President Trump’s refusal to certify that Iran is complying with its nuclear deal came after he “threw a fit,” according to a source of the Washington Post. The president was, the Post reported, “incensed by the arguments of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, and others that the landmark 2015 deal, while flawed, offered stability and other benefits.” That left Mr. Trump, the Post’s source said, “furious. Really furious.”
Well, why shouldn’t Mr. Trump have been furious? The Post seems to suggest that he is somehow unstable, a line that’s being hawked by the New York Times. By our lights he was right to blow his celebrated stack. He had run for president, after all, on a bright line promise to exit the Iran deal. The deal itself was entered into by President Obama and Secretary Kerry with the full knowledge that both houses of Congress were against it.
Not only that, they plunged ahead in the face of warnings by, in Israel, our closest ally in the Middle East. Nor was it just Israel’s right-of-center government led by Prime Minister Netanyahu. It was also the left-of-center opposition, the Zionist Union, which warned against the appeasement. Yet someone in the Obama administration — our own theory is that it was the president, though Secretary Kerry denied that — set down Israel’s leader as “chickenshit.”
Plus, too, Messrs. Obama and Kerry took the aforementioned articles of appeasement and brought them to New York City, where they asked the United Nations Security Council to approve the deal. They voted in the Security Council against what they knew to be the wishes of our own United States Congress. So where did Secretaries Tillerson and Mattis come off trying to maneuver Mr. Trump into certifying a deal he’d specifically opposed in his campaign?
In announcing his decision, Mr. Trump went back to the 1979 revolution and marked that the rule of the ayatollahs was imposed on Iran against its will (and reimposed in 2009 as Islamist thugs crushed a democratic spring while an American president stayed mute and did nothing). Mr. Trump also marked Iran’s orchestration of the bombings of our embassy and our Marine barracks at Beirut in 1983 and the bombing of American military housing in Saudi Arabia.
Good for him. If he blew his stack at Messrs. Tillerson and Mattis, he nonetheless threaded a careful route forward. The most important feature of it is that he has dialed the Congress back into the process. It is the custodian most of the foreign policy powers granted to the government, including the centerpiece power to regulate Commerce with foreign nations. It’s no small thing for the president to return this question to the body that should have had a chance to ratify. Let us hope the Congress can rise to the task.
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