Two bipartisan bills introduced in Congress last week aim to remedy the United States’ failure to deter Iran’s aggression since the 2015 nuclear deal, Tzvi Kahn, a senior Iran analyst for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote Wednesday in a policy brief.
The Senate bill, introduced by Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R – Tenn.) and Sen. Bob Menendez (D – N.J.), and co-sponsored by six Republican and six Democratic senators, requires the president to impose sanctions on any individual who helps advance Iran’s ballistic missile program or transfers arms to Iran. It would likewise target anyone who financed such transactions.
The legislation would also invoke the authority of Executive Order 13224, which allows the president to freeze the assets of individuals or groups who carry out terror attacks or are likely to do so, in order to impose sanctions on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The Senate bill would additionally require the executive branch to submit a plan for countering Iran’s conventional and asymmetric threats, clarify differences between American and European sanctions lists, explain efforts to free U.S. hostages in Iran, and document developments in Iran’s ballistic missile program.
Kahn described the bill in the House of Representatives as going further than the Senate bill in requiring the president to issue a report on “the Iranian ballistic missile program’s domestic and global supply chain.”
Main sponsors of the House bill are Reps. Ed Royce (R – Calif.), Eliot Engel (D – N.Y.), Kevin McCarthy (R – Calif.), and Steny Hoyer (D – Md.). The legislation specifically targets “individuals or entities that defy UNSCR 2231’s arms embargo and ballistic missile prohibition.” UNSCR 2231 codified the 2015 nuclear pact between Iran and world powers.
Kahn noted that even though former President Barack Obama promised to increase necessary non-nuclear sanctions on Iran, his administration “remained largely passive in practice, fearing that any meaningful new penalties would spur the regime to abandon the agreement.”
Despite Iranian threats to withdraw from the agreement on account of new sanctions, it isn’t a likely maneuver because “such a move would deprive the country of billions in international sanctions relief at a time when its economy, though improved since the agreement, remains fragile.” Kahn credited the introduced legislation as “a belated attempt to restore U.S. deterrence and call Tehran’s bluff.”
In a move considered to be largely symbolic, Iran announced earlier this week that it would sanction 15 American companies–a retaliation for sanctions imposed by the Trump administration in February on entities that support Iran’s ballistic missile program. None of the sanctioned U.S. companies currently operate in Iran.
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