The Iran deal was born in deceit, sold through deception, and kept alive by willful blindness. The looming “Korean deal” should be approached by employing the very opposite methodology used in Obama’s Iran deal

In National Review, Victor Davis Hanson thinks he knows what Iran's plans have been from day one of the nuclear deal they got from Obama.

Ostensibly postpone a bomb now, at a time when the regime was facing growing unrest and near bankruptcy from sanctions — and thus was in no position anyway to build an arsenal of bombs and missiles.

Keep occasionally cheating to ensure the apparatus for bomb-making was successfully hibernated — and therefore easily restarted at a future date.

Enjoy hundreds of billions of dollars in new commercial income over the next ten to 15 years to quiet domestic unrest, and to bank enough cash to go fully nuclear in the future.

Forge the so-called Shiite Crescent to the Mediterranean, by dominating Bashir al-Assad’s weak Syria, exploring anti-Sunni possibilities in Yemen, and bulking up Hezbollah’s Lebanon, while stocking a huge arsenal of preemptive missiles based near Israel. Hope that Iran’s regional strategic stature would only improve over the next decade.

Expect natural breakthroughs in technology to make future bomb-making easier and cheaper when the accord expired.

... On the eve of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the deal, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dramatic televised disclosures of captured Iranian documents more or less confirmed the obvious: Iran never had any intention of forgoing its nuclear-bomb-making efforts, as implied by prior politicized national-intelligence estimates. The only mystery was why Iran had carefully recorded evidence of its own deception. In eerie fashion, it was almost as if at some future date Iran had planned to add insult to injury by reminding its mugged partners just how gullible they had been. Or perhaps some Iranian diplomatic grandees feared that in revolutionary Tehran, any purported appeasers would have been tried for treason, so they needed documentary evidence that they had been patriotic cheaters all along.

...The Iran deal was born in deceit, sold through deception, and kept alive by willful blindness. The more we were told it could not be nullified, the more malodorous it became. Nothing since its death has proven it wise; everything has confirmed it really was, in the words of Trump, “a “disaster.”

A final note. The looming “Korean deal” should be approached by employing the very opposite methodology used in Obama’s Iran deal: Be prepared to walk away; assume North Korea will cheat; do not separate its terrorist behavior or ballistic missiles from its promises to denuclearize; and focus on its nuclear patrons, without which there could be no North Korean bomb; expect even a denuclearized North Korea to remain an enemy of the U.S; do not invest presidential stature in the mercurial whims of a thug.

VDH makes many other crucially important points here.