The Trump administration threw signal after signal this week that it could walk away from an international agreement aimed at preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons — a deal the president’s own secretary of defense said is good for U.S. national security.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that President Donald Trump plans to decertify Iran’s compliance in the multilateral Joint Comprehensive Plant of Action (JCPOA): an international agreement finalized in 2015 that forced Iran to scale back its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
The story broke after the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified in Congress that he was unaware of any material breach of the pact on Iran’s part.
Under a U.S. law that is separate from the JCPOA itself, the White House must certify every three months that Iran is complying with the terms to which it agreed in 2015. The Trump administration has certified compliance previously and is due to do so again Oct. 15. If the administration decertifies Iran, Congress would have the option, but not the obligation, to reinstate economic sanctions eased under the agreement.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis — who said he believes the JCPOA helps U.S. national security — foreshadowed such a tack Tuesday, when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee the administration could move to reintroduce sanctions on Iran without withdrawing unilaterally from the JCPOA.
“They’re two different pieces,” Mattis told the panel. “And that is under consideration right now about how we deal both the legal requirement from the Congress as well as the international agreement.”
Broadly, the JCPOA required Iran to curb its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief from six world powers that helped negotiate and enforce the agreement: China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Trump has roundly criticized the JCPOA, which was finalized by the international coalition in the final years of the Barack Obama administration. In a Sept. 10 speech before the U.N. General Assembly, Trump called the pact “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.”
Whether Mattis shares his boss’ opinion or not, the top Pentagon official thinks the agreement makes the U.S. more secure.
“Do you believe it’s in our national security interest at the present time to remain in the JCPOA?” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) asked Mattis Tuesday during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
“Yes, Senator, I do,” Mattis said after a long pause.
However, Mattis told lawmakers the administration is “very alert to any cheating” on Iran’s part.
As for Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford, who testified alongside Mattis, repeated that as far as he knows, “Iran is not in material breach of the agreement. And I do believe the agreement to date has delayed the development of a nuclear capability by Iran.”
Dunford told the committee essentially the same thing last week during a confirmation hearing to serve a second term as Joint Chiefs chairman.
Elsewhere in Washington this week, the hawkish Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a potential lightning rod for GOP foreign-affairs hardliners in the chamber, rebutted Mattis and Dunford in a speech at the right-leaning Council on Foreign Relations think tank. Cotton said the U.S. should decertify Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA on the grounds that the agreement itself is a “national security threat.”
“[T]he deal paves Iran’s path to the bomb in just a few years,” Cotton said in prepared remarks later posted on his website.
Like Mattis, Cotton noted that certification of Iran’s compliance with JCPOA “occurs under U.S. law — not the deal itself. The decision not to certify doesn’t withdraw us from the deal immediately. Rather, it gives Congress a 60-day window to do quickly what we’ve always had the power to do: re-impose sanctions.”
Cotton has made similar appeals since the JCPOA was finalized. Last year, the firebrand GOP senator threatened to hold up the federal budget process because of Energy Department plans to buy Iranian heavy water. Heavy water can be used to make plutonium, but it can also be employed for scientific and industrial purposes.
Then-Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, one of the chief architects of the JCPOA, said the purchase was part of a “dramatic rollback of the Iranian nuclear establishment” enabled by the agreement.
After Cotton spoke this week, Moniz took to the opinion pages to defend the deal.
“If the president pulls the United States out — either by failing to certify Iranian compliance without clear evidence of violations or by making a clean withdrawal — he will trigger a crisis that will significantly increase nuclear dangers,” Moniz wrote in his hometown Boston Globe.
