As a wordsmith and Constitutionalist, I paid very close attention to how other media outlets referred to President Trump’s actions on limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The most common term was the “Iran Nuclear Deal”. The second-most-popular was “agreement”. Several referred to it as a “plan”. There were a few “accords” and even a couple of “frameworks”. To avoid being repetitive, most articles mixed and matched those terms throughout.
But some news sites–and a good deal of opinion pages–will be issuing corrections today as they referred to it as a “treaty”. The Iran Nuclear Deal is not a treaty. President Obama never brought the agreement to the US Senate for ratification as is required by the Constitution. Instead, President Obama acted unilaterally, essentially making nothing more than a “pinky promise” and lifting sanctions on Iran that had been approved by Congressional action. Negotiators went into the bargaining room with no intent of ever drafting a “treaty” that would hold the full faith and weight of the United States.
Had President Obama gone the Constitutional route and negotiated a treaty approved by the Senate, yesterday’s action by President Trump would have been far more difficult. Pulling out of a treaty also would have also required Senate approval–including public hearings by the Foreign Relations Committee. There would have been public discussion of the merits of the treaty, whether Iran was really in compliance–or just doing a good job of hiding weapons development from hapless UN inspectors–and if the treaty was actually providing some stability to the Middle East. It would have been an open and transparent process. Instead, President Obama opened the door to allow President Trump to just talk with his hard-line advisors behind closed doors in the White House–using who knows what intelligence information (if any was used at all)–and conducting the entire withdrawal process in his head.
A lot of talking heads claimed that the US is “damaging its credibility around the world” by backing out of the Iran Nuclear Deal and talking about dropping out of the Paris Climate Accord. But what they fail to grasp is that the United States Government never approved of either deal through the process spelled out in our Constitution. Those were merely one guy in the White House saying that he was going to do something–followed by another guy in the White House saying he is not going to do the same things.
Maybe if those we elect to represent us would follow the rules, we wouldn’t have this flip-flopping.
