Trump Seriously Considered Blowing Up the Iran Deal
President Donald Trump very nearly killed the Iran nuclear deal, attempting to upend an announcement to certify Iran’s compliance with the deal — apparently on a whim — as advisors tried to talk him down for hours on Monday.
As Eli Lake reported in Bloomberg, since the Iran deal was signed in 2015, every few months the State Department would certify that Iran was complying with the deal. Despite slamming Obama’s agreement with the country as the worst deal ever negotiated, once Trump ascended to the presidency, his rhetoric tempered, and the certifications carried on as usual.
But on Monday, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his cohorts prepared to roll out another announcement of Iran’s compliance, Trump stepped in, calling off a plan to inform Congress:
And for a few hours on Monday afternoon, it looked like the White House was going to tell Congress it could not certify Iran was complying, without saying Iran was in breach of the pact. This would have triggered a 60-day period in which Congress could vote to re-impose the secondary sanctions lifted as a condition of the deal, or to strike it down altogether.
The problem with that, Lake notes, is that neither Congress, the White House, nor the other seven signatories of the agreement were prepared for such a move, administration officials said.
“Trump had yet to even put forward a broader Iran policy,” Lake writes, and “the U.S. intelligence community feels that Iran is pushing the edges, but overall is in compliance Iran deal.”
The New York Times also reported that Trump’s top security advisers — including Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster — assembled at an hourlong meeting last Wednesday to convince the president to re-certify.
An official familiar with the internal discussions said “Trump had spent 55 minutes of the meeting telling them he did not want to” preserve the Iran deal.
Bloomberg points out that other administration officials, including CIA director Mike Pompeo and chief strategist Steve Bannon, are vehemently opposed to the Iran deal.
Yet, despite their protests, “Trump walked back from the ledge, and the administration certified Tehran’s compliance” — for the next few months, at least.
[image via screengrab]
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