{"id":47418,"date":"2017-10-14T05:53:03","date_gmt":"2017-10-14T05:53:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=47418"},"modified":"2017-10-14T05:53:03","modified_gmt":"2017-10-14T05:53:03","slug":"trump-disavows-nuclear-deal-doesnt-scrap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/news\/trump-disavows-nuclear-deal-doesnt-scrap.html","title":{"rendered":"Trump Disavows Nuclear Deal, but Doesn’t Scrap It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trump Disavows Nuclear Deal, but Doesn’t Scrap It<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

President Trump announced on Friday his decision to disavow the Iran nuclear agreement, threatening to leave the deal altogether if it was not amended to permanently block Tehran from building nuclear weapons or intercontinental missiles.<\/span><\/p>\n

But even as he delivered a fire-breathing indictment of the Iranian government\u2019s activities around the Middle East, he stopped short of unraveling the agreement reached by President Barack Obama two years ago.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe will not continue down a path whose predictable conclusion is more violence, more chaos, the very real threat of Iran\u2019s nuclear breakout,\u201d Mr. Trump declared at the White House in a speech that was intended to define a broad strategy for confronting Iran.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Trump\u2019s decision not to certify that Iran was complying with all terms of the agreement came after a fierce debate inside the administration, according to a senior official familiar with the discussions and who agreed to describe them on the condition of anonymity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis argued that it was in the national security interests of the United States to keep the deal\u2019s constraints on Iran. The two men succeeded, over time, in persuading Mr. Trump not to immediately scrap the accord, despite his campaign promise to do so.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Trump, in declaring his intention not to certify Iran\u2019s compliance with the deal, essentially kicked to Congress a decision about whether to reimpose sanctions on Iran and blow up the agreement. His aides, however, insisted that was not the goal, and that they instead wanted Congress to enact legislation defining what would incite the United States to reimpose sanctions.<\/span><\/p>\n

The president listed three such triggers \u2014 the deployment of an intercontinental ballistic missile by Iran, Iran\u2019s refusal to negotiate an extension of the deal\u2019s existing constraint on its nuclear activities and evidence that Iran could manufacture a bomb in less than 12 months. Any of those could prompt the United States to walk away from the deal.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn the event we are not able to reach a solution working with Congress and our allies,\u201d he said, \u201cthen the agreement will be terminated.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Persuading the allies to renegotiate the deal is a far-fetched goal. The leaders of Britain, France and Germany quickly issued a joint statement urging the United States to adhere to the agreement, which they hailed as \u201cthe culmination of 13 years of diplomacy.\u201d Iran\u2019s president, Hassan Rouhani, said his country would consider \u201cno amendment whatsoever\u201d to the deal.<\/span><\/p>\n

And enacting new legislation on Iran would require 60 votes in the Senate, meaning Republicans would need to pick up the support of at least eight Democrats. Senate Democrats had urged Mr. Trump not to withhold certification, and they are unlikely to agree to legislation without assurances that the deal will remain intact.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Trump\u2019s scalding critique of the nuclear deal as \u201cone of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into\u201d echoed the language he used during his presidential campaign. But he also acknowledged the obstacles to ripping it up.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s done is done,\u201d Mr. Trump said, \u201cand that\u2019s why we are where we are.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The president seemed determined to erase any residual hope that the nuclear deal might form the basis of a new relationship between the United States and Iran. His speech, from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, was perhaps the most hostile of any American leader toward Iran since President George W. Bush placed the country on his \u201caxis of evil\u201d in 2002.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Trump recited a litany of misdeeds by Iran going back to the 1979 hostage crisis and described it as the world\u2019s leading state sponsor of terrorism, supporting Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban. He also accused the country of dealing with North Korea, a reference to Pyongyang\u2019s long history of selling missile technology to Iran, and said he had asked the nation\u2019s intelligence agencies to investigate whether the relationship went further.<\/span><\/p>\n

