‘Congress, Trump not seeing eye-to-eye on Iran nuclear deal’
Tue Oct 10, 2017
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has once again confirmed that Iran is sticking with the terms of its nuclear deal with the P5+1 group that has recently become the subject of much controversy on the world stage. IAEA Chief Yukiya Amano has told a nuclear conference in the Italian capital Rome that Iran is following through on its commitments under the accord. Speculation has been going around over the past few weeks that US President Donald Trump is planning to “decertify” Iran’s compliance with the deal this week, setting in motion a process in Congress to decide whether to restore the sanctions that the US has agreed to waive.
Talking to Press TV, Roozbeh Aliabadi, the managing partner of Global Growth Advisors, dismissed Trump’s rhetoric as political maneuvering, insisting that any measure against Iran’s nuclear deal needed an endorsement by Congress, which according to him, seemed impossible under the current circumstances in light of the wide gap that existed between the president and the majority of senators over the deal.
In 2015, the US Congress passed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, which gives Congress the right to review any agreement reached in the P5+1 talks with Iran. The White House is required to certify the nuclear deal every 90 days and Congress has the option of restoring the sanctions on Iran in case certification is not provided.
Aliabadi predicted that President Trump will likely refuse to certify the Iran deal, adding however that the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Corker and the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee at the House Ed Royce will prevent the reimposition of sanctions against Iran.
Bob Corker, who was a firm supporter of Trump during last year’s presidential election campaign, gradually grew disappointed with the president’s policies and eventually turned against him, with the enmity between the two emerging in the form of a full-fledged Twitter war in recent days.
Corker tweeted on Sunday that the White House had become an “adult day care center” and told The New York Times that he worried President Trump might set off “World War III.”
The comments came after the Republican president went on a Twitter rampage against Corker, lambasting him for supporting Iran’s nuclear deal at the Senate.
“What we are seeing right now is a lot of noise. No signals. And President Trump is trying to fulfill his campaign promise. But at the same time, this is coming at the price of credibility of signing a multilateral deal by the United States. So, it will come back and haunt him and it will come back and haunt the US foreign policy in much deeper and significant manner in the years to come,” Aliabadi concluded.
In January 2016, Iran and the P5+1 countries — namely the US, Russia, China, France, Britain, and Germany —started implementing the deal, under which Iran undertook to apply certain limits to its nuclear program in exchange for the termination of all nuclear-related sanctions.(Press TV)
