Eli Lake, Columnist

Making the Iran Nuclear Deal Great Again

Trump doesn't need to tear up the pact. He just needs to enforce it in ways Obama refused to.

November 11, 2016 at 11:00 AM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

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President Barack Obama's signature foreign policy achievement, the Iran nuclear deal, is in trouble. On Wednesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency noted that Iran had exceeded its allowed stockpile of "heavy water," a substance used to cool plutonium reactors, for the second time since the agreement went into effect.

When this happened in February, the Obama administration lent a hand, agreeing to purchase the excess material to get Iran back into compliance. This time around, it's resorting to semantics. State Department spokesman Mark Toner says the non-compliance was not a "violation" of the agreement, which would in theory trigger a process to re-impose sanctions. He said the Iranians were working quickly with other parties to resolve the issue.