President Donald Trump refused to certify the Iran nuclear deal Friday, a move that has been described as one piece of a larger strategy to toughen U.S. policy toward Iran.
“We cannot and will not make this certification,” Trump said in prepared remarks laying out the administration’s months-in-the-making Iran strategy. “We will not continue down a path whose predictable conclusion is more violence, more terror, and the very real threat of Iran’s nuclear breakout.”
Under a law linked to the nuclear deal (INARA), Trump is required to report to Congress every 90 days on four conditions, including whether sanctions relief is appropriate and proportionate to Iran’s behavior under the deal. Trump cited that condition in his speech Friday. Proponents of decertification have noted that Trump could decertify on that basis, or on a condition that questions whether continued sanctions relief is in America’s vital national security interests.
Trump on Friday slammed the deal’s expiring limits, its upfront provision of sanctions relief to Tehran, its failure to promote stability in the Middle East, and its failure to address Iran’s missile programs. Congress has already begun addressing these issues, he noted.
“We got weak inspections for no more than a purely short-term and temporary delay in Iran’s path to nuclear weapons,” Trump said. “What is the purpose of a deal that at best only delays Iran’s nuclear capability for a short period of time?”
Decertification does not withdraw the U.S. from the nuclear deal. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters Thursday that Trump wanted to try to fix the deal before walking away from it wholesale.
The president warned Friday that if Congress, the White House, and negotiating partners cannot reach an agreement, the deal “will be terminated.”
INARA now allows Congress 60 days to debate reimposing sanctions on Iran. But some hawkish lawmakers have said they will not call for an immediate reimposition of sanctions, which would effectively blow up the deal. They are instead looking to use the months following decertification to exercise “coercive diplomacy” and fix the deal’s flaws through legislation.
Trump said Friday that Congress should amend INARA to “strengthen enforcement, prevent Iran from developing an intercontinental ballistic missile, and make all restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activity permanent under U.S. law.”
Arkansas senator Tom Cotton and Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker are expected to introduce a legislative framework that would address some of the deal’s flaws without violating it. Their proposal would automatically reimpose sanctions if Iran’s ‘break out time’—how long it takes to produce enough material for a nuclear weapon—dips under one year, or if the country violates certain restrictions.
These restrictions would “remain in force indefinitely,” thereby addressing the deal’s expiring provisions, according to a Senate fact sheet circulated Thursday. They’d also “bolster IAEA verification powers” and “limit Iran’s advanced centrifuge program.” Cotton and Corker coordinated closely with the administration on the framework and kept it under wraps for weeks.
Corker said he was hopeful the legislation would help spur negotiations among European allies.
“I’m hopeful that what we’re going to be able to do is, with a lot of work, and certainly with my Democratic counterparts involved, is to bring them along in a way that causes them to want to have a follow-on, or they themselves apply similar sanctions in the event that Iran moves beyond some of the requirements that exist in the JCPOA from years 8 to 15,” he told reporters.
European leaders have urged Trump not to quit the nuclear deal, but some have signaled openness to supplementing it.
“Most of this new talk of wanting to enforce the deal better among our allies, willing to look at fixes, is only because President Trump said he would walk away,” David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told lawmakers Wednesday. “Before that, there were big problems in getting the Europeans to take any of these problems seriously.”
Cotton has described decertification as a necessary “preliminary step” that could drive European partners to “sit down and negotiate a hard bargain at the table.”
But lawmakers, deal critics, and administration officials have also been careful to stress that the Iran deal is only one part of what must be a broader strategy toward Tehran. Iran’s ballistic missile program, support for terrorism, and human rights abuses must also be addressed, they say, as well its regional aspiration to build a land bridge from Tehran to Beirut.
“The previous administration’s myopic focus on Iran’s nuclear program to the exclusion of the regime’s many other malign activities allowed Iran’s influence in the region to reach a high-water mark,” read a fact sheet circulated by the White House Thursday night.
Trump said Friday that the administration’s comprehensive Iran strategy includes countering the regime’s support for terrorist proxies, additional sanctions to block terror financing, addressing Iran’s proliferation of missiles and weapons, and denying Tehran “all paths to a nuclear weapon.”
The president emphasized the “tough sanctions” that he would impose on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which he slammed as Ayatollah Khamenei’s “corrupt terror force and militia” that provides support to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad as well as proxy groups.
A wide-ranging piece of sanctions legislation passed this summer required the administration to extend a terrorism designation to the IRGC, which has a pervasive presence in Iran’s economy, by Oct. 31. The Treasury Department announced Friday that it would be designating the IRGC consistent with that law, as well as pursuant to Executive Order 13224, which was signed by George W. Bush in 2001. That order is “aimed at freezing the assets of terrorists and their supporters, and at isolating them from the U.S. financial and commercial systems.”
The IRGC’s overseas arm, the Quds force, is already designated.
Tillerson expressed hesitance about designating the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization Thursday.
“There are particular risks and complexities to designating an entire army, so to speak, of a country,” he said.
