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America's closest allies are fighting with each other over the Iran deal

Even John Kerry, secretary of state under President Barack Obama, has been getting involved.

President Trump’s decision to kill or save the Iran nuclear deal is coming down to the wire. And America’s closest allies are desperately pulling him in opposite directions.

Trump has until this Saturday, May 12, to decide whether he’s going to preserve the Iran deal, negotiated under former U.S. president Barack Obama, or follow through on his stated desired to torpedo it. The U.K. and France are pushing him to stay with the agreement. Israel, meanwhile, is goading Trump to indulge his more disruptive instincts and blow the deal to smithereens.

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Even John Kerry, secretary of state under President Barack Obama, has been getting involved in “shadow diplomacy” with a top-ranking Iranian and European officials in a bid to save the deal that he helped negotiate, according to a report in The Boston Globe on Friday.

On Monday, Trump blasted Kerry’s moves on Twitter as “possibly illegal.”

A spokesman for Kerry acknowledged the former diplomat has stayed in touch with his old contacts from around the world, and cast Kerry’s role as attempting to keep Iran inside the deal.

“I think every American would want every voice possible urging Iran to remain in compliance with the nuclear agreement that prevented war,” Kerry’s spokesperson told a Fox News reporter. “Like America’s closest allies, he believes it is important that the nuclear agreement, which took the world years to negotiate, remains effective as countries focus on stability in the region.”

Trump’s Monday-morning Twitter rant came shortly after another U.S. ally tried to sway Trump. U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson pulled his own power move on Monday in a bid to reach Trump: He went on Fox & Friends. Johnson’s appearance on a show well known to be one of Trump’s favorites was widely interpreted as a direct appeal to the American president.

On the air, Johnson pointed out that scrapping the nuclear deal might cause other Middle Eastern countries to build their own nuclear weapons.

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“Let me just remind you, if they do get a nuclear weapon, you're going to get an arms race in the Middle East,” Johnson said on the program. “You're going to have the Saudis wanting one, the Egyptians, the Emiratis. It's already a very, very dangerous state at the moment. We don't want to go down that route.”

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Johnson also penned an op-ed in The New York Times that appeared Sunday under the headline: “Don’t Scuttle the Iran Nuclear Deal.”

French President Emmanuel Macron, who visited Washington and met with Trump in April, also warned that killing the deal could create a chain reaction of negative consequences leading to armed conflict.

“We would open the Pandora’s box. There could be war,” Macron told German magazine Der Spiegel. “I don’t think that Donald Trump wants war.”

Israel, on the other hand, has pushed Trump to kill the deal or renegotiate it. Under the terms of the 2015 accord, Iran accepted limits on its nuclear program in exchange for the removal of sanctions.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued his own appeal over the weekend, calling for the agreement to be either “fully fixed or fully nixed.” Netanyahu has argued that the deal’s sunset provision means that once it expires, Iran will be free to pursue nuclear weapons.

Read: Netanyahu just tried to convince Trump to kill the Iran deal with a Powerpoint

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Trump himself has called the deal “insane,” “ridiculous,” and “the worst deal ever.” He’s touted his own ability to negotiate a far better outcome. Officials from the Obama White House, including Kerry, have warned that any attempt to abandon or reopen the accord could lead to disaster.

Netanyahu gave a dramatic presentation last week in which he accused Iran of “brazenly lying” about its activities, speaking in front of a big screen that declared, simply: “Iran lied.”

Iran, for its part, has warned that if the U.S. scraps the deal, it will be able to restart its nuclear program within days.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in a televised speech over the weekend that “if America leaves the nuclear deal, this will entail historic regret for it.”

Cover image: Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, second left, speaks with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, left, while British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, right, waits during a meeting on the sidelines of a NATO foreign ministers at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo, Pool)