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UPDATE II: "Should President Trump announce later this week that he will 'decertify' the Iran deal he has derided as a historic 'embarrassment' to the United States, he in effect would be passing along to Congress responsibility for the fate of the international nuclear accord.
In so doing, Trump would be taking a page out of his own playbook: Make a showy declaration of transformational change that excites his political base, which is hungry to disrupt the status quo, even if the substance of the move is incremental or indeterminate.
From the Paris climate accord to the domestic opioid epidemic, from the U.S.-Mexico border wall to various trade agreements, Trump’s actions have not fully lived up to his rhetoric.
The president’s flashy pronouncements have masked the more nuanced reality of governing, as actions can take months or even years to be implemented or still require decisions by other stakeholders, such as Congress.
For Trump, the result is politically advantageous. He gets credit from his base for bold action — Withdraws from the Paris climate accord! Declares opioids a national emergency! — while the policies themselves end up being slow-walked or punted, in part because of complexities in the system, buying the administration time and preserving outs should the president be persuaded to change course.
'This is not a ‘buck stops here’ president,' said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. 'His language is Trumanesque — unflinching and 'here’s what I’m going to do.' But it’s just rhetoric. Once he tries to implement it as policy, he backs off . . . He goes forward in a bully-boy fashion, but he gets his comeuppance.' . .
Lanhee Chen, a Republican policy expert and fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said Trump has hit 'a sweet spot' between communicating sweeping changes while actually taking more incremental policy steps that preserve options.
'Most Americans are not particularly interested in the details and care to a certain degree, and Trump is figuring out what that degree is,' Chen said. 'It is a careful triangulation, but it’s one that politically is going to be advantageous for him in the long run'”
Chen pointed to Trump’s handling of the nuclear threat posed by North Korea and its leader Kim Jong Un as another example of the gulf between the president’s language and his administration’s actions.
'Behind the scenes there’s a whole different set of activities going on,' Chen said. 'In public he’s saying don’t talk to ‘Rocket Man,’ that’s crazy. But there clearly is an effort in the administration to open a dialogue.'
The pattern is evident on other issues as well. . .
To Trump’s supporters, Brinkley posited, it may not matter whether Congress reimposes sanctions derailing the Iran deal. The word they will hear the president utter is 'decertify.'
'All his base knows is that he said Obama made the worst deal in history on Iran,' Brinkley said. 'Fewer people follow the minutiae of that deal. So he gets known to be the guy who dislikes Obama’s deal, even though the deal may stick.'
Read the Washington Post, Trump’s bold declarations don’t always lead to the results he promises.
UPDATE: "Trump has repeatedly criticized the 2015 agreement that limited Tehran’s nuclear activities, once dubbing it 'the worst deal ever.' . .
Trump could have unilaterally killed the deal by refusing to issue the waivers that kept the old sanctions from being imposed. Instead, he punted the decision to Congress. The Post also reports that he may hold off on recommending that sanctions be reinstated. . .
By handing off any real decision to Congress, he can avoid having to make a hard decision himself. And by picking a fight with Corker, he has a scapegoat if his supporters grow frustrated with a lack of action in Congress. It seems plausible that Trump’s allies are simply being prepared for another legislative failure."
Read the Washington Post, Trump’s latest feud is bad news for his Iran plans.
"Various cultures have different phrases for expressing the idea of having it both ways at once. 'To take a swim and not get wet' is an Albanian proverb. Poles talk about 'having the cookie and eating it.' Iranians want 'both God and the sugar dates.'
The Trump administration has been weighing a contemporary geopolitical version of this straddle. Hard-liners have been urging the president to decertify the Iran nuclear agreement but insist that he wants to strengthen the deal, not break it. The idea is enticing politically, certainly, but it has as much chance of working as (forgive me) 'washing your fur but not getting wet,' as a German aphorism puts it.
[NOTE: The Donald likes to say it is the "dumbest", "weakest", "most dangerous" "worst deal ever negotiated".]
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a leading critic of the Iran deal, described this ambiguous diplomatic approach this week at the Council on Foreign Relations. 'I don’t propose leaving the deal yet. I propose taking the steps necessary to obtain leverage to get a better deal.' Cotton wants decertification, but no sanctions, so that the United States can . . . what? Apparently, the idea is that U.S. pressure will convince Iran to make unilateral concessions that it refused during the 13 years the deal was being negotiated.
Magical thinking is always appealing in foreign policy, but it usually produces nothing more than fairy dust. In this case, there is no evidence that putting the agreement in limbo will bring any security benefits for the United States or Israel. It will introduce uncertainty where the United States and its allies should most demand clarity — in insisting on compliance by all sides with an agreement that caps Iran’s centrifuges and stockpiles of enriched material for at least another decade.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, hardly a dove on Iran, bluntly told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that the nuclear deal was 'something that the president should consider staying with.' When pressed by Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) on whether he thought the pact was in the United States’ national-security interest, Mattis paused and answered: 'Yes, Senator, I do.'
Officials speak truth to power at their own risk in President Trump’s Washington. So Mattis’s argument for sustaining what the president has called 'one of the dumbest [and] most dangerous' deals was important, though the outcome of the debate still isn’t clear. It’s probably because of Mattis’s military advice, however, that Trump has dropped his campaign talk of simply tearing up the agreement."
Read the Washington Post, The nuclear issue isn’t the real Iranian challenge.
Read also Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Iran Edition.
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