Pompeo’s arrival at State Department could bring an end to Iran nuclear deal

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President Trump’s decision last week to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo could signify a coming end to the Iran nuclear deal, an agreement both Pompeo and Trump have long criticized.

The controversial pact already faced an uncertain future under the Trump administration heading into a key deadline in mid-May. Trump must decide by May 12 whether to extend the sanctions relief former President Barack Obama granted Iran in exchange for limits on its nuclear production, and Tillerson’s team had spent weeks working with European allies to renegotiate parts of the deal in an effort to preserve it past the summer.

But Pompeo’s ascension to secretary of state has given fresh hope to opponents of the Iran nuclear deal. Tillerson’s opposition to the agreement was one of several reasons Trump’s allies remained skeptical about his leadership throughout his year-long tenure.

“Rex Tillerson’s firing is intimately linked to the president’s desire to kill the Iran deal,” Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump White House aide, told the Washington Examiner.

Trump cited his differences with Tillerson over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the Iran deal is formally known, as one of the only specific reasons he parted ways with his secretary of state.

“We got along, actually, quite well, but we disagreed on things. When you look at the Iran deal; I think it’s terrible, I guess he thought it was OK. I wanted to either break it or do something, and he felt a little bit differently,” Trump told reporters on March 13. “So, we were not really thinking the same.”

Richard Nephew, senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, said Tillerson’s removal is very likely linked to his efforts to rescue the Iran deal.

“I can say, emphatically, that I believe Director Pompeo being [secretary of state] makes it far more likely that Trump kills the deal,” Nephew said. “I think this makes it far more likely we’re out of the JCPOA by May.”

Nephew pointed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent visit to the White House on March 5 as a potential factor in the timing of Tillerson’s ouster, because Netanyahu “probably gave Trump some grief over Iran talks with the Europeans.” Netanyahu is one of the Iran deal’s most vocal opponents.

Tillerson had spent the past few months working with Congress and negotiating with world leaders over amendments or additions to the Iran nuclear deal that could address Trump’s concerns without requiring the U.S. to leave the agreement. He had even acknowledged publicly that his views on how to approach the JCPOA diverged from Trump’s, raising questions about whether the president actually backed the steps Tillerson took toward reworking parts of the deal.

Fred Fleitz, senior vice president for policy and programs with the Center for Security Policy, said a president shouldn’t have a national security team that tries to prevent him from pursuing one of his top foreign policy priorities.

“It’s one thing to argue these things privately, as secretaries of state should do,” Fleitz said. “But after you’ve given your private advice, it shouldn’t be leaking out to the media that the secretary of state disagrees with the president on such an important issue.”

Fleitz noted H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, has also advocated internally for keeping the Iran deal — a policy position that could ultimately cost him his job in the administration.

“McMaster is on the way out too, I just don’t know when or who will replace him,” Fleitz said. “But the president has certain priorities.”

John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has been rumored as a contender to replace McMaster. Bolton is a fierce critic of the Iran nuclear deal and has laid out a detailed plan for withdrawing from the JCPOA, which could make him an attractive candidate to a president who campaigned against the deal as a symbol of the Obama administration’s incompetency.

Trump described the JCPOA as an “embarrassment to the United States” during his speech in September to the United Nations, a line that many interpreted as a sign the agreement would soon come to an end.

“The Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into,” Trump said at the time.

The president declined to certify Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA in October using the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, also known as the Corker-Cardin law. Lawmakers passed Corker-Cardin in 2015 to ensure Congress could provide oversight of the deal amid criticism that the Obama administration had circumvented Capitol Hill in pursuit of the agreement.

Trump’s decision to decertify left the JCPOA in limbo as he entreated Congress to consider reviving sanctions against Iran or amending Corker-Cardin to broaden the scope of what would constitute a violation of the nuclear deal.

Critics of the agreement have argued the JCPOA does not account for non-nuclear offenses from Tehran, such as Iran’s support for groups — including the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah — that destabilize the region or its repeated ballistic missile tests. Those kinds of provocations draw condemnation from the U.S., but don’t technically violate the nuclear deal.

Opponents of the agreement have also said so-called “sunset provisions,” or limits on Iran’s centrifuges and uranium enrichment that expire after a fixed time frame, put Tehran on a glide path to nuclearization.

Administration officials who agree with Trump’s views on Iran, including UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, have said U.S. policy toward Iran focuses too heavily on the JCPOA, rather than the wider and more complicated equation of Iran’s regional aggression.

Supporters of the deal, however, have argued the JCPOA is working because inspections of Iran’s nuclear production sites have yielded no evidence to suggest Iranians have breached the deal. Some say Trump would risk demonstrating to North Korea that the U.S. cannot be trusted in negotiations over denuclearization if he were to tear up a nuclear agreement with another country.

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