the Islamic Republic told The Algemeiner on Thursday.
“I think the reactions we’ve seen from Iran — the urging of Trump to maintain the nuclear deal, the warning that he can’t roll it back — suggest that they’re worried about the fact that existing US policy, which is very favorable to Iran, could change pretty substantially over the course of the next several months,” Ilan Berman — of the Washington, DC-based conservative think tank the American Foreign Policy Council — said.
Looking ahead at what Trump’s Iran policy might be, Berman noted, “You need to figure out what’s going to change and what’s not going to change. What’s not going to change, unfortunately, is the nuclear deal itself, because even though Trump has talked a lot about renegotiating or rolling back the deal, the reality is that the lion’s share of the benefits from the deal have already been conferred to Iran. Also, the deal is multilateral, so even if the US walks away, it doesn’t mean that our partners in the P5+1 will do so as well.”
“So if the deal is going to be with us in some fashion for some time,” Berman continued, “we have to be thinking seriously about what comes next. And what comes next, hopefully, is a strategy that pushes back against a rising Iran regionally. This will require military resources, political will and, frankly, a more forward stance on responding to Iranian proxies like Hezbollah.”
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