This article has been updated with information that Haley provided in her speech.
The top American diplomat to the United Nations outlined an argument for the Trump administration’s possible decision not to recertify Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal. Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, spoke Tuesday at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on how the administration will be evaluating the Iranian government’s compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on that country’s nuclear program.
Haley called the JCPOA, which was brokered by the Obama administration, a “very flawed and very limited agreement” that was “designed to be too big to fail.” She also laid out a case for why President Trump would be justified to decline to certify Iran’s compliance, as he is periodically required to do by law.
“If the president chooses not to certify Iranian compliance, that does not mean the United States is withdrawing from the JCPOA,” Haley said. “If the president finds that he cannot certify Iranian compliance, it would be a message to Congress that the administration believes either that Iran is in violation of the deal, or that the lifting of sanctions against Iran is not appropriate and proportional to the regime’s behavior, or that the lifting of sanctions is not in the U.S. national security interest, or any combination of the three.” President Trump has recertified Iran’s compliance with deal twice since his inauguration, most recently in July. He was reportedly reluctant to do so but yielded to the need for the administration to complete its comprehensive interagency policy review.
“I am not going to prejudge in any way what the president is going to decide next month,” Haley said. “While I have discussed it with him, I do not know what decision he will make. It is his decision to make, and his alone.” When later pressed on whether she is recommending he decertify Iran’s compliance, Haley said: “I’m not making the case for decertifying. What I am saying is, should he decide to decertify, he has ground to stand on.”
Haley, who last month traveled to Vienna to meet with officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency, spoke about why Iran’s compliance is “not as straightforward as many people believe” and listed out the country’s violations to the deal—having nuclear material above stated thresholds and limiting the IAEA from inspecting military sites where the Iranian government is thought to be still developing its weapons program.
She drew a distinction between the provisions of the “flawed” deal and the requirements of the U.S. law compelling the president to determine “whether the Iran deal is appropriate, proportionate, and in our national security interests.”
“Withdrawal from the agreement is governed by the terms of the JCPOA,” Haley said. “The Corker-Cardin law governs the relationship between the president and Congress.” And if the president did not recertify, she added, “What happens next is significantly in Congress’s hands.” Haley also said she was not saying the United States should leave the deal.
Asked why the administration was shifting the difficult decision about whether to withdraw from the deal to Congress, Haley pointed out that the Corker-Cardin law requires the president to certify or not, and that because President Obama did not pursue the JCPOA as an official treaty, the United States’s involvement is still contingent on Congress.
Responding to questions about how the other parties to the JCPOA, especially America’s European allies, would respond to Trump decertifying the deal or even a withdrawal from it, Haley posed it as a question of national interest.
“Are we going to take care of our allies and make sure they’re comfortable, or are we going to look out for American national security interest?” she said. Haley added that if the rest of the world continues to ignore Iran’s nuclear activity in violation of the deal, “we will be dealing with the next North Korea.”
“We need to wake up,” she said.
She also spent a great deal of time making the case for a history of bad acting on the part of the Iranian regime—from founding and funding terrorist groups like Hezbollah to supporting the bloody regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. “You can look at any place in the Middle East where there are problems, and the Iranian tentacles are there,” Haley said.
