Donald Trump has constantly complained, both throughout the campaign and since occupying the White House, that the nuclear agreement with Iran is a terrible deal. A deal that damages the United States. An “embarrassment.” And it’s clear that there is a national embarrassment.
[Trump] was incensed by the arguments of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and others that the landmark 2015 deal, while flawed, offered stability and other benefits. He did not want to certify to Congress that the agreement remained in the vital U.S. national security interest and that Iran was meeting its obligations. He did not think either was true.
“He threw a fit,” said one person familiar with the meeting. “. . . He was furious. Really furious. It’s clear he felt jammed.”
When Trump’s own advisors are coming forward to inform that the Iran deal is providing stability and blocking Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and the State Department certified that Iran was in compliance with the deal … what was causing Trump to throw a no-deal fit? It’s not really a surprise.
“He doesn’t want to certify the Iran deal for more domestic reasons than international ones,” said Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “He doesn’t want to certify that any piece of the Obama strategy is working.”
Trump’s refusal to listen to reason made White House staff come up with a plan that would let Donald Trump stomp his foot and scream about the plan, but actually throw in a roadblock to eliminating the deal. Coming up with elaborate ways to soothe the fury of Trump while desperately working behind the scenes to stop the world from blowing up fits in with a series of actions where staff has attempted to keep Trump from either exploding, or blowing up the rest of us. That’s how things work at the White House daycare.
The occasion during which Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Donald Trump a f#$%ing moron, was a meeting where Trump looked at a graph showing the number of US nuclear weapons, and declared that he wanted to put the US back at the top by building 68,000 new warheads—ten times what we currently have. Not because we need the weapons. Because Trump didn’t like being at “the bottom of the curve” on the graph.
Clearly, Tillerson’s declaration was well-earned. But handling Donald Trump with kid gloves and scrambling to find ways to work around his temper tantrums is putting the nation, and the world, at constant risk.
“McMaster realized we just cannot come back here next time with a binary option — certify or decertify,” an exercise Congress requires every 90 days, said a person familiar with the July discussion. “He put his team to work on a range of other options, including a decertification option that would involve Congress” and would not immediately break the deal.
The truth is McMaster was supposed to come back with a binary option—either Iran was in compliance with the deal and the US should certify that compliance, or they were not. By offering a third option, Iran gets the chance to move back on the path to nuclear weapons and the United States moves into the role of a nation that no one trusts.
“We need to send the message that the president does not feel constrained by the JCPOA and does not feel beholden to it” while seeking an extension of the deal’s restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities and other modifications.
Sending the signal that one president “does not feel constrained” by a treaty made on the previous president isn’t a casual gesture, it’s a huge warning flair of instability, inconsistency, and bad faith.
Britain, France and Germany, along with the European Union’s foreign policy chief, have argued to Congress and the Trump administration that the deal cannot be redone. Iran has said the same.
Decertifying the Iran deal does confirm one thing that Donald Trump has said—the United States has nothing to offer North Korea except a military solution. Because they clearly can’t trust America to hold to a diplomatic agreement.
Trump’s decertification of the deal without cause threatens to reverse not years, or even decades, or US policy. It threatens to leave Iran free to pursue its goals without facing the crippling sanctions that brought them to the table after long, difficult negotiations. And it threatens to leave, not Iran, but America, as an international pariah.