U.S. President Donald Trump, left, poses for photos with China's President Xi Jinping during a visit to Zhongnanhai Garden in Beijing on May 15. AFP-Yonhap

While in China, Donald Trump said the pile of 440 kilograms of 60 percent enriched uranium that was at the heart of his justification for going to war with Iran is, in fact, safely under 24/7 surveillance by nine cameras and no one is getting close to it. In fact, although he’d prefer to get the material out of the country altogether, he said that would be “more for public relations than it is for anything else.”

I thought this near-weapons grade uranium was the basis for believing Iran was about to build a nuclear arsenal. I thought it posed an existential threat not just to Israel, but also the Middle East, Europe and — just as soon as Tehran acquires an intercontinental ballistic missile — the U.S. itself. I thought the reason the U.S. had to send its bombers back to Iran, after turning the underground storage site into a tomb last summer, was that its presence still made for too high a risk of nuclear breakout.

Trump last month told Americans and the wider world that he didn’t go to war to achieve regime change in Tehran. He has said that making sure Iran doesn’t acquire a nuclear weapon was “99 percent” of the problem.

The U.S. military, according to Trump, has by now obliterated all other Iranian threats, including its navy and ballistic missile capabilities. He’s called the closure of the Strait of Hormuz a minor issue because the........

© The Korea Times