IRAN/NORTH KOREA/OBAMA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “So much of the Trump presidency to this moment has been about undoing President Barack Obama. Announcing the US would leave the Iran nuclear deal, President Donald Trump was still more concerned with how badly he said it was negotiated than with what would come next. He called it flawed, horrible, poorly negotiated and ‘defective at its core’ and promised vaguely to work with allies toward something new. There’s a pattern here. Whatever Obama did was bad and Trump will deliver something better…Now, 17 months into office, Trump will argue he’s finally on the cusp of actually delivering something he can point to as better. That’s probably why so much of his Iran announcement dealt with North Korea, another nuclear aspiring country. Trump inherited no international deal on North Korea. And he has upended decades of foreign policy orthodoxy to bring North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un to the negotiating table. He offered those forthcoming talks up as proof he would deliver on his word.And it’s his own word that Trump views as most important. US commitments seem to begin with his presidency since previous presidents entered into bad deals. Good deals will happen in the future. Trust him.”
-Z. Byron Wolf, “Trump is obsessed with undoing Obama’s deals, but now he’s working on one of his own,” CNN Politics, CNN.com, May 9, 2018 8:59 am