What Happens If Trump Doesn't Certify the Iran Deal?
Earlier this month, two U.S. senators gave starkly different speeches one day and one mile apart in Washington, D.C. In an address to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton outlined how Donald Trump could begin rectifying the “dumbest and most dangerous” deal in American history, in which Barack Obama had placed the revolutionary zealots in Tehran on a path to a nuclear-weapons capability that would make North Korea’s look tame. In a speech to the Center for American Progress, the Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy argued that, actually, the deal was the main thing preventing Iran’s sprint for nuclear weapons, and undermining it was what would put Iran back on the path to the bomb. The president’s “most outrageous act” might be coming soon, Murphy said, in the form of a “catastrophic self-imposed wound” that when paired with the North Korean nuclear crisis, could potentially inflict a “mortal” wound on “millions of global citizens.”
The senators were talking about the same topic: the Trump administration’s expected decision this week to not certify the nuclear deal that the Obama administration struck with Iran and other world powers. So how can one move generate such divergent interpretations? What specifically would happen next if the president declines to certify the accord in the coming days? Here’s a primer.
In 2015, around the time that the Obama administration was finalizing an international agreement to restrict Iran’s advancing nuclear program, Senators Bob Corker and Ben Cardin bipartisan legislation requiring as a treaty, which would have required Senate approval.
