During the 2016 presidential campaign I had pledged to make both decisions on my first day in office. And within the Trump administration, both proved hotly contested.
Both State and Defense were strongly opposed to moving our embassy in Israel. For years, Democratic and Republican presidents had promised to move our embassy to Jerusalem, and presidents of both parties had repeatedly broken that promise. For other countries, America puts our embassy in the capital city. But for Israel, our embassy was in Tel Aviv, because the Palestinians dispute Israel’s right to have Jerusalem as their capital. For that reason, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis both argued that moving our embassy would enrage the enemies of Israel and impede the Middle East peace process.
I strongly disagreed. I urged President Trump that strength and clarity were the only ways to make progress in the Middle East. And if we moved the embassy to Jerusalem, our Arab allies—in Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia—even though they would feel obliged politically to publicly denounce the decision, would be secretly overjoyed. I argued those allies would reason that any president with the courage and backbone to stand up to the torrent of criticism from the world and the New York Times on the issue of Jerusalem, would maybe, just maybe, have the courage also to withdraw from the Obama Iran nuclear deal, which they rightly viewed as profoundly dangerous to their security and to ours.
President Trump agreed with my advice and overruled his own State Department and Defense Department. He courageously did what prior presidents had feared to do: he moved the U.S. embassy in Israel, and I was there in Jerusalem the day our embassy opened, on the seventieth anniversary of the creation of the modern state of Israel. It was a powerful, moving experience. At the opening, I visited with multiple Americans and Israelis moved to tears, including one woman who was a Holocaust survivor and simply said, “I never thought I would live to see it happen.”
I do not believe it was a coincidence that within one week of opening our embassy in Jerusalem we also announced that we were withdrawing from the Obama Iran deal.
As with the embassy, both State and Defense fought hard to prevent it from happening. Tillerson and Mattis both vigorously defended the deal and pressed Trump hard to stay bound by it. Repeatedly, I made the case directly to President Trump that we should pull out of the deal, that sending billions to a religious zealot who wants to murder us was profoundly dangerous.
And, as with the embassy, Trump ended up agreeing with me and overruling both State and Defense. I believe that pulling out of the Obama Iran deal was the single most significant national security decision made by President Trump.
That decision also highlights the ongoing threat to national sovereignty we see from modern-day Democrats and from transnational institutions. In support of the deal, Secretary Mattis, both publicly and privately, kept saying “a deal is a deal” and “when America gives her word, we have to live up to it.” That was wrong.
Put simply, in the Iran deal, the United States did not give its word. There are two ways, and two ways only, that binding law is made under our Constitution: either a statute is passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by the president, or a treaty is signed by the president and ratified by two-thirds of the Senate. Those are the only two ways the United States can make binding commitments.
President Obama deliberately circumvented the constitutional process. He knew he didn’t have the votes to have Congress pass the Iran deal by statute, nor did he have the votes for the Senate to ratify it as a treaty. So he decided to ignore both.
Instead, Obama signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as an international agreement between Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China. It was announced not from Washington, but in Vienna on July 14, 2015.
And he didn’t take it to the elected branches in Congress to be adopted or ratified; instead, he took it to the United Nations Security Council.
Rather than negotiating a treaty that could earn the support of two-thirds of the Senate—admittedly no easy task—the Obama administration chose to “implement” the nuclear deal by having Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power cast a UN Security Council vote in favor of UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which was the UN’s way of ratifying JCPOA.
But, as Medellín made clear, the United Nations cannot make binding law in the United States.
Not only was Obama’s catastrophic deal not ratified by the U.S. Senate, it was actively opposed by the Senate. A bipartisan majority of the Senate (58–42) voted against the JCPOA and made unequivocally clear that we believed it to be disastrous foreign policy.
When it comes to presidential power, the seminal case laying out the parameters and limits of the president’s authority is the steel seizure case (Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer), in which the Supreme Court struck down Harry S Truman’s attempted seizure of steel plants during the Korean War. The central analysis was in Justice Robert Jackson’s concurring opinion, which explained that “when the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb, for then he can rely only upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter.”
Justice Jackson is universally considered one of the most brilliant justices ever to have served. He was a self-taught lawyer who never went to law school, and he became solicitor general and attorney general for Franklin Delano Roosevelt before FDR put him on the Court. After World War II, Jackson took a leave of
