The Trump administration told Congress for a second time Monday that Iran is complying with the nuclear deal and can keep enjoying sanctions relief, even as it insisted Tehran would face consequences for breaching "the spirit" of the deal.
President Donald Trump, who lambasted the 2015 pact as a candidate, gave himself more time to decide whether to scuttle it or let it stand. Instead, senior Trump administration officials sought to emphasize their deep concerns about Iran's non-nuclear behavior and vowed that those transgressions won't go unpunished.
In a shift from Trump's previous threat to "rip up" the deal, officials said the administration was working with U.S. allies to try to fix the deal's flaws, including the expiration of some nuclear restrictions after a decade or more. The officials also said the U.S. would slap Tehran with new sanctions penalizing it for developing ballistic missiles and other activity.
Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and "the entire administration judge that Iran is unquestionably in default of the spirit" of the agreement, one official said. That assessment carries no legal force, while Trump's certification that Iran is technically complying clears the way for sanctions to remain lifted.
The late-night announcement capped a day of frenzied, last-minute decision-making by the president, exposing deep and lingering divisions within his administration about how to deal with a top national security issue.
Under the deal struck by Obama and other world leaders, Iran agreed to roll back its nuclear program — long suspected of being aimed at developing atomic weapons — in return for billions of dollars in sanctions relief. The deal does not address global concerns about Iran's non-nuclear activities, but also doesn't prevent the U.S. and others from punishing Iran for those activities. Iran remains on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism for its support of anti-Israel groups.
Scuttling the deal would put further distance between Trump and foreign leaders who are already upset over his move to withdraw from the Paris global climate change accord. Other powers that brokered the nuclear deal along with the U.S. have said there's no appetite for renegotiating it.
Meanwhile, a senior commander in Iran's Revolutionary Guards warned the United States on Monday that if it designated the group a terrorist organization and applied new sanctions its action could be perilous for U.S. forces in the region.
U.S. officials said earlier this year that President Donald Trump's administration was considering a proposal that could lead to potentially categorizing the powerful Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. In Mid-June the U.S. Senate voted for new sanctions on Iran over its ballistic missile program and other activities not related to the international nuclear agreement reached with the United States and other world powers in 2015.