The Senate’s top Iran hawks heaped praise on the president’s nomination of CIA director Mike Pompeo to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson Tuesday, and critics of the deal on and off Capitol Hill expressed confidence that Pompeo’s presence would place renewed pressure on negotiations to fix the Iran nuclear deal—or nix it.
Trump said in a tweet Tuesday that Tillerson would be replaced with Pompeo, and later said the two “disagreed on things” including what to do about the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The president waived certain nuclear sanctions on Iran in January but warned that if the Europeans do not agree to “fix the terrible flaws” in the deal, he would not do so again at the next May deadline.
Tillerson’s State Department has led the charge on those talks, which some European diplomats described to the New York Times as an attempt to “convince Mr. Trump that you have changed the deal without actually changing it.”
South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, asked if Pompeo’s appointment would make for tougher negotiations over the deal, said, “I hope so.”
“I think it means that the likelihood of withdrawing from the agreement, if you don’t change the sunset clause and deal with some other deficiencies in the agreement … goes up,” he said.
Trump touched on proposed fixes for the deal’s “disastrous flaws” in a January statement, including a strengthened inspections regime that involves Iran’s military sites, a fix addressing the deal’s expiring provisions or sunset clauses, and prohibitions on Iran’s ballistic missile program.
Iran hawks hope that the presence of Pompeo, if confirmed, will make the Europeans take negotiations over those fixes more seriously—or bring those discussions to a head.
“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,” said one Senate aide. “State [under Pompeo] will push a hard line with the Europeans—they will either accept that or not. But at least we won’t do a halfway fix that won’t get at the real issues”
Pompeo and Trump “think the same way about Iran,” the aide said. “So when the State Department is off in Europe doing these working group meetings … the Europeans will take what State is saying as truly speaking in line with the President, which may not have been the case as consistently under Tillerson’s leadership.”
“The change in leadership at State increases the pressure on them to take a serious look at how they can address these flaws in the deal,” the aide added.
European and U.S. officials had planned to meet in Berlin in coming days to discuss the deal.
A senior GOP congressional staffer told TWS that many had worried Tillerson’s negotiated fixes to the deal would amount to a “fig leaf.”
“The chances of at least having a better policy, whether it is a deal that is fixed or we leave the deal—I think we’re going to be on better footing.”
“Tillerson and his team really weren’t preparing for the possibility of a world without a flawed Iran nuclear deal,” the staffer continued. “But Pompeo is at least intellectually open to thinking about how does the United States prepare for a world without the Iran deal, and making sure that we prevail in such a world. He will come at the Iran issue with a fresh set of eyes.”
Off Capitol Hill, critics of the deal said much the same.
“For those Europeans (and Americans) who think Trump is not serious about walking away on May 12th if there’s no agreement to fix the Iran nuke deal, I give you Exhibit A: his soon-to-be Secretary of State Mike Pompeo,” said Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
A foreign policy veteran close to the White House questioned whether the administration should carry on with talks to fix the deal.
“The Europeans were already refusing to accept some of the president’s baseline demands, and Tillerson was scrambling to prevent the whole thing from falling apart,” he said. “Pompeo has always said the deal is fundamentally flawed and beyond repair, which is more or less where the president is.”
“The deal,” he concluded, “is functionally dead.”
