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Will Congress Have a Say in Iran Policy?

From the Oct. 30, 2017, issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD
In mid-October, President Trump was due to make a certification to Congress on four conditions about its nuclear deal. He has repeatedly said this deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), gave the Iranians too much for too little. On October 13, he surprised no one by declining to certify one of the conditions set out in the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA), a bill Congress passed to oversee the 2015 deal: that continued sanctions relief to Iran under the agreement is “appropriate and proportionate” to measures taken by the regime to end its nuclear program.
The president said he is not yet quitting the deal, which he can do unilaterally, but giving his administration time to fix its flaws by working with Congress and our European allies. This “decertification” set off a 60-day period during which lawmakers could reimpose the heavy sanctions killed by the 2015 deal through a fast-track process. This would immediately take the United States out of the deal—something opposed by our closest allies and some of Trump’s chief advisers, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis.
One of the more hawkish lawmakers, Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, says he does not want to immediately reapply sanctions. He and Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker of Tennessee have been working with the administration on legislation that could bolster diplomatic efforts to fix the deal. “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 ahead of the certification deadline.
The Corker-Cotton bill would essentially amend INARA, adding “trigger points” that, crossed by Iran, would lead to the reimposition of sanctions. The text of the bill has not been released, but the trigger points are certain to address specific flaws in the deal that the Trump administration has outlined. This could include inspections of Iranian military sites, the country’s ballistic missile program, and the planned expiration of limits on the development of advanced centrifuges. “They’re trying to rewrite U.S. policy on the deal and get it into a statutory form so that it’s permanent,” says David Albright, head of the Institute for Science and International Security.
The bill’s restrictions would remain in force indefinitely. “These amendments under INARA would outlive the JCPOA,” Secretary of State Tillerson told reporters ahead of Trump’s October 13 speech. The bill could also spur broader negotiations about the deal’s gaps and flaws, Tillerson said. Some European officials have suggested openness to supplementing the deal, whose negotiators included China, Russia, Germany, France, the U.K., and the EU, to address Iran’s ballistic missile program as well as the agreement’s expiring provisions. The Europeans have been resistant to reopening the deal itself.
Tillerson said Trump told him and others either to “put more teeth” into the deal or “forget the whole thing” and walk away. Corker told reporters that it will be up to the administration to get European allies to a “similar place,” and only this will get the bill the votes it needs to pass. Without European support, he said, Democrats and even some Republicans are unlikely to sign on. “The only way this effort fails is if the administration does not work with our allies and bring them along. The onus is on the White House, and I’m going to keep the onus over there,” he said. “You watch what they do with our European allies, and then you’ll know whether we’re going to be successful here.”
But administration officials say the bill does not require negotiations with the Europeans. It is, in the words of Tillerson, “purely an internal domestic decision.” “The action we’re asking Congress to take on INARA,” he told reporters, “will strengthen our arguments and will strengthen our diplomatic effort if we have that kind of support, but it’s not controlling the diplomatic effort itself or the pace with which we’ll make progress.”
The executive and legislative branches are engaged in what one senior GOP congressional aide calls a game of “hot potato” over who is responsible for realizing the president’s demands. The dispute only underscores the difficulty GOP lawmakers will have in getting the bill passed. It will need 60 votes in the Senate—meaning that if every Republican votes for it, at least eight Democrats will have to come on board. “In the Senate you need 60 senators to do anything ordinarily,” the aide told me. “But right now, no Democratic senators have clearly said they want to do this sort of fix.”
Trump’s tough talk on the deal is fresh in Democrats’ minds. “We are dealing with an administration now that does not support the agreement. Before we were dealing with an administration that did support it,” says Senator Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. “The review statute was based upon Congress being left out of the process. Now we have a president that’s trying to have Congress substitute for the administration on this.”
“This entire thing is contingent upon eight or nine Democrats getting on board with it,” says another GOP aide. “We could be left with a situation where we’re only able to get tough on Iran to the extent that the Democrats allow us to.”
The Cotton-Corker bill faces serious questions from Republicans, too. “We shouldn’t have the potential of the Iranians acquiring a nuclear weapon rest on Chuck Schumer’s shoulders,” notes Wyoming representative Liz Cheney. She describes the Corker-Cotton proposal as “wholly insufficient” because it leaves the nuclear deal in place. “It’s one thing for Obama to have negotiated the worst deal that the United States has ever entered into,” Cheney says. “It’s another thing if you then have the Republican Congress look like we are somehow giving our blessing to that deal.”
Florida senator Marco Rubio and Texas senator Ted Cruz say that they see reimposing sanctions as the best step. “The Obama Iran deal was spectacularly dangerous when signed, and it remains so,” Cruz told reporters.
The president has options outside of the Corker-Cotton legislation. He could detail the “trigger points” through executive orders without the hassle of congressional approval. “The administration could, and probably should, issue a new executive order that, at least for the duration of Trump’s term, lays out these trigger points, and then use diplomacy and pressure to persuade other countries to get on board,” the senior GOP aide points out.
But some lawmakers say that they are happy to have a voice in Iran policy, describing it as a welcome change from the Obama administration’s unilateralism. “Instead of us just being critics sitting on the sidelines, get us involved,” said South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a proponent of the “trigger point” proposal. “I think challenging the Congress is a good thing.”


 


Jenna Lifhits is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

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