Three Democratic senators forcefully rejected recent charges by top Iranian officials that the United States would be violating the nuclear deal if it extended the Iran Sanctions Act (ISA), The Weekly Standard reported Tuesday.
The House of Representatives passed the ISA’s renewal in a 419-1 vote earlier this month. The bill needs to pass the Senate and be signed into law by the president before the end of the year to extend it for ten years.
Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have claimed that renewing the ISA would violate the nuclear deal that it signed with the United States and other global powers last year. The deal lifted some sanctions and prevents new nuclear-related sanctions from being implemented, but the language is disputed when it comes to pre-existing sanctions related to Iran’s support for terrorism, which the ISA covers.
“If these sanctions are extended, it will surely constitute a violation of the [deal] and [the U.S.] should know that the Islamic Republic will definitely react to it,” Khamenei said last week.
“Iran is making this up. These problems don’t exist,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D – Md.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told The Weekly Standard. “Congress, by extending ISA, is not taking any new steps against Iran at all.” Rather, Cardin said, the bill makes it possible for Congress to “snapback” suspended sanctions if Iran is found to be in violation of the deal.
“The Iranians need to know that there are consequences for their actions. Hopefully, they will change their course of actions,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D – N.J.) told the magazine. “In the absence of that, the United States should not ultimately let them be the veto over what we decide is the appropriate foreign policy.”
Cardin and Menendez both opposed the nuclear deal when the terms were revealed last year. But a supporter of the deal, Sen. Chris Coons (D – Del.), also rejected Iran’s charges. “I am convinced that Congress is well within its rights to extend the Iran Sanctions Act,” he told The Weekly Standard. “Iran has always resisted non-nuclear sanctions and tried to tie them into the nuclear deal. That’s not correct….I think it’s completely appropriate that we continue the sanctions architecture.”
Ironically, Iran’s complaints about alleged American violations of the deal came shortly after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, announced that Iran had violated the deal’s limits on its stockpiles of heavy water, an element used in the production of nuclear weapons, for the second time since the deal was implemented in January.
Experts at the Institute for Science and International Security argued recently that Iran may be in violation of other elements of the deal, particularly its limits on its stockpile of low-enriched uranium and its use of advanced centrifuges, and that the IAEA’s reporting requirements were too loose to properly monitor Iran’s nuclear program. Fifteen Democratic senators who supported the nuclear deal stated in July that they were concerned with whether the IAEA’s reporting requirements were specific enough to be effective.
“Providing additional situational awareness of Iran’s nuclear program is vital for the long-term health of this agreement,” the senators, led by Sen. Gary Peters (D – Mich.), wrote in a letter to President Barack Obama. “We urge [the Obama] administration to ensure that the IAEA releases all relevant technical information so that we may continue to make our own judgments about the status of Iran’s nuclear program.”
Benham Ben Taleblu, a senior analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argued late last week that Iran’s claims that America is the one violating the nuclear deal are part of a broader strategy to obtain greater sanctions relief.
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