President Donald Trump will announce Friday he is decertifying the Iran deal is in the national security interests of the United States. In a speech outlining the administration’s new policy on Iran, the president will call on Congress to amend its Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act to insist on tougher actions against Tehran if it is in violation of the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
“This is a much broader strategic approach than has been taken with Iran in the past, and it has been built around the intention that we will stay in the JCPOA but the president is going to decertify under INARA,” said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson Thursday. “The president has come to the conclusion that he can not certify under INARA that the sanctions relief that was provided is proportional to, in effect, the benefits that we’re seeing from that agreement.”
Trump has been resistant to recertifying the deal, which the law requires every 90 days and which the president has already done twice, most recently in July. Back then, Trump was frustrated that his national security team had not provided him enough options and very nearly decided to decertify then. He was convinced to recertify after being assured of the need to finish the interagency review of the administration’s Iran policy.
But the president began laying the groundwork for decertifying in August, and his team appears to have found an option for him to do so without immediately withdrawing from the deal. “Let’s take the INARA and amend the INARA to put in place some very firm trigger points in INARA that if Iran crosses any of these trigger points, the sanctions automatically go back into place,” Tillerson said. “There’s no determination other than they hit a trigger point, and there’s no other actions required.” He added that the administration would call on Congress to also include extend the “sunset clauses” of the JCPOA that allow Iran to restart parts of its nuclear program after a period of time. “These amendments under INARA would outlive the JCPOA,” Tillerson said.
The secretary also suggested a path to create a “new agreement” with the European signatories to deal with both these sunset clauses and Iran’s ballistic missile program. Tillerson said it was unlikely the current deal would be reopened. “It more likely means we would undertake an initiative to have a new agreement that doesn’t replace the JCPOA but addresses these two issues and lays along beside the JCPOA,” he said.
The president is expected to talk a tough line, as he and his administration have for months, about Iran’s bad actions in the region, including the support for terrorism by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. But Tillerson indicated the administration would not go so far as to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization, despite the ample evidence the group funds, trains, and engages in terrorism across the Middle East.
“There are particular risks and complexities to designating an entire army, so to speak, of a country, where that then puts in place certain requirements for where we run into one another on the battlefield that then trigger certain actions that we think are not appropriate and not necessarily in the best interest of our military actions or not necessarily going to benefit what we’re attempting to do,” Tillerson said. “What we’re really attempting to do is curtail the IRGC’s ability to finance its terrorist activities, finance its support for terrorist activities.” The president will likely announce new sanctions on “individuals and entities” associated with the IRGC.
This path forward for Trump on the Iran deal will require a balancing act, encouraging Congress to do its part—and not immediately reimpose nuclear sanctions—while also getting the Europeans on board with some kind of new agreement. On the Congress side of things, Tillerson sounded an cautiously optimistic tone. “We’ve been socializing this on the Hill now for several weeks quietly, so as not to put anyone in a box or force them to take a position early on, because this is a bit of a complicated issue, and it does require one to think about, okay, what’s the benefit of doing this?” he said. “I don’t want to suggest to you this is a slam dunk up there on the Hill. We know it’s not. People have very strong feelings about this nuclear arrangement with Iran. But we also feel strongly.”
As for the Europeans, whose companies have already begun to take advantage of the lifting of sanctions by doing business in Iran? Administration officials have been saying for weeks there is a new recognition that the JCPOA needs to be strengthened among European officials. The Trump team says they are hoping to use the terms of the deal as written to force stronger action.
“We’re leaning hard into the agreement now, and we think it’s useful to do that,” Tillerson said.
