From The American Conservative:
Following last week’s humiliating rebuke of the US at the Security Council, Mike Pompeo is going to the United Nations in a transparent, bad-faith effort to trigger the so-called “snapback” provision to reimpose U.N. sanctions on Iran. Only JCPOA participants can invoke this provision, and the US publicly ended its participation more than two years ago:
But diplomats in Europe, China and Russia – the other powers that brokered the deal during the Obama administration – have questioned the legality of the demand because the United States is no longer part of the nuclear agreement.
The administration wants to have things both ways. It wants to be able to quit the JCPOA, wage economic war on Iran in violation of our previous commitments, and then it expects to able to use the deal’s own provisions to destroy the deal. When they first started floating this idea earlier this year, I said that it wouldn’t receive any support from the other parties to the deal, and it won’t. The US obviously forfeited any right to act as a participant in the JCPOA when it reneged on that agreement. Everyone understands this, and the rest of the Security Council will not put up with this duplicity. The US doesn’t even have the legal standing to bring this up at the Council, and I expect that is what the other members will say to Pompeo today.
The Trump administration maintains that it can use the “snapback” provision because it is a permanent member of the Security Council, and UNSCR 2231 listed the P5+1 among the participants, but this is clearly a case of trying to use the letter of the law to defeat the spirit of the law. When that resolution was written, it was taken for granted that the P5+1 would all remain parties to the deal. As soon as the US left the deal, that was no longer the case.
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