Al Arabiya News, 15 November 2016 – US President-elect Donald Trump could reimpose sanctions on Iran, Republican Senator Tom Cotton said in a Fox News interview this week.
Cotton said that he agreed with Trump that the deal was “the stupidest deal he’s ever seen.”
“Iran has violated that deal already,” said Cotton. “The Obama administration just acknowledged last week that there’s another violation of it.”
“The Congress working with president-elect Trump can reimpose sanctions on Iran and we can work with our allies to reimpose those sanctions. We have a lot of leverage; we the world’s largest economy by far.”
“we can impose those sanctions when there are violations of the nuclear deal and the violations of other obligations, like not building ballistic missiles which can reach US troops and our allies, and not sponsoring terrorism that’s been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans and not destabilizing the entire region,” Cotton said.
Previously, Republican leaders of the US House of Representatives said they plan a vote as soon as mid-November on a 10-year reauthorization of the Iran Sanctions Act.
The Iran Sanctions Act, or ISA, which expires on Dec. 31, allows trade, energy, defense and banking industry sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program and ballistic missile tests.
Its fate is one of the major pieces of unfinished business facing lawmakers when they return to Washington for the first time after the Nov. 8 elections.
US Representative Ed Royce, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is expected to introduce the 10-year renewal as soon as Congress gets back, aides said.
Congressional aides said a “clean” renewal, meaning unchanged from the current legislation, was likely to pass the House. Its fate in the Senate was much less certain, and a White House spokesman would not say whether President Barack Obama would sign it into law.
Republicans control majorities in both the House and Senate, and every Republican in Congress opposed the international nuclear deal announced in July 2015, in which Iran agreed to curtail its nuclear program in exchange for relief from crippling economic sanctions.
Republicans have since tried repeatedly to pass legislation to clamp down on Iran, accusing Obama of being so eager to burnish his foreign policy legacy that he conceded too much to Tehran in the nuclear talks.
Some Senate Republicans want more than a clean renewal of the ISA. They are trying to build support for legislation that would renew it but also do more to punish individual Iranians and businesses over the country’s ballistic missile tests and what they see as its support for terrorism.
(with Reuters)
