onald Trump’s declaration earlier this month that he intends to withdraw from the Iran nuclear accord—the “worst deal ever,” as he loves to say—unless lawmakers on Capitol Hill made it broader and tougher, was “the equivalent of pulling the pin out of the grenade and handing it to Congress,” one Democratic congressional aide told me. Now Congress has 90 days—when the president has to recertify the deal—to put the pin back in. But, as in an action movie, it’s a task that currently looks impossible. The legislation that the Senate devises will have to garner 60 votes and also satisfy the Trump administration, which wants lawmakers to strengthen restrictions on the regime’s behavior. If Congress fails to deliver, Trump will unravel his predecessor’s signature foreign policy achievement. Meanwhile, the Iranians have said that any move by the Trump administration to unilaterally change the terms of the agreement would be viewed as a breach, potentially starting their race for a bomb.
Without one party or another adjusting their stance, it gets down to the same game of chicken: who’s going to blink? The Trump administration theory seems to be that if everything blows up, Congress—maybe even the Democrats in Congress—get the blame for being soft on Iran. “The rhetoric is intellectually dishonest,” says a highly placed source at the State Department. “I understand the political, domestic lens with which people look at this, but the facts are that it doesn’t need to be a Congressional issue . . . [The White House is] just punting it because there were no good options for what they wanted to do . . . This way, they could just say, ‘we’re doing it,’ and have a scapegoat lined up.
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