Donald Trump would be ill-advised to tear apart the Iran nuclear deal as he has promised if he wins the American presidential election, US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said.
"It's technically possible, but I just don't see that any calculation leads you to that as being a sensible approach," Moniz said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
Moniz, a nuclear physicist who helped negotiate the accord on behalf of the administration of President Barack Obama, was in Israel this week in part to allay the concerns of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the deal's most vigorous opponents.
Trump, the Republican frontrunner, said in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington last month that his "No. 1 priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran" that President Obama has called one of his top foreign policy achievements.
It is "extremely unlikely" that the other world powers that negotiated with Iran alongside the US—China, France, Russia, the UK and Germany—"would follow our lead if the next president just arbitrarily says, 'Well, everything's going fine, but I just don't like this deal. Let's start over again'." Moniz said. "It just does not make any sense."
Moniz, who signed an agreement while in Israel to expand cooperation on alternative fuels and water desalination, said Netanyahu now accepts the deal after denouncing it in a speech to the US Congress last year.
He said the two nations share concerns about Iran's support for Lebanon's Hezbollah movement and about its recent testing of long-range missiles.
"I think the prime minister has made it clear that, look, now the deal is done, it's implemented, let's make sure it's implemented fully, that it's verified, and then we can continue to address the other issues that we see around," Moniz said.
