Getting to No: How the Trump Administration Decided to Decertify the Iran Nuclear Deal

On the morning of July 17, the day the White House was to transmit its decision to Congress, chief strategist Steve Bannon handed Trump an article with the headline “Trump Must Withdraw from the Iran Nuclear Deal—Now.” The op-ed, written by former United Nations ambassador John Bolton and published the day before in the Hill, made the argument Trump had wanted to make: Iran wasn’t complying with the terms of the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action; the mullahs were advancing their nuclear program, ostensibly with America’s blessing; and the deal certainly wasn’t in the national security interests of the United States.

“President Trump has repeatedly made clear his view that the Iran deal was a diplomatic debacle,” Bolton wrote. “It is not renegotiable, as some argue, because there is no chance that Iran, designated by Ronald Reagan as a state sponsor of terrorism in January 1984, will agree to any serious changes. Why should it? President Obama gave them unimaginably favorable terms, and there is no reason to think China and Russia will do us any favors revising them. Accordingly, withdrawing from the JCPOA as soon as possible should be the highest priority. The administration should stop reviewing and start deciding.”

So right then, Trump changed his mind. The United States would not recertify the Iran deal, as he’d decided on July 12. It was time to move on.

The abrupt reversal began making its way to Trump’s top advisers late that morning, upending nearly a week of White House preparation. Indeed, a rollout of the previous decision had already begun. For nearly eight hours, Trump’s national security team would scramble to make their public relations effort consistent with the president’s new position.

Shortly after 8 a.m., Kelly Sadler, a White House communications official, had sent an email to the White House surrogates’ list—friendly policy wonks and journalists who might be called upon to explain and defend the recertification. The advisory notified the surrogates of a background call, scheduled for noon, with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster to discuss the Iran deal. A similar email notification had gone out to the White House press corps, advising them of a background briefing on Iran at 1 p.m. At 11:28 a.m., about a half-hour before the surrogate call, the White House had sent surrogates its “talking points” on recertification. The guidance made clear that the recertification was grudging but defended the president’s decision. One anticipated question got to the heart of the administration’s awkward position: “If, as you say, the JCPOA is so bad and Iran is in ‘default’ of its ‘spirit,’ then why did the administration—for the second time—recertify Iran’s compliance?”

The White House had provided surrogates an answer:

• As the Secretary of State’s letter makes clear, “the JCPOA is a one-sided agreement that gives Iran every incentive to be in tactical compliance, while repeatedly testing the boundaries of the agreement.”
• This recertification in no way implies that the Trump Administration has changed its mind about the threats from Iran or the shortcomings of the JCPOA.
• We will continue to work with our allies and partners to address those threats and to address the JCPOA’s considerable flaws.

Now these talking points were suddenly irrelevant. They defended a position the president had just abandoned. White House officials scrambled to draft new talking points and a new letter to Congress explaining the president’s decision to decertify the Iran deal.

The surrogate briefing went ahead as scheduled. But at 12:34, the White House press office sent an email to the press corps. “UPDATE: The originally scheduled background briefing will be postponed. We will provide an update when we have a new time.”

At 1:30 that afternoon, Trump held a previously scheduled meeting with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and several other top national security and foreign policy advisers. According to seven sources directly involved in the decision-making on Iran policy, the president made clear his frustration with his lack of options on Iran and wondered aloud why his team had not given him a broader set of alternatives to recertification.

Having failed to receive the decertification option from his own team, Trump called Senator Tom Cotton and put him on speakerphone. The president asked Cotton to make the case for decertifying the Iran deal. Cotton took five minutes and walked Trump and his team through the case, emphasizing one point in particular: recertifying the deal would be declaring that it was in the national security interest of the United States, something Cotton understood that Trump didn’t believe. Bannon provided the political complement to Cotton’s policy argument: Mr. President, you campaigned on tearing up the deal and now you’re recertifying it—for the second time?

Trump left the phone call, and the meeting, even more convinced that his decision that morning—to decertify—was the right one. When he had reluctantly recertified in April, he had made clear that he didn’t want to do it again and had instructed his team to provide him with a wide range of options. They didn’t.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer had a briefing scheduled for 2 p.m. It started late, at 2:32, and reporters were curious about the recertification decision. Spicer punted. “The secretary of state will have an announcement very shortly on that deal,” he said. Moments later, he went further, suggesting a reversal of the president’s April decision was imminent. “I think the president—from throughout the campaign until now—has made very clear that he thinks it’s a bad deal. And initially he recertified it because he had the luxury of having an entire team here, both from State, DoD, NSC to review it. That time is up, and State will make its announcement very shortly. But I think he’s been very consistent with the fact that he thought it was a bad deal.”

At 4:15, Trump met with key members of his national security team—Tillerson, McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and others—to review the new policy. If the president thought he’d find support for decertifying, he was mistaken. Mattis and Tillerson urged the president to recertify the deal, arguing that an abrupt reversal would frustrate and anger our European allies. McMaster, who wasn’t a defender of the deal on the merits, argued for recertification on the grounds that the National Security Council hadn’t yet completed its comprehensive review of Iran policy.

Trump was irritated but eventually gave in. The NSC signed off on the letter shortly before 7 p.m. and then sent its approved version to the State Department, which transmitted the letter to Capitol Hill under Tillerson’s signature. At 7 p.m., the long-delayed press briefing took place, and White House officials relied once again on the talking points that had been discarded at noon, only to be restored late in the day.

