More Trump for the day

The New York Times has an article by Mark Landler and David Sanger about the Iranians:

President Trump (photo) is expected to overrule his top national security advisers and decline to certify the Iran nuclear agreement, according to people who have been briefed on the matter, a decision that would reopen a volatile political debate on Iran, but is likely to leave in place the landmark deal negotiated by the Obama administration.
By declining to certify Iran’s compliance, Trump would essentially kick it to Congress to decide whether to reimpose punitive economic sanctions. Even among Republicans, there appears to be little appetite to do that, at least for now.
Still, Trump’s expected move would allow him to tell supporters that he had disavowed the accord, while bowing to the reality that the United States would isolate itself from its allies if it sabotaged a deal with which Iran is viewed as complying. Trump repeatedly ridiculed the accord during the 2016 presidential campaign, vowing to rip it up.
White House officials cautioned that the President had not yet formally decided to “decertify” the agreement. But he faces a 15 October 2017 deadline, and he has made little secret of his intentions, most recently when he declared at the United Nations two weeks ago that the agreement was “embarrassing to the United States”.
Trump will present his decision on the deal as part of a broader American strategy to crack down on Iran for its ballistic missile program and destabilizing actions throughout the Middle East. Administration officials said he had signed off on the overall approach and hoped he would present it before the deadline.

Comment:Too bad we cannot decertify Mr. Trump.

The strategy is an effort by the Trump administration to make the nuclear agreement only part of a multidimensional approach to pressure Iran on many fronts, including its missile program, its support for militant groups like Hezbollah and its intervention in the Syrian civil war on behalf of the Assad government.
But the administration has yet to articulate that broader strategy. As a result, the nuclear deal remains the fulcrum of the relationship with Iran, and a political football in Washington.
Congress will have to decide whether to reimpose sanctions, which could sink the deal, or use the prospect of that to force Iran, and the other parties to the deal, back to the negotiating table to make changes in the agreement.
That is the approach favored by Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, who has emerged as a leading hard-liner on Iran and is working closely with the White House to devise its strategy. On Thursday, Cotton met with Trump to discuss Iran and other issues.
“Congress and the president, working together, should lay out how the deal must change and, if it doesn’t, the consequences Iran will face,” Cotton said in a speech on Tuesday at the Council on Foreign Relations. Reimposing sanctions, he said, would be a “backward-looking step.”
Cotton said the United States and its allies should demand three changes to the deal: an elimination of “sunset clauses”, under which restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities are phased out in less than fourteen years; a strengthening of international inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities; and a curbing the country’s ballistic and cruise-missile programs.
Democrats argue that Trump should certify the agreement, warning that the administration’s ability to press Iran on other activities it objects to would be compromised, rather than enhanced, if the United States threw the future of the agreement into question.
Britain, France and Germany, all signatories to the agreement, are watching Trump’s deliberations with deepening concern. Diplomats from the three countries, as well as from the European Union, met with dozens of senators this week to warn them that if the United States withdrew, Europe would not follow.
“For us, this is a high priority in our national security,” said Peter Wittig, Germany’s ambassador to Washington. “We will stand by the Iran deal, and we want you not to walk away, but to comply with it. We share some of the grievances you have about Iran, and we can talk about it, and we should talk about it, but only on the basis of sticking to the deal.”
The deal is also contentious inside the administration. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis have both urged Trump not to back out of it, in part because that would free Iran to begin producing uranium and reprocessing plutonium immediately, not after thirteen years, as is stipulated in the agreement.
But Trump, after twice certifying the deal, has warned his aides that he would not do so again. As a result, the administration is looking for ways to claim Iran is in violation of the “spirit” of the accord, even if it has complied with inspection criteria. The International Atomic Energy Agency has said that Iran was in compliance; when it has found minor violations, they have been quickly fixed.
The president could also decline to certify it by claiming that the deal is simply not in the national security interests of the United States.
While the White House said that Trump had not formally signed a decision memo on the certification issue, he tipped his hand in mid-September with a less heralded, but in many ways more important, decision. At that time, facing another congressionally imposed deadline, he agreed to renew an exemption on sanctions on Iran.
Trump said nothing about that decision, which he came to reluctantly in a series of National Security Council meetings.
Declining to recertify Iran’s compliance would amount to a compromise. Because it is simply a notification from the White House to Congress, it has no legal effect by itself. Trump could tell his supporters that he broke with President Barack Obama on the deal, without actually violating its terms.
“It appears to be part of a ‘have your cake and eat it too’ strategy by the administration,” said Philip H. Gordon, who coordinated Middle East policy in the National Security Council during the Obama administration.
The risk, Gordon said, is that “while the administration may hope Congress refrains from passing new sanctions that cause the nuclear deal to collapse, no one can guarantee that outcome.” He noted that every Republican member of Congress voted against the deal.
The larger question is whether Trump’s “decertification” would gradually strangle the bigger goals of the nuclear negotiation: to integrate Iran with Western economies while assuring it cannot build a nuclear weapon for more than a decade.
If the Trump administration’s actions makes European banks fearful of lending billions to Iran to build new refineries, or expand other economic links with the West, it may fuel opposition to the deal inside Iran.
For its part, Iran has warned it would refuse to renegotiate the deal, or even talk about extending its length or conditions, unless the United States was also ready to make concessions on parts of the deal that have left it unhappy. While Trump argues that the United States paid too much up front in the deal to Iran, the Iranians reply that they were the ones who gave up most of their nuclear material before the arrangement went into effect.
“Are you prepared to return to us ten tons of enriched uranium?” Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, asked in an interview in New York City in late September of 2017, referring to the stockpile of nuclear material, about 98 percent of the country’s nuclear fuel holdings, that Iran shipped out of the country in the opening moments of the accord.

Rico says the agreement might be “embarrassing to the United States", but not as embarrassing as Trump is...