Among those most alarmed by President Donald Trump’s selection of John Bolton as his new national security adviser on Thursday were supporters of the Iran nuclear deal, the 2015 international agreement that curbed Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for a partial lifting of economic sanctions.

Rob Malley, who coordinated Middle East policy in the Obama administration, observed that Bolton’s appointment, along with the nomination of Iran deal critic Mike Pompeo as secretary of state, seemed to signal that the agreement would most likely be “dead and buried” within months. Trita Parsi, leader of the National Iranian American Council wrote on Twitter: “People, let this be very clear: The appointment of Bolton is essentially a declaration of war with Iran. With Pompeo and Bolton, Trump is assembling a WAR CABINET.”

Their alarm was understandable. Bolton, who made his name as a belligerent member of George W. Bush’s State Department and a Fox News contributor, has not only demanded that the Trump administration withdraw from the nuclear deal, he also previously advocated bombing Iran instead. Bolton has spent the better part of a decade calling for the United States to help overthrow the theocratic government in Tehran and hand power to a cult-like group of Iranian exiles with no real support inside the country.

Withdrawing from the Iran #NuclearDeal should be a top @realDonaldTrump administration priority.

— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) July 17, 2017

Just eight months ago, at a Paris gathering, Bolton told members of the Iranian exile group, known as the Mujahedeen Khalq, MEK, or People’s Mujahedeen, that the Trump administration should embrace their goal of immediate regime change in Iran and recognize their group as a “viable” alternative.

“The outcome of the president’s policy review should be to determine that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution will not last until its 40th birthday,” Bolton said. (The 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution will be on February 11, 2019.) “The declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran,” Bolton added. “The behavior and the objectives of the regime are not going to change and, therefore, the only solution is to change the regime itself.”

As the Iranian expatriate journalist Bahman Kalbasi noted, Bolton concluded his address to the exiles with a rousing promise: “And that’s why, before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran!”

#JohnBolton 8 months ago among MEK supporters tells them they will overthrow #Iran’s regime and celebrate in #Tehran with Bolton himself present, “before 2019” pic.twitter.com/H7oaaU3faU

— Bahman Kalbasi (@BahmanKalbasi) March 22, 2018

To understand how extraordinary it is that the man about to become the president’s most senior national security official made this promise to the MEK, it is important to know that, until recently, the Iranian dissidents had spent three decades trying to achieve their aims through violence, including terrorist attacks.

After members of the MEK helped foment the 1979 revolution, in part by killing American civilians working in Tehran, the group then lost a bitter struggle for power to the Islamists led by the revolution’s leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. With its leadership forced to flee Iran in 1981, the MEK’s members set up a government-in-exile in France and established a military base in Iraq, where they were given arms and training by Saddam Hussein, as part of a strategy to destabilize the government in Tehran that he was at war with.

In recent years, as The Intercept has reported, the MEK has poured millions of dollars into reinventing itself as a moderate political group ready to take power in Iran if Western-backed regime change ever takes place. To that end, it lobbied successfully to be removed from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2012. The Iranian exiles achieved this over the apparent opposition of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in part by paying a long list of former U.S. officials hefty speaking fees of between $10,000 to $50,000 for hymns of praise like the one Bolton delivered last July.

But, according to Ariane Tabatabai, a Georgetown University scholar, the “cult-like dissident group” — whose married members were reportedly forced to divorce and take a vow of lifelong celibacy — “has no viable chance of seizing power in Iran.”

If the current government is not Iranians’ first choice for a government, the MEK is not even their last — and for good reason. The MEK supported Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. The people’s discontent with the Iranian government at that time did not translate into their supporting an external enemy that was firing Scuds into Tehran, using chemical weapons and killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians, including many civilians. Today, the MEK is viewed negatively by most Iranians, who would prefer to maintain the status quo than rush to the arms of what they consider a corrupt, criminal cult.

Despite such doubts that the MEK’s political wing, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, is any more reliable than Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress proved to be, spending lavishly on paid endorsements has earned the group a bipartisan roster of Washington politicians willing to sign up as supporters. At a previous gala, in 2016, Bolton was joined in singing the group’s praises by another former U.N. ambassador, Bill Richardson; a former attorney general, Michael Mukasey; the former State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley; the former Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend; the former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I.; and the former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. That Paris gala was hosted by Linda Chavez, a former Reagan administration official.

At a similar event this January, the backdrop behind former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, as he praised MEK leader Maryam Rajavi, made the aim of the group’s investment in American politicians clear.

