NEW YORK — After using the most high-profile foreign policy speech of his presidency to call the Iran nuclear deal “an embarrassment to the United States,” President Trump could find recertifying the agreement next month even more politically difficult than the deal’s opponents had already promised to make it.
Supporters of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the Iran deal is formally known, rallied in defense of it this week ahead of Trump’s appearance at the United Nations General Assembly, where he was expected to argue against the deal both publicly and privately. Trump’s searing indictment of the JCPOA on Tuesday — and his extensive conversation about the deal during a bilateral meeting on Monday with French President Emmanuel Macron, who supports it — has heightened speculation that he may decide to decertify the agreement by Oct. 15, when his State Department must inform Congress whether Iran has complied with the terms of the deal.
“I don’t think we know what the president’s decision on the deal is going to be yet,” John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the UN, told the Washington Examiner. “But these were very strong comments. And when you say, among other things, that the deal is an embarrassment to the U.S., it’s hard to see how you certify or stay in.”
Bolton suggested recertifying the JCPOA after criticizing it so harshly could send mixed signals to the international community about where Trump truly stands on Iranian policy.
“To me, that’s the kind of one shoe on, one shoe off foreign policy — that’s not the way the U.S. leads, because to lead, you need moral and political clarity,” Bolton said.
Addressing the United Nations General Assembly for the first time on Tuesday, Trump went after the government of Iran for sponsoring terrorism and developing its ballistic missile program in violation of UN resolutions barring such behavior. The JCPOA, however, does not prohibit many of the provocations that Trump and other world leaders have long condemned.
“The Iranian government masks a corrupt dictatorship behind the false guise of a democracy. It has turned a wealthy country with a rich history and culture into an economically depleted rogue state whose chief exports are violence, bloodshed, and chaos,” Trump said in his speech.
“The longest-suffering victims of Iran’s leaders are, in fact, its own people. Rather than use its resources to improve Iranian lives, its oil profits go to fund Hezbollah and other terrorists that kill innocent Muslims and attack their peaceful Arab and Israeli neighbors,” Trump continued. “This wealth, which rightly belongs to Iran’s people, also goes to shore up [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship, fuel Yemen’s civil war, and undermine peace throughout the entire Middle East.”
Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, took to Twitter shortly after Trump’s speech to excoriate the president’s characterization of the Iranian people.
“Trump’s ignorant hate speech belongs in medieval times,” Zarif tweeted. “Fake empathy for the Iranians fools no one.”
Trump reserved his fiercest criticism for the Iran deal negotiated by his predecessor, however. Like many critics of the JCPOA, Trump argued the nuclear agreement put Iran on a path to obtain the very weapons the deal was supposed to outlaw.
“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,” Trump 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.”
The Trump administration has given little indication of how it plans to handle the upcoming recertification deadline. Although Trump vowed to tear up the agreement on the campaign trail, his State Department has already recertified the JCPOA twice under the guidelines of legislation that requires the administration to affirm Iran’s compliance to Congress every 90 days.
But Trump’s comments about Iran at the UNGA gathering galvanized those who have pushed him to walk away from one of former President Obama’s signature foreign policy achievements.
National security adviser H.R. McMaster and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, however, have urged Trump to consider an approach to Iranian policy that punishes the regime’s aggressions without abandoning the JCPOA altogether, according a source familiar with the situation.
The conflicting advice has further complicated Trump’s considerations on Iran ahead of a deadline that will force him to make a decision that will ultimately inflame at least one faction of his supporters.
Sebastian Gorka, former adviser to Trump and staunch opponent of the Iran deal, said he interpreted Trump’s speech as a signal that he will likely decertify the JCPOA next month.
“The president’s comments are the clearest indication that he has maintained the view he had when we last debated the JCPOA in the Oval with Secretary Tlllerson and Gen. McMaster,” Gorka told the Washington Examiner, referring to a meeting in July that he said occurred near the time of the most recent 90-day deadline.
“The president didn’t want to recertify then, and today’s speech is a clear indication he’s had enough,” Gorka added. He said Trump’s speech represented a “death-knell” for the Iran nuclear deal.
