PMOI/MEK,7 May 2018— This article is part of “The myths of JCPOA,” a series of articles that answers major questions surrounding the nuclear deal signed between Iran and world powers in 2015.

With the May 12 deadline looming close, where U.S. President Donald Trump will be deciding on the fate of the nuclear accord forged between the Iranian regime and world powers in 2015, proponents of leniency and rapprochement with the regime of Iran have been putting forth different arguments to defend the flawed deal and the extension of a policy of appeasement toward the mullahs ruling Iran.

Among those arguments is that the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), has made the Middle East region a safer place. An op-ed in this regard, published in the New York Times, wrote, “Imagine all the mutually contaminating civil wars and internecine conflicts that rage across the Middle East today. Then turn the dial and add the possibility of a regional nuclear arms race triggered by Iran dashing for a bomb. That is the scenario which the agreement has helped to prevent.”

This argument can be best described as putting the cart before the horse. Part of the premise is true, which is that the Middle East region, namely Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, is engulfed in violence and conflict. But at the heart of all those conflicts is the Iranian regime, which owes its survival to sowing the seeds of chaos in neighboring countries.

At the time the nuclear negotiations were initiated in 2013, the Iranian regime was hard hit by severe economic sanctions, a strong leverage for the international community to force the regime to cut back on its regional meddling and domestic human rights violations. Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), stipulated at the time, “Evicting the regime from the Middle East and preventing its regional meddling… is a fundamental principle that needs to be included in any agreement.”

But the world powers negotiating with the regime decided to narrowly focus on the nuclear dossier, tacitly giving the mullahs free pass on their other illicit activities.

Knowing that its counterparts’ sole focus was the nuclear negotiations, the Iranian regime proceeded with ramping up its foreign interventions to make up for its strategic retreats on the nuclear front. And the JCPOA gave the Iranian regime billions of dollars to spend on its terrorist and extremist ambitions, such as sending weapons to Yemen, recruiting militias in Iraq and propping up the Assad regime in Syria with a constant flow of money, troops and arms.

Meanwhile, the regime virtually spent nothing from the nuclear deal bonanza to fix its broken economy, a fact that was accentuated when protests and uprisings broke out across the country earlier this year over economic grievances and financial corruption in the government.

Rogue states such as the Iranian regime want nuclear weapons as a deterrent, a power leverage, a last resort. But inciting violence and sectarian conflicts in neighboring countries is the bread-and-butter of its everyday survival. That’s why, as the Iranian resistance has time and again emphasized, the threat of Iran’s fundamentalist ideology is by far more dangerous than its nuclear ambitions.

So it is only fair to conclude that the JCPOA and its failure to address the multitude of threats the Iranian regime poses to the region and across the globe was a major contributing factor to instability and insecurity in the Middle East. Only a multi-pronged approach which takes into consideration the regime’s terrorism and human rights violations along with its missile and the nuclear program can contain the threat posed by the mullahs ruling in Tehran.