Unsurprisingly, leading figures from among the exile group’s Washington followers have expressed delight over Bolton’s impending elevation to the White House

.@AmbJohnBolton has the right vision and great understanding of the whole region especially the threat from the Iranian regime and the need for a #FreeIran. https://t.co/zlJocvDwgT

— Alireza Jafarzadeh (@A_Jafarzadeh) March 22, 2018

Congratulations to @AmbJohnBolton for the new post. Well deserved. https://t.co/TuXgvx9ApY

— Shirin Nariman (@ShirinNariman) March 22, 2018

At the group’s celebration of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, in Albania on Tuesday, Rajavi was joined on stage by Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City.

Mr. Giuliani reiterated that unlike other countries in the region, there is an alternative to the ruling regime in Iran. Thus, its overthrow will lead to peace and tranquillity in a region that has been severely threatened by the clerical regime.#Iran#IranProtests pic.twitter.com/BFb5fWcFgs

— Maryam Rajavi (@Maryam_Rajavi) March 20, 2018

Although the official announcement from the White House was not made until Thursday, Giuliani told the group, to loud applause, that Bolton “is going to be President Trump’s national security adviser.”

In case there was any doubt among the exiles that Bolton might not advise Trump to overthrow Iran’s government, Giuliani assured them that “if anything, John Bolton has become more determined that there needs to be regime change in Iran, that the nuclear agreement needs to be burned, and that you need to be in charge of that country.”

Moments later, Giuliani led the crowd in chanting “regime change.”

Despite the fact that Trump ran for office as a critic of the decision to invade Iraq, Bolton still refuses to call the preemptive attack a mistake. That position stunned even Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, during an interview two weeks ago. After Carlson pointed out that Bolton had called for regime change in Iraq, Libya, Iran, and Syria, and the first of those had been “a disaster,” Bolton disagreed, saying, “I think your analysis is simple-minded, frankly.”

“I think the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, that military action, was a resounding success,” Bolton told Carlson. The chaos that followed in Iraq, he said, was caused by a poorly executed occupation that ended too soon. On the bright side, Bolton said, the mistakes the U.S. made in Iraq offered “lessons about what to do after a regime is overthrown” in the future.

The Intercept.com, Robert Mackey

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump often denounced the failures of the US foreign policy establishment, including the trigger-happy Washington insiders who, too often, had led the country down the path of devastating wars. In particular, leading up to and since his election, President Trump has often invoked the example of the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a monumental mistake in contemporary US foreign policy. But, recently, President Trump appointed one of the architects of the Iraq war, John Bolton, to serve as his third national security adviser, replacing H.R. McMaster, a three-star general with a moderate outlook. Bolton’s track record in the nonproliferation space—as the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs from 2001 to 2005, his brief tenure as the US Ambassador to the United Nations in 2005 to 2006, and his writings and media appearances in recent years—all point to the end of the nuclear deal with Iran and a generally more aggressive stance on the Islamic Republic.

The Trump administration’s approach has largely been one of increased pressure. If a country’s foreign policy toolbox includes a number of tools, ranging from sticks to carrots, the President’s Iran policy has largely consisted of sticks. But the administration has so far only utilized some of these tools, mainly the adoption of harsher rhetoric, including denunciations at international fora, particularly as undertaken by Ambassador Nikki Haley at the UN Security Council, and sanctions and designations. Hence, so far, Washington has steered away from an all-out confrontation with Iran. The President has long expressed his opposition to the nuclear deal, and his administration has increased the uncertainty surrounding its future and refused to recertify the agreement. But the administration has so far decided not to pull the trigger and withdraw from the deal, as Trump had promised on the campaign trail. Several key administration officials can be credited with moderating the administration’s stance vis-à-vis the nuclear deal, including former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and McMaster.

But McMaster’s ousting and Bolton’s arrival, potentially coupled with Mike Pompeo’s ascendance at the State Department as Tillerson’s replacement, make it much likelier for the administration to pull out of the nuclear deal and potentially even confront Iran militarily.

To understand why this may be the case, it’s imperative to examine Bolton’s worldview, nonproliferation track record, and stance on Iran.

Bolton largely sees the US foreign policy toolkit through the prism of what most national security professionals view as the last resort: military action. Indeed, Bolton has long advocated for bombing countries to settle disputes and mitigate threats, before such options as negotiations, sanctions, and naming and shaming on the international stage are fully exhausted. In particular, Bolton famously called for attacking Iran to address the challenge stemming from the country’s nuclear ambitions—and this, as the negotiators were working toward a comprehensive agreement achieving strict limits on those ambitions. Likewise, Bolton has often brushed aside the need for multilateralism. In fact, Bolton seems to distrust and disdain negotiations, particularly those requiring American concessions. Multilateralism and the use of the broad American foreign policy toolbox—including incentives, economic and political pressure, the threat of the use of force, and diplomacy—were central to the nuclear talks and resulting agreement. And they also yielded more lasting results at a lower cost than military action would have entailed.

