Iran Focus
London, 5 Oct – There are many reports that Donald Trump looks set to decertify the Iran nuclear deal at the October 15 deadline, despite certain advisers trying to stop him.
A White House source, who has been briefed on deliberations in the Pentagon and State Department said that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who is reportedly still trying to convince Trump, and others who disagree with decertification “are now adjusting to the reality it is going to happen”.
The source also said that they are negotiating the wording Trump will use for decertification, which will likely be accompanied by the new US policy on Iran.
By refusing to certify the deal, Trump would be making good on his promises over recent months (and indeed, since the campaign trail).
In July, he recertified the deal for the second time but made clear that he wouldn’t do it a third time. This was confirmed in his speech to the UN where he called the deal an “embarrassment” to the US.
Daniel Larison, a contributing editor at The American Conservative, wrote an op-ed, published on Business Insider, in which he stated that he didn’t believe that Trump would certify Iran again and even pointed out that Tillerson is unlikely to be a strong defender of the deal.
He wrote: “For his part, Tillerson may be resisting decertification, but he has echoed so many [hawkish] complaints about the deal publicly that he can’t have been making a very good case for the deal in private.”
So, the deal is likely to be decertified and even the biggest defenders of it within the administration are now accepting it. What will happen next?
Well, Congress will have 60 days to decide whether or not to reimpose sanctions on Iran but for some reason, the Iranian Regime’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif seems to think that they won’t.
He said, in an interview with Susan Glasser: “It’s up to Congress to adopt any decision, or not to adopt any decision, and I believe in the past a Republican Congress had this idea to let the nuclear agreement stay, as did our parliament. It had decided in the past not to take action; it can decide again.”
However, he is greatly underestimating the US Congress.
Larison wrote: “There may be individual Republicans in Congress inclined to keep the deal in place, but there are many more vocal opponents of the deal…they will be eager to propose new sanctions… and I assume most Republicans in both chambers will go along that.”
