Roji Kurd: President Trump will take a leap into the diplomatic unknown Friday if — as expected — he strikes a blow at the 2015 deal that the Obama administration and other global powers reached with Iran to curb its nuclear activities.
Trump has long condemned the nuclear deal as an “embarrassment” to the United States because Tehran has continued with aggressive and meddlesome activities in the Middle East, despite the lifting of sanctions and the return of tens of billions of dollars frozen abroad after the agreement was reached.
A decision by Mr. Trump to “decertify” the multinational accord under U.S. law — effectively declaring that Iranian behavior means the accord is no longer in the U.S. national interests — will throw the issue into the lap of Congress, which could do nothing or could unilaterally reimpose wide-ranging economic sanctions on Iran that analysts say would effectively scuttle the deal.
Iran and key U.S. allies, who still support the accord, have sent conflicting signals on how they will respond. Interested bystanders — most notably North Korea — are watching closely to see how successful the Trump administration will be in trying to wring fresh concessions from Iran.
The president has argued that Tehran has also badly undermined the spirit of the deal by carrying out several ballistic missile tests over the past two years, in violation of a standing U.N. Security Council resolution that bans such tests.