First-rate journalism, a fractious array of players, and one of the most vexing existential questions of our time

Stephen Hayes and Michael Warren of The Weekly Standard have an exhaustively detailed account of how and why the JCPOA has been recertified twice so far during the Trump administration and what might be done to pursue a different course this month. They clearly have some great sources. They've meticulously compiled a time line - with points along it situated in terms of exact times of day - of the meetings, phone calls and press conferences that shaped policy toward the "deal" this past spring and summer.

In July, the president seemed to be ready to make an abrupt reversal:

On the morning of July 17, the day the White House was to transmit its decision to Congress, chief strategist Steve Bannon handed Trump an article with the headline “Trump Must Withdraw from the Iran Nuclear Deal—Now.” The op-ed, written by former United Nations ambassador John Bolton and published the day before in the Hill, made the argument Trump had wanted to make: Iran wasn’t complying with the terms of the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action; the mullahs were advancing their nuclear program, ostensibly with America’s blessing; and the deal certainly wasn’t in the national security interests of the United States.

“President Trump has repeatedly made clear his view that the Iran deal was a diplomatic debacle,” Bolton wrote. “It is not renegotiable, as some argue, because there is no chance that Iran, designated by Ronald Reagan as a state sponsor of terrorism in January 1984, will agree to any serious changes. Why should it? President Obama gave them unimaginably favorable terms, and there is no reason to think China and Russia will do us any favors revising them. Accordingly, withdrawing from the JCPOA as soon as possible should be the highest priority. The administration should stop reviewing and start deciding.”

So right then, Trump changed his mind. The United States would not recertify the Iran deal, as he’d decided on July 12. It was time to move on.

The abrupt reversal began making its way to Trump’s top advisers late that morning, upending nearly a week of White House preparation. Indeed, a rollout of the previous decision had already begun. For nearly eight hours, Trump’s national security team would scramble to make their public relations effort consistent with the president’s new position.

Shortly after 8 a.m., Kelly Sadler, a White House communications official, had sent an email to the White House surrogates’ list—friendly policy wonks and journalists who might be called upon to explain and defend the recertification. The advisory notified the surrogates of a background call, scheduled for noon, with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster to discuss the Iran deal. A similar email notification had gone out to the White House press corps, advising them of a background briefing on Iran at 1 p.m. At 11:28 a.m., about a half-hour before the surrogate call, the White House had sent surrogates its “talking points” on recertification. The guidance made clear that the recertification was grudging but defended the president’s decision. One anticipated question got to the heart of the administration’s awkward position: “If, as you say, the JCPOA is so bad and Iran is in ‘default’ of its ‘spirit,’ then why did the administration—for the second time—recertify Iran’s compliance?”

The White House had provided surrogates an answer:

• As the Secretary of State’s letter makes clear, “the JCPOA is a one-sided agreement that gives Iran every incentive to be in tactical compliance, while repeatedly testing the boundaries of the agreement.”
• This recertification in no way implies that the Trump Administration has changed its mind about the threats from Iran or the shortcomings of the JCPOA.
• We will continue to work with our allies and partners to address those threats and to address the JCPOA’s considerable flaws.

Now these talking points were suddenly irrelevant. They defended a position the president had just abandoned. White House officials scrambled to draft new talking points and a new letter to Congress explaining the president’s decision to decertify the Iran deal.

The surrogate briefing went ahead as scheduled. But at 12:34, the White House press office sent an email to the press corps. “UPDATE: The originally scheduled background briefing will be postponed. We will provide an update when we have a new time.” 

Trump gathered top national security and foreign policy figures for a meeting shortly after lunch and "wondered aloud why his team had not given him a broader set of alternatives."

Then he got Senator Tom Cotton on the phone.

The president asked Cotton to make the case for decertifying the Iran deal. Cotton took five minutes and walked Trump and his team through the case, emphasizing one point in particular: recertifying the deal would be declaring that it was in the national security interest of the United States, something Cotton understood that Trump didn’t believe. Bannon provided the political complement to Cotton’s policy argument: Mr. President, you campaigned on tearing up the deal and now you’re recertifying it—for the second time?

Trump left the phone call, and the meeting, even more convinced that his decision that morning—to decertify—was the right one. When he had reluctantly recertified in April, he had made clear that he didn’t want to do it again and had instructed his team to provide him with a wide range of options. They didn’t. 

Shortly after 2:30, at Sean Spicer's daily press briefing, Spicer kept the focus of his remarks on how Trump considered the JCPOA a bad deal.

In the late afternoon, Trump once again convened a group of national-security officials. We know that at least Tillerson was present at both meetings.

Mattis and Tillerson urged the president to recertify the deal, arguing that an abrupt reversal would frustrate and anger our European allies. McMaster, who wasn’t a defender of the deal on the merits, argued for recertification on the grounds that the National Security Council hadn’t yet completed its comprehensive review of Iran policy.

Trump was irritated but eventually gave in. Shortly before 7 p.m., NSC officials transmitted the letter to Congress notifying it of the president’s decision to recertify the deal. At 7 p.m., the long-delayed press briefing took place, and White House officials relied once again on the talking points that had been discarded at noon, only to be restored late in the day. 

Talk about a whiplash change in official position!

Then came the effort to walk the fine line between appearing to condone the status quo and keep the focus on what a bad actor Iran is. This included a WSJ op-ed by the president and a speech at AEI by Nikki Haley. Also Trump's speech to the UN General Assembly, emphasizing the murerous nature of the Iranian regime.

So now we approach the end of the current 90-day period.

What happens next?

Success on this post-decertification route will require working closely with Congress, negotiating with European allies who have economic interests in Iran and want to expand them, and follow-through and commitment on the part of the administration. John Bolton tells TWS he’s highly skeptical of the news reports of this plan. “What’s been described is an incoherent policy mishmash,” says Bolton, who was candid in his criticism of Tillerson, Mattis, and McMaster’s guidance of the president toward recertification back in July. “If they failed to present the president with the full range of policy options, it is—and I say this wittingly—a dereliction of duty.” If Trump begins to feel this way again, he could upend the difficult path forward for improving the deal.

And that’s the worrisome X-factor for Iran hawks hopeful that this renegotiation-first plan might be pulled off: President Trump himself. He has had no major legislative achievements on Capitol Hill, having alienated nearly every Democrat in Congress and the Republican leadership, too. Administration officials insist that their counterparts in Europe are privately talking about the need to fix the flaws in the JCPOA, but for the European heads of state, Trump remains difficult to partner with.

And while the NSC-led interagency review of Iran policy is complete and offers a path forward, there is concern that Trump and his administration could lose focus on Iran. The Treasury Department, which enforces sanctions, has its attention on North Korea. The State Department is understaffed, run by careerists generally supportive of the existing Iran deal and led by a secretary who has been crosswise with Trump on the issue from the get-go. Asked if he was worried the president might not follow through on the additional work needed after decertification, Tom Cotton responded with one word: “No.”

Cotton is perhaps Trump’s most trusted outside adviser on Iran—it was the subject of their first conversation back in 2015. But the Arkansas Republican’s confidence in the president’s perseverance is not widely shared. As administration officials say about Trump all the time, as was borne out in his quicksilver changes of position on the Iran deal on July 17: With this president, you never know.

It can work for some presidents to have a team of rivals advising him, but it takes a president who has a consistent vision through which he's filtering the advice.

In any event, Hayes and Warren have done a fantastic job of recounting a head-spinning set of events in linear and highly detailed fashion.