The president wouldn’t be blowing up the nuclear agreement—at least not right away.
Earlier this month, two U. S. senators gave starkly different speeches one day and one mile apart in Washington, D. C. In an address to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton outlined how Donald Trump could begin rectifying the “dumbest and most dangerous” deal in American history, in which Barack Obama had placed the revolutionary zealots in Tehran on a path to a nuclear-weapons capability that would make North Korea’s look tame. In a speech to the Center for American Progress, the Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy argued that, actually, the deal was the main thing preventing Iran’s sprint for nuclear weapons, and undermining it was what would put Iran back on the path to the bomb. The president’s “most outrageous act” might be coming soon, Murphy said, in the form of a “catastrophic self-imposed wound” that when paired with the North Korean nuclear crisis, could potentially inflict a “mortal” wound on “millions of global citizens.”
The senators were talking about the same topic: the Trump administration’s expected decision this week to not certify the nuclear deal that the Obama administration struck with Iran and other world powers. So how can one move generate such divergent interpretations? What specifically would happen next if the president declines to certify the accord in the coming days? Here’s a primer.
What Certification Means
In 2015, around the time that the Obama administration was finalizing an international agreement to restrict Iran’s advancing nuclear program, Senators Bob Corker and Ben Cardin helped pass bipartisan legislation requiring the president to certify certain things about the deal to Congress every 90 days. The bill was basically a way for skeptical lawmakers to assert some control over an accord that Obama hadn’t negotiated as a treaty, which would have required Senate approval.
Trump, who has denounced the deal and views Iran as one of America’s fiercest enemies, has twice heeded the advice of his foreign-policy advisers and grudgingly certified the agreement. But he’s suggested that he won’t a third time, when an October 15 certification deadline will coincide with the conclusion of the Trump administration’s broader review of its Iran policies.
Reports indicate that if Trump doesn’t certify, it won’t be on the grounds that Iran is violating the terms of the agreement, which deals narrowly with Iran’s nuclear program and not other potentially threatening behavior. Trump’s own government, United Nations inspectors, and the other parties to the deal all agree that the Iranians haven’t substantively breached the accord and that the Iranian nuclear program has been mothballed for the time being.
Instead, Trump may cite a provision of the Corker-Cardin law, officially known as the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA), which asks whether the lifting of sanctions imposed in retaliation for Iran’s nuclear program is in America’s national-security interests. The Trump administration would essentially be saying it’s not—because of flaws in the Iran deal, because Iran has continued testing ballistic missiles that could theoretically carry nuclear weapons, and because Iran has persisted with aggressive policies that the United States abhors, including propping up Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria and supporting groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah that the U. S. considers terrorist organizations.
Critically, however, declining to certify the stipulations of INARA is a procedural move under U. S. law with no direct or immediate impact on the international nuclear deal with Iran. It’s not synonymous with ripping up the agreement. It would not make the United States non-compliant with the accord. What it would do is punt the Iran debate to Congress, where the consequences could be much greater.
Scenario #1: Congress Sinks the Iran Deal
If Trump were to not certify, the minority or majority leaders in either house of Congress would have 60 days to introduce legislation to reimpose nuclear-related sanctions on Iran. These could include the kind of severe measures against the country’s banking system and oil exports that helped force the Iranians into nuclear negotiations during the Obama administration. If such a sanctions package were to get through Congress, there’s very little chance Trump, who set the whole process in motion, would veto it.
Reinstating these sanctions would put the United States in breach of the Iran deal and could lead to the unraveling of the agreement in a matter of months. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has said that, in the event Trump doesn’t certify, his government “will wait for Congress to make its decision” and that Iran could choose to remain in the deal even without the United States. This would depend on whether Britain, France, and Germany, who are also signatories to the accord, decide to join in the renewed punishment of Iran or to resist it — and each of these countries has expressed support for keeping the deal. (China and Russia, the other parties to the deal, are much less likely to take America’s side in any dispute over the future of the Iran deal.)
How Europe would respond to the United States reimposing nuclear sanctions is a live question. David O’Sullivan, the European Union’s ambassador to the United States, recently suggested that the EU might try to legally shield European companies doing business with Iran from having to comply with American sanctions, but acknowledged some uncertainty in an interview with my colleague Krishnadev Calamur. “I don’t think anyone, frankly, has thought through what they would do if one of [the Iran nuclear agreement’s] signatories said they consider themselves no longer bound by the deal,” O’Sullivan told him. Joe Kaeser, the CEO of the German conglomerate Siemens, which struck several infrastructure deals with Iran following the lifting of sanctions last year, seemed more resigned when I spoke with him this month. “If the world believes that Iran doesn’t play by the rules and imposes sanctions, then we’ll follow them whether we have an opinion about it or not,” he said.
But many former Obama administration officials, who were involved in the nuclear talks with Iran, believe the Iranians would stop complying with the deal and ramp up their nuclear program if the United States were to reverse course on sanctions relief. Philip Gordon, Obama’s top Middle East adviser, envisions Iran removing caps on stockpiles of enriched uranium that could be turned into weapons-grade nuclear material, reinstalling centrifuges to enrich that uranium, and reconstituting a heavy-water reactor that could produce weapons-grade plutonium. “We would be right back to where we were in the first place when we agreed to this deal, which is to say Iran step by step getting to the point where they’re on the verge of a [nuclear] weapons capability,” Gordon has said . “The choice for the United States becomes clear and binary, which is to say: Accept that they develop a nuclear capability or bomb them to prevent them from having it.”
In his speech last week, Murphy forecast additional fallout from the United States walking away from the Iran deal by reimposing sanctions, arguing that it would further fray U. S.-European relations and dash hopes, however remote at the moment, of a diplomatic resolution to the standoff over North Korea’s rapidly developing nuclear-weapons arsenal. “If the U. S. pulls the plug, despite Iran’s compliance, just because we’re idiots,” it will “shred our credibility and isolate the United States from our partners and allies just at the moment when the North Korean crisis commands us to be rallying the globe to meet this new threat,” he said. “Why would [Kim Jong Un] have any reason to believe that we would uphold our end of the bargain?” The upshot: A devastating war on the Korean peninsula would grow more likely.
Cotton, who has been closely consulting with the Trump administration on its Iran strategy, claimed that Iran’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal could be managed, even if that involved initiating another bout of instability and military conflict in the Middle East. The Trump administration could respond by inflicting an all-out trade and financial embargo on Iran that “will likely create economic chaos and destabilize the regime” within the estimated 12-month timeframe it would need to build nuclear weapons, he argued during his appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations. And if not, the economic pressure would at least “buy time” for the United States to launch “calibrated strikes” against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. “If they choose to rebuild it, we could destroy it again, until they get the picture,” Cotton vowed.
Scenario #2: Congress Seeks to Improve the Iran Deal
Despite the roadmap offered by the INARA legislation, there is good reason to believe that congressional leaders will refrain from immediately reimposing nuclear sanctions if Trump refuses to certify the Iran deal. The president isn’t expected to explicitly call for Congress to reinstate sanctions. Trump, in fact, has the authority to withdraw the United States from the nuclear agreement without any help from Congress.
