Let’s say that ISIS successfully infuses the Washington DC water supply with stupid pills, and Congress votes down US participation in the implementation of the nuclear agreement with Iran (with an overridden veto).
Now, of course, the agreement is still going to go forward; Iran will still be getting back into global trade, selling their oil, buying needed goods.
Presumably, the inspections regimes agreed to in the deal will be implemented.
Would the US be able to participate in such an inspections regime? My intuition is that we wouldn’t, but I’m not able to find confirmation of that. Anybody know?
Would the sanctions be lifted and the agreement go forward if Congress rejects it?
I thought the relief on sanctions was dependent on inspections, and the agreement was necessary for this kind of progress.
Is it possible for the President to relieve sanctions without the ratification of this agreement? (Obviously, the European and Asian partners can do this on their own.)
It’s my understanding that the agreement does not require ratification (since it’s an international agreement, rather than a treaty), and that all the President needs to lift sanctions under the terms of the agreement is to not have his veto overridden on a resolution forbidding him to do so.
Since the US was only one of the major powers at the table they can’t unilaterally nullify the entire agreement. If the US backs, Iran can still go ahead and allow the IAEA to inspect while reducing centrifuge numbers and enriched uranium stockpiles like they agreed. The other major powers can still end their embargoes. Simply throwing out the agreement at this point doesn’t mean things go back to where they were before.
These last two conclusions are speculative. There is nothing in the agreement that requires the sanctions relief to continue if the U.S. ends up not dropping its sanctions. Furthermore, it is not clear whether Iran would want to submit to this agreement if the U.S. continues its sanctions. We could make guesses until the cows come home about what Iran would want to do, but these are very shaky presumptions.
Here’s generally how things would work under the agreement: the UN is lifting its sanctions with the expectation that other countries are going to work in good faith to lift their own national sanctions. More or less concurrently, Iran is going to allow inspections of nuclear sites.
If any party to the deal believes that another party has not lived up to its commitments (e.g., the U.S. keeps its sanctions in place, Iran stops the inspections, or whatever) then the agreement details a complex dispute resolution process.
The process involves discussion among the parties, possibly calling in neutral third parties as more or less mediators, and ultimately referring the dispute to the U.N. Security Council. In the end, the dispute resolution process is actually quite biased toward the U.N. restarting sanctions on Iran.
What is absolutely unknowable at this point is how Iran, Russia, China, or any other country would react to the Congress blocking Obama’s promise to lift sanctions on Iran. There are so many ways things could play out, but I would hazard to say that Iran probably would not want to give the U.S. a free pass at keeping its sanctions in place while continuing to allow inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities. Even if everyone else in the world lifted their sanctions, I suspect that Iran would react strongly against the perception that the U.S. gets to have its cake and eat it too. But again, this is conjecture.
Under the agreement, the inspections are to be carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The IAEA is responsible for the vast majority of nuclear compliance inspections around the world, with the one major exception being U.S.-Russian inspections that are agreed to under bilateral arms control treaties that only impact those two countries.