ASSASSINATION/IRAN/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “How Iran will respond to the American assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani remains a matter of speculation, but one outcome seems almost certain: the end of Europe’s long effort to keep the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal alive. In interviews on Friday [1-3-20], European analysts envisioned a number of baleful results from the killing of the general, who was a national hero and potential political leader in Iran, and whose death Tehran has vowed to avenge. Among those were the downgrading of diplomacy, the destabilization of Iraq and the further strengthening of Iran’s hard-liners and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. But the more immediate threat, they said, was to the nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama in 2015. President Trump pulled the United States out of the treaty in May 2018, calling it ‘a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made,’ and imposed punitive new sanctions as part of a ‘maximum pressure’ campaign.”
–Steven Erlanger, “Suleimani’s Gone, and the Iran Nuclear Deal May Be Next,” The New York Times online, January 3, 2020