Is It Decertification Day for Iran?

It’s Friday the thirteenth, and it’s also the day President Trump will announce his administration’s new Iran policy. That will come in a speech from the White House at 12:45 p.m., and Trump is expected to announce he will decertify that the sanctions relief afford to Iran under the nuclear deal. This wouldn’t undo the deal—certification is a provision of a federal law governing sanctions relief—but it would put the administration on a path to either renegotiating the terms of the deal or, eventually, scrapping it—though Congress will now also have a say in the matter.

I say “expected to” because it’s not a guarantee Trump will follow through on what his top advisers and Cabinet members are preparing for. At the previous certification deadline in July, Trump made a day-of reversal before switching back, as Steve Hayes and I reported in this week’s issue:

On the morning of July 17, the day the White House was to transmit its decision to Congress, chief strategist Steve Bannon handed Trump an article with the headline “Trump Must Withdraw from the Iran Nuclear Deal—Now.” The op-ed, written by former United Nations ambassador John Bolton and published the day before in the Hill, made the argument Trump had wanted to make: Iran wasn’t complying with the terms of the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action; the mullahs were advancing their nuclear program, ostensibly with America’s blessing; and the deal certainly wasn’t in the national security interests of the United States.

“President Trump has repeatedly made clear his view that the Iran deal was a diplomatic debacle,” Bolton wrote. “It is not renegotiable, as some argue, because there is no chance that Iran, designated by Ronald Reagan as a state sponsor of terrorism in January 1984, will agree to any serious changes. Why should it? President Obama gave them unimaginably favorable terms, and there is no reason to think China and Russia will do us any favors revising them. Accordingly, withdrawing from the JCPOA as soon as possible should be the highest priority. The administration should stop reviewing and start deciding.”

So right then, Trump changed his mind. The United States would not recertify the Iran deal, as he’d decided on July 12. It was time to move on. . . .