Fred Fleitz, senior vice president for policy at the Center for Security Policy, said Trump’s remarks reflected “the Trump I voted for,” one who pushed aggressively against the JCPOA despite the foreign policy establishment’s widespread support for it.
The speech “suggests he’s not going to certify JCPOA and will pull out,” Fleitz said. “I don’t see how he can do otherwise after what he said about [the] deal in [his] UNGA speech.”
Fleitz noted the president had moved to what appeared to be a more hawkish position on the agreement than the one promoted by his top advisers, highlighting Trump’s return to using the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” on Tuesday.
“The speech was a dramatic shift for Trump away from what McMaster and Tillerson have been saying and advising on JCPOA and radical Islam,” he said. “It almost seemed as if they were on vacation and didn’t get to clear the speech.”
Indeed, Tillerson said Tuesday evening that the administration would seek to renegotiate provisions of the Iran deal in order to extend its restrictions beyond the sunset dates agreed to by Obama, But he stopped short of the full-throated condemnation Trump fired at the JCPOA just hours earlier.
“It’s not a stiff enough agreement. It doesn’t slow their program enough, and holding them accountable is difficult under the agreement,” Tillerson said during an interview with Fox News. Tillerson said Trump recognizes that the deal must be “revisited” and suggested the administration would reach out to European allies to gauge support for tightening restrictions in the multilateral agreement.
If Trump moves to decertify the JCPOA next month, he will find some support among congressional Republicans.
Republican lawmakers — including Sens. David Perdue of Georgia, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Marco Rubio of Florida — have urged Trump to reconsider the suspension of sanctions at the heart of the Iran deal.
However, others have urged Trump to work within the agreement’s framework to counter the behavior — such as conducting ballistic missile tests, supporting groups like Hezbollah, and facilitating destabilization in Syria and Yemen — that have soured administration officials on the JCPOA.
For example, House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce called on Trump to “enforce the hell” out of the JCPOA rather than scrap it altogether.
Royce, R-Calif., argued Tuesday that “in a way, the toothpaste is out of the tube” when it comes to the Iran deal due to the influx of financial resources Tehran received as a result of the JCPOA’s sanctions relief, making strict enforcement of the existing agreement the only way to prevent the situation from worsening.
And other world leaders have warned Trump not to discard the hard-fought concessions Iran agreed to in exchange for that sanctions relief, such as limits on its uranium enrichment and centrifuges.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who has also criticized Iran’s provocations, said Tuesday that Trump would make a “big mistake” if he failed to recertify the Iran deal.
Macron, like other proponents of recertification, argued nullifying the JCPOA could have implications for the prospects of securing an agreement in the future with rapidly-nuclearizing North Korea.
“North Korea is a very good illustration of a ‘what if’ regarding Iran,” Macron told CNN on the sidelines of the UN summit.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who has threatened reprisal if Trump pulls out of the deal, also argued that any effort to abrogate the JCPOA would scare other countries off from striking similar deals with the U.S. down the line.
“The exiting of the United States from such an agreement would carry a high cost, meaning that subsequent to such an action by the United States of America, no one will trust America again,” Rouhani said Tuesday in an interview with NBC.
Trump’s options for dealing with the JCPOA extend beyond simply leaving or staying, however. Because the agreement fails to police much of Iran’s military, political and financial activity, Trump and other world leaders could impose new restrictions on Tehran that leave the terms of the nuclear deal untouched.
The topic could surface in dicussions about the JCPOA on Wednesday during a ministerial meeting in New York with the six signatories of the deal.
Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior Iran analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Trump’s speech kept his precise position on how to approach the recertification deadline concealed.
“I don’t think he tipped his hand,” Taleblu told the Washington Examiner.
However, Taleblue said, Trump and other administration officials, like U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, have begun to lay the groundwork for viewing the Iran deal “much more wholistically as opposed to just seeing it is a limited arms control agreement.”
“Now is the opportunity to create the diplomacy that’ll take its place” should Trump choose to decertify the deal, Taleblu added.