From nearly the moment Trump grudgingly agreed to recertification, he began preparing to decertify at the next deadline. On July 25, in a candid interview with the Wall Street Journal, he made clear that he’d felt penned in by his national security team. “Personally, I have great respect for my people, but if it was up to me, I would have had [Iran] noncompliant 180 days ago,” he said, adding that he’d “be surprised” if Iran would still be considered compliant 90 days later.

On September 5, the administration released what officials have said was a “trial balloon” for decertification. In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley made a strong case for why President Trump would be justified in decertifying the deal in October.

“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.” Haley was careful not to confirm Trump’s intentions. “I’m not making the case for decertifying,” she said. “What I am saying is should he decide to decertify, he has ground to stand on.”

There were more hints in President Trump’s September 19 speech to the U.N. General Assembly. “We cannot let a murderous regime continue these destabilizing activities while building dangerous missiles, and we cannot abide by an agreement if it provides cover for the eventual construction of a nuclear program,” he said. “The Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into. Frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the United States, and I don’t think you’ve heard the last of it. Believe me.”

What, exactly, would decertification mean? The requirement that the president certify Iran’s compliance with the deal every 90 days isn’t a provision of the JCPOA—it’s part of U.S. law. It’s contained in the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, known as Corker-Cardin after the two senators who authored it. When the Obama administration denied the Senate the opportunity to ratify or reject the Iran deal as a treaty, Congress passed Corker-Cardin as part of its assent to the sanctions relief called for in the deal.

Decertifying it, as administration officials point out, does not kill the deal. But it does place the onus on Congress to determine a legislative path—to impose new non-nuclear sanctions, to amend the Corker-Cardin law, or to pass a new bill—that would guide how the U.S. government will proceed on the deal.

Under the terms of Corker-Cardin, the president must certify four things to Congress every 90 days: that Iran is complying with the JCPOA’s terms, that Iran is not in “material breach” of the agreement, that Iran is not materially advancing its nuclear program, and that the sanctions relief provided for in the deal remains in the national security interest of the United States.

It is this final benchmark the administration is expected to cite if it decertifies. In an October 3 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Tom Cotton emphasized this point, just as he had on his phone call with Trump and his advisers on July 17. “Even if they were complying with it, even if .  .  . it was fully verifiable they were complying with it, which it’s not and which they aren’t, it is still not in our vital national-security interests because it does not block Iran’s path to a bomb,” Cotton said. “It puts them on the path to a bomb, now in barely a decade. So there’s no need to quibble over Iran’s technical compliance with the deal.”

What happens after decertification is a precarious balancing act if the president hopes to succeed in renegotiating a better deal that achieves the U.S. goal of preventing a nuclear Iran. There are a lot of things Trump and his administration could do to try to improve the deal before deciding whether to scrap it altogether. As Mark Dubowitz and David Albright put it in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, these include: designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, slapping Iranian companies and organizations with new non-nuclear sanctions allowed under the JCPOA, insisting on making permanent the “sunset clauses” that only temporarily restrict Iran’s nuclear program and testing, and demanding thorough and complete inspections of Iranian facilities to ensure compliance. In his Council on Foreign Relations speech, Tom Cotton echoed these ideas.

Success on this post-decertification route will require working closely with Congress, negotiating with European allies who have economic interests in Iran and want to expand them, and follow-through and commitment on the part of the administration. John Bolton tells TWS he’s highly skeptical of the news reports of this plan. “What’s been described is an incoherent policy mishmash,” says Bolton, who was candid in his criticism of Tillerson, Mattis, and McMaster’s guidance of the president toward recertification back in July. “If they failed to present the president with the full range of policy options, it is—and I say this wittingly—a dereliction of duty.” If Trump begins to feel this way again, he could upend the difficult path forward for improving the deal.

And that’s the worrisome X-factor for Iran hawks hopeful that this renegotiation-first plan might be pulled off: President Trump himself. He has had no major legislative achievements on Capitol Hill, having alienated nearly every Democrat in Congress and the Republican leadership, too. Administration officials insist that their counterparts in Europe are privately talking about the need to fix the flaws in the JCPOA, but for the European heads of state, Trump remains difficult to partner with.

And while the NSC-led interagency review of Iran policy is complete and offers a path forward, there is concern that Trump and his administration could lose focus on Iran. The Treasury Department, which enforces sanctions, has its attention on North Korea. The State Department is understaffed, run by careerists generally supportive of the existing Iran deal and led by a secretary who has been crosswise with Trump on the issue from the get-go. Asked if he was worried the president might not follow through on the additional work needed after decertification, Tom Cotton responded with one word: “No.”

Cotton is perhaps Trump’s most trusted outside adviser on Iran—it was the subject of their first conversation back in 2015. But the Arkansas Republican’s confidence in the president’s perseverance is not widely shared. As administration officials say about Trump all the time, as was borne out in his quicksilver changes of position on the Iran deal on July 17: With this president, you never know.

Correction, 10/6/2017: The article originally stated that the NSC official signed off before 7 p.m. and then sent the letter to Congress. In fact, the NSC signed off on the letter shortly before 7 p.m. and then sent its approved version to the State Department, which transmitted the letter to Capitol Hill under Tillerson’s signature.

Stephen F. Hayes is editor in chief and Michael Warren is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.