Bolton’s nonproliferation track record is predominantly one of missed opportunities and outright failures. He advocated for the US invasion of Iraq, based on the idea that Saddam Hussein’s regime had retained threatening weapons of mass destruction programs. As he put it then, Bolton was “confident” that Saddam was hiding such weapons facilities. While the Iraqi regime did have WMD programs and even deployed chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), that was no longer the case when America attacked the country in 2003. In fact, in a situation reminiscent of the Trump administration’s (and Bolton’s) stance toward Iran, international inspectors were on the ground in 2003 and verifying the state of Iraq’s WMD program, but they were not given a fair chance to complete their work and present their findings before the United States invaded. In fact, in a closer look at the developments leading to the Iraq war, one can spot many similarities between the claims presented by those arguing that time was ticking so the United States had to attack Iraq to prevent catastrophe, and the arguments put forward now by Bolton on Iran. Today, nearly 15 years after the start of Iraq war—where America still sees no end in sight—Bolton continues to support the conflict. And in another situation with parallels to the Iranian controversy, Bolton supported nixing the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea. While that agreement was nowhere as comprehensive and strong as the Iran nuclear deal, its collapse did lead to today’s standoff on the Korean peninsula, with Pyongyang possessing a small but growing nuclear arsenal that either has or likely will soon have the capability to hit the United States.

From these foreign policy failures, Bolton has concluded that the use of force and the abrogation of international agreements are the ways for the United States to achieve its goals—despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

But perhaps most troubling is Bolton’s cozy relationship with the Mujahedin-e Khalq (meK), an Iranian opposition group that he hails as a viable alternative to the Islamic Republic, a champion of democracy and human rights, and an agent for a change of behavior by Iran. But the MeK is neither a viable alternative to the current Iranian government nor a force for democracy and human rights, as I have written elsewhere. Instead, it’s a cult-like organization that has abused its own members and is already publishing lists of journalists for its sympathizers to target. It enjoys little support inside Iran and is responsible for a number of terrorist attacks on Iranians and Americans alike. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that the MeK would adopt a policy on the country’s nuclear program or other nefarious activities that is different from the current regime’s. More important yet, the very idea that regime change, Bolton’s preferred foreign policy option to deal with Iran, would be successful and yield a sustainable outcome is put in question by the legacy of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In that sense, Bolton’s worldview and approach to Iran differ from President Trump’s “America First” policy, which seeks to minimize American involvement in various theaters. But with moderate voices largely isolated and sidelined in the Trump administration, the nuclear deal’s days seem numbered and a potential confrontation with Iran likely.

It must be remembered that US intelligence community has found no evidence of nuclear weapon activities in Iran since 2009. Despite its shortcomings, the Iran nuclear deal has significantly scaled back Tehran’s nuclear program. By May 12, the president will have to choose whether to reissue waivers of the nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, as provided for in the nuclear deal. The administration has already indicated to European negotiating partners and the rest of the world that the President may refuse to do so if no “fixes” to the deal’s shortcomings, as outlined by the Trump team, are found. The administration may refuse to waive the sanctions without withdrawing from the agreement, or simply withdraw from it altogether. While neither scenario is ideal, the latter would be much more complex to rectify down the line than the former.

Indeed, if the deal collapses altogether—which, absent the United States, it will, whether it dies slowly, or immediately because Iran pulls out as well—the Iranians aren’t likely to return to the negotiating table for the foreseeable future. Indeed, as the winter 2017-18 protests in Iran demonstrated, the general public there is fed up with the country’s economic situation, and it increasingly views the nuclear deal as a series of empty promises made in exchange for real nuclear concessions by Iran. Regime hardliners regularly target President Hassan Rouhani and his team that negotiated the deal. And the deal has lost the support of key power centers, including the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards. The best approach to rectifying the agreement’s shortcomings lie in an option the administration has ruled out altogether: preserving the nuclear deal and building on it, by leveraging the channels of communication that resulted from it, to address other areas of concern in Iran’s behavior, including limitations on the country’s missile program.

For the time being, despite increased pessimism about the fate of the nuclear deal, the Europeans continue to have some leverage over and credibility in Iran—although their attempt to impose sanctions on Iran to appease the Trump administration and push it to preserve the deal may backfire. Whether the implementation of the agreement continues will largely depend on them. The Europeans must continue to engage Iran and preserve the channels of communication that are critical to deescalating the tensions likely to arise from the toxic combination of hawkish voices gaining prominence in Washington—now including John Bolton’s—and hardline pushback in Tehran.

Ariane Tabatabai, The Bulletin.org

Ariane M. Tabatabai is the director of curriculum and an assistant teaching professor of security studies in the Georgetown University…