His tone made clear that Mr. Trump has no interest in what, for the Obama administration, was the biggest gamble of the accord: to provide the basis for two longtime adversaries to find other ways to cooperate. He also suggested that Iran would never change.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGiven the regime\u2019s murderous past and present, we should not take lightly its sinister vision for the future,\u201d the president said. \u201cThe regime\u2019s two favorite chants are \u2018Death to America\u2019 and \u2018Death to Israel.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The nuclear deal is the latest international agreement that Mr. Trump has tried to exit, amend or water down, including the Paris climate accord and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The closest analogy to this deal may be Nafta, the trade agreement that Mr. Trump once threatened to rip up and is now undergoing a painstaking renegotiation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Critics said Mr. Trump risked isolating the United States diplomatically and giving up the deal\u2019s hard-won gains, including intrusive inspections of Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities. The angriest voice belonged to former Secretary of State John Kerry, who spent several years negotiating the accord that Mr. Trump denounced.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is very, very poor, nonstrategic diplomacy,\u201d Mr. Kerry said in an interview, his voice rising. Pointing out that \u201cyou cannot unilaterally reset the terms of the deal,\u201d he said the agreement \u201cgives us a quarter-century of absolute accountability\u201d and assured that \u201cthe minute we see the stockpile going up, the questions and red flags will go up like crazy. And 15 or 25 years from now, we still have the same military options we have today.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf you want to have your war, Donald Trump,\u201d Mr. Kerry said, \u201cyou can have it in 20 years.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Congress is deeply divided on the Iran deal, and getting it to agree on additional legislation could prove difficult. While some Republicans are eager to undermine the deal, Democrats are equally determined to preserve what they view as another legacy of the Obama administration that Mr. Trump is trying to dismantle.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe will not buy into the false premise that it is Congress\u2019s role to legislate solutions to problems of his own making,\u201d said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.<\/span><\/p>\n

Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the chairman of the committee, released a potential blueprint for imposing an automatic return of sanctions if Iran was believed to be capable of producing a nuclear weapon within a year, or if it violated other restrictions.<\/span><\/p>\n

He worked on the proposal with White House officials and Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who is a hard-liner on Iran, and predicted it could win bipartisan support. It suggests that Mr. Corker\u2019s bitter personal feud with Mr. Trump will not obstruct cooperation on this issue.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Corker, acknowledging he had little choice but to \u201cdeal the circumstances as they are,\u201d signaled that he would work to try to find points of compromise \u2014 possibly including assurance that the deal would not simply be ripped up by the president. \u201cYou\u2019re going to see all of this evolve in daylight,\u201d he told reporters.<\/span><\/p>\n

Decertification does not, by itself, affect the American obligation to adhere to the deal, including the lifting of some economic sanctions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since becoming president, Mr. Trump has twice reluctantly certified the agreement. But administration officials concluded that he could not bring himself to do that every 90 days, even if the judgment of nuclear inspectors and his own intelligence agencies was that Iran was in compliance.<\/span><\/p>\n

So they tried to find a solution that would allow Mr. Trump to signal his disapproval of the deal without putting the United States in the position of being the first signatory to violate it. That solution was to declare that the suspension of sanctions was not \u201cappropriate and proportionate\u201d to the steps that Iran has taken to end its illicit nuclear activities.<\/span><\/p>\n

That formulation is narrower than declaring that the agreement is no longer in the nation\u2019s national security interests, and administration officials said it was chosen carefully to avoid putting Mr. Trump in a box the next time he had to decide whether to waive sanctions against Iran.<\/span><\/p>\n

While Mr. Trump\u2019s speech was described beforehand by his aides as a description of a broad new initiative to push back on Iran, he gave little description of what that would be. Mr. Trump did say the United States would increase pressure on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which he described as the \u201csupreme leader\u2019s corrupt personal terror force and militia.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Treasury Department announced it would designate the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist group, expanding an existing designation of the Quds Force, the corps\u2019 paramilitary wing. But Mr. Trump stopped short of putting it on the State Department\u2019s list of foreign terrorist organizations.<\/span><\/p>\n

Such a designation, Mr. Tillerson said, would impede military operations in which American and Iranian forces found themselves on the same battlefield \u2014 presumably fighting the Islamic State.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:-\u00a0https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/10\/13\/us\/politics\/trump-iran-nuclear-deal.html<\/span><\/p>\n

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