BICOM

US President Donald Trump will announce today whether or not he will reinstate US nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, potentially jeopardising the future of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal.

“I will be announcing my decision on the Iran Deal tomorrow from the White House at 2:00pm [7pm UK time],” the President tweeted yesterday afternoon.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson was in Washington and held talks with Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo yesterday. He told Fox and Friends on Fox News that the deal is “working” at its core, and the US and its allies should work to “fix the rest”.

Although he said Trump was “right to see the flaws in the deal,” without the accord, “Plan B does not seem, to me, to be particularly well developed at this stage”. Johnson added that “there doesn’t seem to me at the moment to be a viable military solution”.

He also wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in which he argued that “only Iran would gain” from abandoning nuclear restrictions that “handcuff” the Islamic Republic.

In the past two weeks, French President Emanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have visited the US to try to address Trump’s concerns over Iran’s ballistic missile programme, the terms under which international inspectors visit suspected Iranian nuclear sites, and “sunset” clauses under which some terms of the deal expire.

The UK’s Ambassador to the US, Sir Kim Darroch, described the nuclear agreement as “a good deal” but efforts are ongoing to “find some language, produce some action that meets the president’s concerns”.

A White House official said it was possible Trump would end up with a decision that “is not a full pullout,” but was unable to describe what that might look like.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said yesterday that his country could remain in the accord even if the US withdraws. “If we can get what we want from a deal without America, then Iran will continue to remain committed to the deal. What Iran wants is our interests to be guaranteed by its non-American signatories,” he told state television.