Iranian President Rouhani
Iranian President RouhaniReuters

President-elect Donald Trump has made numerous statements denouncing the Iran deal, calling it “one of the worst deals I’ve seen negotiated in (my) entire life.”

Trump discussed the Iran deal at his speech to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July. He said, “Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, is now flush with $150 billion in cash released by the United States — plus another $400 million in ransom. Worst of all, the nuclear deal puts Iran, the number one state sponsor of radical Islamic terrorism, on a path to nuclear weapons.”

At the AIPAC convention in March, Trump said that, “My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.”

However, according to one of his top foreign policy advisers, Walid Phares, Trump has no intention of ripping up the deal. In an interview in July, Phares said that, “No, he’s not going to get rid of an agreement that has the institutional signature of the United States.”

Phares added that, “He is a man of institutions. He’s going to look back at it in the institutional way. He is not going to implement it as is, he is going to revise it after negotiating one on one with Iran or with a series of allies.”