President Trump has the authority and the justification to scrap the Iran nuclear agreement if he chooses, according to the administration’s top diplomat at the United Nations.
“The entire world thinks the JCPOA is untouchable, but it’s not,” Ambassador Nikki Haley said Tuesday, using the formal acronym for the pact that former President Barack Obama’s team negotiated.
Haley denounced Iran and the agreement, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, both in terms of the regime’s compliance with the deal and the utility of the deal to American interests even when Iran follows the letter of the pact. That served to make the case for withdrawal, but Haley put the chief burden on Congress to decide how the United States will proceed.
“U.S. law requires the president to also look at whether the Iran deal is appropriate, proportionate, and in our national security interests,” Haley said in prepared remarks at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank in Washington D.C. “If the president chooses not to certify Iranian compliance, that does not mean the United States is withdrawing from the JCPOA … Under the law, Congress then has sixty days to consider whether to re-impose sanctions on Iran.”
That observation hinged on a “critically important, and almost completely overlooked” aspect of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, which allowed lawmakers to vote on the deal but set a high bar for actually blocking it. Haley was echoing an argument that some Senate Republicans have made in support of the idea that Trump should decide that the deal is still in the national security interests of the United States.
“Iran continues to wage a campaign of regional aggression, sponsor international terrorism, develop ballistic missile technology, and oppress the Iranian people,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and three others wrote to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in July. “In light of these actions, there is simply no basis on which to make a certification that U.S. national security is bolstered by continued sanctions relief.”
Haley seized on the same provision of federal law, after arguing that Iran uses the threat of abandoning the nuclear deal as a shield to deter the west from cracking down on their development of ballistic missiles and other aggressions. “We’re not keeping the Iranians from doing bad things,” she said at AEI. “We’re empowering them. And, we gave them a ton of money to do it and so we can’t expect any different behavior.”
She denied making a direct case against staying in the deal, however. “I’m not making the case for decertifying, what I am saying is, should [Trump] decide to decertify, he has grounds to do it,” Haley said.
