Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker said on Sunday that he expects President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal in May if progress is not made to fix it by then.
When Trump waived certain nuclear-related sanctions on Iran in January, he warned that he would not do so again at the next deadline in May if Germany, Britain, and France did not agree to “fix the terrible flaws of the Iran nuclear deal.”
“The Iran deal will be another issue that’s coming up in May, and right now it doesn’t feel like it’s gonna be extended,” Corker said on CBS’s Face the Nation. “The president likely will move away from it unless our European counterparts really come together on a framework. And it doesn’t feel to me that they are.”
“As we get within two weeks of the May 12th date, that could change,” he added. Asked point blank whether he thinks the president will pull out of the deal on that date, Corker said, “I do, as I mentioned, unless something changes.”
U.S. talks with Europeans officials over the fixes have not been going smoothly, he suggested, despite the Europeans’ strong desire to stay in the Obama-era deal.
“The interesting thing about all this is the Europeans, more than anyone else, want to keep the deal in place,” he said. “And yet, there’s been difficulties in coming together on this framework.”
Corker specifically cited a proposed fix that would address the nuclear deal’s expiring provisions. Other proposed fixes include prohibitions on Iran’s ballistic missile program and a broader inspections regime that includes Iran’s military sites.
State Department and European officials had been looking for a compromise that both keeps the deal intact and pleases the president, the New York Times reported last month. Some European diplomats told the Times that the task involves an “element of diplomatic legerdemain.” “How do you convince Mr. Trump that you have changed the deal without actually changing it?”
But the discussions could take on a different tone now that Trump has fired Rex Tillerson as secretary of state and announced CIA director Mike Pompeo as his intended replacement. Pompeo and Trump are viewed as being of similar mind on the deal, while Tillerson and the president often disagreed. Corker had worked with Tillerson to prevent Trump from quitting the deal.
After Trump announced Pompeo’s nomination last week, one Senate aide told THE WEEKLY STANDARD: “The Europeans will understand that they truly need to get on board fixing the [nuclear deal] in a serious way, and not just papering over it and trying to convince the president into thinking that they fixed it.”
“State [under Pompeo] will push a hard line with the Europeans—they will either accept that or not,” the aide said. “But at least we won’t do a halfway fix that won’t get at the real issues.”
Corker said Sunday that he expected Pompeo’s perspective on the deal to differ from that of Tillerson, as well as that of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. The foreign relations panel will likely hold Pompeo’s confirmation hearing in April.
“I think Pompeo’s sense is that we should move away from the deal also,” he said. “He will bring a very different point of view, based on what I’ve been told.”
And Corker reiterated that any nuclear deal-related legislation, a version of which he floated months ago, needs Democratic support. But Democrats won’t sign on to any such bill without European support—which requires diplomatic legwork by the administration.
“We really put the onus back on the administration. It’s up to them diplomatically to bring [the Europeans] along and make that happen,” Corker said. “Until it does, there’s no way we’re going to pass legislation here.”
