Within days, international monitors will send an inspection report on Iran’s nuclear facilities to governments around the world, touching off a chain of events that could lead to another clash between President Trump and congressional Republicans, or even his own top advisers.
As New York Times writes in the article If Report Says Iran Is Abiding by Nuclear Deal, Will Trump Heed It?, in dry and highly technical language, the report by the International Atomic Energy Agency is likely to show that Iran — with perhaps minor lapses — is largely complying with the 2015 nuclear accord, experts say. And that is where the problems will begin for the Trump administration. No matter what the inspection report says, Mr. Trump has declared that he expects by October to determine that Iran is violating the deal, adding in late July that “if it was up to me, I would have had them noncompliant 180 days ago.” Such a declaration could end the nuclear deal, which imposed strict limits on Iran’s nuclear activities for 15 years in exchange for sanctions relief. Mr. Trump, who has called the pact an egregious giveaway to Iran, has the power by himself to scrap it and reimpose sanctions on Tehran.
Senate Republicans have signaled unease with the president’s vow to undo the deal and his own security advisers recommend preserving it, but the White House is giving serious consideration to alternatives that stop short of abandoning the accord. Under one option, the Trump administration could declare that Iran is violating the deal but say that the United States intends to keep it in place for now and not immediately reimpose sanctions.
Senator Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who led the unanimous Senate Republican opposition to the deal in 2015, said at a recent event that he had warned Mr. Trump that “you can only tear the agreement up one time.” Doing so now, Mr. Corker said, would generate a self-created crisis.
Calls placed to more than 20 Senate offices of opponents of the deal found few willing to discuss their positions publicly. Mirroring Republican unease, some of the groups that once fiercely opposed the deal are similarly silent.
A spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which underwrote a multimillion-dollar national advertising campaign against the deal in 2015, refused to answer questions about whether the organization now wanted it scrapped. Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, another group that sought to defeat the Iran deal, said he did not want the deal summarily scrapped.
Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who led the effort to preserve the deal in 2015, likened the politics around it to that of the Affordable Care Act. “It’s another situation where heated campaign rhetoric falls apart when it comes to the Senate floor,” he said in an interview.
Still, some opponents of the pact remain eager to see it ended. “I don’t think we get much benefit from the deal, so it collapsing doesn’t trouble me all that much,” Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, said recently.
The Trump administration is undergoing a review of its Iran policy. Mr. Trump grudgingly agreed in mid-July to certify that Iran remained in compliance with the agreement, but warned his security team that he would not keep doing so indefinitely.
Administration officials emphasized at the time that they intended to toughen enforcement of the accord and apply new sanctions over Iran’s support of terrorism and other destabilizing activities. But at the same time, a chorus of top national security advisers has urged Mr. Trump to keep the deal in place, including Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson; Defense Secretary Jim Mattis; Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser; and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Other parties to the agreement, including Britain, China, France, Russia and Germany, have made clear that they believe it is working, and some have sent diplomats to Capitol Hill in recent weeks to warn against ending it, saying that doing so would isolate the United States. European attachment to the deal has led some of its opponents to try to create circumstances that could bait the Iranians into walking away from the deal themselves.
After the Trump administration imposed new sanctions on Iran over its ballistic missile program, the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said in an interview in July that the sanctions may violate the deal. More recently, Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s president, said that if the American government imposed further sanctions on Tehran, his country’s nuclear program could be restarted in a matter of hours.
The American ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, on Wednesday visited the Vienna headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is expected to issue its quarterly report on Iranian compliance this week. Before the visit, Mr. Zarif complained that Ms. Haley’s trip was intended to sow doubts about the viability of the accord. In a statement released after her meetings in Vienna, Ms. Haley said she had expressed appreciation for the nuclear inspectors’ work and “noted that access to facilities in Iran would be crucial to fulfilling this mandate.”
Mr. Dubowitz, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is among those pushing the Trump administration to decertify Iran while keeping the deal in place. “I’ve shared these ideas with senior people in the administration, and I think there’s an openness to look at a third way,” he said in an interview. Simply pulling out of the deal, Mr. Dubowitz said, “would allow Iran to play the aggrieved victim and alienate the Europeans.” The importance of decertification, he said, is that it would help “to build a rap sheet” against small Iranian violations of the deal.
But Aaron David Miller, a former State Department Middle East analyst and negotiator, called Mr. Dubowitz’s strategy a “Trojan horse that unwinds the deal.” “The only way to read that strategy is as a taunt to push the Iranians into ending the deal,” Mr. Miller said.
Mr. Durbin said that scrapping the deal without any evidence that Iran was seriously violating its terms would damage American credibility around the world and all but guarantee that North Korea would refuse to undergo a similar set of negotiations to end its own nuclear program, now Mr. Tillerson’s top goal.
“If the president voids this without any evidence of a breach, it calls into question the credibility of the United States not just on Iran but North Korea and everything else,” Mr. Durbin said. “That cannot be in the interests of the United States.”
