Cogito Ergo Non Serviam

Trump Decertifies Iran Nuclear Deal

Donald Trump decertified the Iran nuclear deal over the week-end. He did this despite the fact that the deal is working as expected. He has falsely and ignorantly claimed that the deal is not in America's national interests and that it is the worst, most one-sided deal ever negotiated. However, decertification doesn't mean withdrawal, and the president is acting to keep the US in the arrangement despite his decertification. He said, "I am directing my administration to work closely with Congress and our allies to address the deal's many flaws." This is what comes of giving a game-show host the final say in foreign policy.

The certification is not part of the international treaty, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA], to which the US and Iran are parties as well as Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia. Instead, as Vox.com reported, it is part of "a law called the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA), put in place in May 2015 to give Congress oversight over an Obama administration agreement of which many members were skeptical. INARA requires the president to publicly certify every 90 days that Iran is in technical compliance with the deal and, more broadly, that 'suspension of sanctions [is] appropriate and proportionate to the specific and verifiable measures taken by Iran with respect to terminating its illicit nuclear program' as well as 'vital to the national security interests of the United States'."

Back in June, the foreign policy team in the administration cajoled Mr. Trump into certifying Iran's compliance, but only after a screaming-match that took hours. Mr. Trump, who couldn't say what is actually in the deal if asked, had insisted since he began campaigning for the White House that the deal was a bad one, and that Iran was cheating. The global consensus is that Iran is not cheating, and this decertifcation is a case of Donald Trump's ego trumping the experts' facts and accumulated wisdom.

Congress now has 60 days to reimpose sanctions in a fast-track process, as per the INARA -- no delaying in the House with points of order, no filibuster in the Senate. The Republican Party could vote new sanctions without much trouble if it chose to do so. The question is will Paul Ryan even schedule a vote? How does the White House find a way to climb down from here?

The climb down is inevitable. The other signatories to the deal do a vast amount of business with Iran, and they have no need or desire to re-impose their own sanctions so long as Iran is in compliance. And Iran isn't about to cheat if it can make Mr. Trump look divisive, isolated and impotent by staying true to the terms of the accord.

Mr. Trump is right in thinking that the Iranian regime is a nasty bunch bent on disrupting the region. Yet with an accord that extends the time Iran will need to go nuclear, as the JCPOA does, the US has boxed the regime in at least when it comes to The Bomb. That is no small feat. Much as the Soviet Union was engaged in dreadful practices around the globe, the SALT and START agreements reduced the nuclear arsenal of the USSR (and the USA), which was a good thing in a huge pile of bad things. Mr. Trump needs to learn the difference.

In the end, this journal expects that a new piece of legislation will come out of Congress that will save the president's bacon. Some arcane formula will be decided that will allow him to say he is tightening the deal and ridding it of its flaws but which, in fact, will do nothing to the agreement itself. How much easier and safer things would be if Mr. Trump could ever admit that he had made a mistake.

© Copyright 2017 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.



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