Trump’s U.N. stunt today backfired just as expected:

The isolation of the Trump administration on the international stage could not be more apparent. The entire UNSC, from the UK and Sweden to Ethiopia and Kazakhstan, have all come out in support of the JCPOA. One by one, they denounced the U.S. withdrawal.

— Shahed Ghoreishi (@shahedghoreishi) September 26, 2018

The overwhelming support for the nuclear deal from members of the Security Council is no accident. When the Council voted three years ago to affirm the deal in UNSCR 2231, the vote was unanimous. Since then, the IAEA has verified that Iran is in compliance twelve consecutive times. The only permanent member that has changed its position in the meantime is the U.S. Virtually every other government in the world can see that the agreement is a good one that has done exactly what it was supposed to do, and the handful that oppose it are doing so for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits of the deal. Trump likes to boast that America is more respected now than it has been in the past, but nothing could be further from the truth. Reneging on our commitments does not inspire respect. Instead, it invites derision and rebuke, and today’s Security Council session gave us a taste of that.

Trump once again denounced the JCPOA as a “horrible, one-sided deal,” but this just proves that he is relying solely on discredited talking points and knows nothing about the substance of the agreement. Iranians might have reason to view the agreement as being horribly one-sided against them, but for an American president to describe it this way is laughable and false. The U.S. didn’t have to give up anything except the continued imposition of punitive nuclear sanctions, and now under Trump the U.S. refuses to do even that much. Iran’s leaders made the mistake of believing that our government would honor its commitments, and they aren’t going to make that same mistake again. In addition to further poisoning relations with Iran, undermining an important nonproliferation agreement, and increasing the risks of an unnecessary war, Trump’s decision in May to renege on the nuclear deal has shown the world that we are not to be trusted and can’t even be relied on to secure our own interests. That decision will go down as one of the worst and most needlessly destructive acts of Trump’s presidency and one of the most senseless, self-defeating moves that the U.S. has made in the last thirty years.