NSC Spokesperson Says U.S. Has “No Intention” of Using U.N. Security Council to Legalize Non-Legal Agreement With Iran

I was just about to post on this presser, where State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki refused to answer whether the United States would bless any nonbinding agreement with Iran in a UN Security Council Resolution, a possibility I analyzed this morning.  And then I read this BuzzFeed news story by Hayes Brown, which cites my post, and in which Bernadette Meehan of the U.S. National Security Council rules out using the UN Security Council in this way:

The U.S. has “no intention” of using the United Nations to lock into place any potential deal with Iran over its nuclear program, a senior U.S. official said on Thursday. The United States will not be “converting U.S. political commitments under a deal with Iran into legally binding obligations through a UN Security Council resolution,” Bernadette Meehan, spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council, said in a statement emailed to BuzzFeed News. “Past UNSC resolutions on Iran have called for a negotiated settlement of the Iran nuclear issue, and accordingly we would fully expect the UNSC to ‘endorse’ any deal with Iran and encourage its full implementation so as to resolve international concerns about Iran’s nuclear program,” Meehan continued. “But any such resolution would not change the nature of our commitments under such a deal, which would be wholly contained in the text of that deal.” … Meehan … dismissed the idea of using the U.N. to bypass Congress. “Indeed, Congress will have to vote to lift sanctions at some point during the duration of the deal,” she wrote to BuzzFeed News. Meehan in particular noted that “any new resolution would not take U.S. commitments under the deal – particularly with respect to sanctions relief – and make them legally binding. We have been and will continue to be extremely careful to avoid any such provisions in future UNSCRs.”

Kind of an odd way to get out this important piece of news, but congratulations to Hayes Brown for extracting it