Commentary: Trump makes 'strategic blunder' in decertifying Iran nuclear deal

President Donald Trump's announcement Friday that he was decertifying the Iran nuclear deal is a "risky gambit" that will "undermine U.S. credibility and the international community's ability to manage further nuclear developments in Iran, North Korea and other places down the line for years," Middle East scholar Vali Nasr writes in The Washington Post.

Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., adds that Trump's move—kicking the issue to Congress and asking them to attach new caveats to the deal—will result, ultimately, in either the collapse of the accord or the straining of relationships between the U.S. and its allies in Europe as well as Russia and China. He notes that it "will only plunge an already volatile Middle East into greater turmoil, which will consume U.S. attention and resources."

More from The Post:

There are those in the United States who would welcome the demise of the Iranian moderates; hard-liners at the helm in Tehran would make it easier to array U.S. forces against that country. But America learned in Iraq that it cannot bring change through the turret of a tank.

The United States will be better off if it is Iranians who bring about change in Iran. Yet Washington is falling victim to the same flawed logic that paved the way to the Iraq War. Trump's Iran policy is not just an attack on President Barack Obama's foreign policy legacy; it will also define his own. History will not be kind to this strategic blunder.