A leading Republican senator says he expects President-elect Donald Trump to enforce the landmark deal with Iran that curtailed its atomic programs in exchange for lifting crippling sanctions.
Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said January 6 that ripping up the deal would create a crisis.
"To tear it up on the front end, in my opinion, is not going to happen," Corker told reporters attending an event hosted by the Christian Science Monitor newspaper.
Trump criticized the deal during the election campaign, and several of his top advisers, including his nominee to head the CIA, are strident critics of engagement with Tehran.
The comments by Corker came after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned the incoming Trump administration against scrapping the Iran nuclear deal, saying it has made the world safer by leaving Tehran technically unable to build a nuclear weapon.
"Nobody can predict what choices [Trump] is going to make," Kerry said on January 5, but the United States had only "very bad choices" of a nuclear-armed Iran or a conflict in the Middle East before the deal was signed last year.
"To be crystal clear, terminating that agreement now would leave us with those same bad choices," Kerry said.
Corker also criticized some of the media leaks about the final White House report on Russia’s alleged computer hacking during the election campaign.
But he said he believed that the report, which he will receive next week, "is going to be very incriminating."
"I believe the Russians have done very nefarious things,” he said.