European governments fear a concerted effort to persuade Donald Trump to continue to certify the Iran nuclear deal may have failed and are now looking for other ways to try to salvage the two year-old agreement, the Guardian reported on Wednesday.

European lobbying efforts are now focused on Congress which will have two months to decide – in the absence of Trump’s endorsement of the 2015 deal – whether to reimpose nuclear-related sanctions.

Fresh sanctions could in turn trigger Iranian withdrawal and a ramping up of its now mostly latent nuclear programme, taking the Middle East back to the brink of another major conflict.

When Trump threatened to withhold certification by a congressional deadline of 15 October, the UN general assembly in mid-September was seen by the European signatories of the agreement – the UK, France and Germany – as the last best chance to convince Trump of the dangers of destroying it.

But according to the accounts of several diplomats involved, the effort got nowhere.

Angela Merkel, in the final stages of an election campaign, could not attend, so it was left to Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron to use their meetings with the US president in New York to make a personal plea to keep the deal alive.

The French president made no headway. To his consternation, Trump kept repeating that under the deal, the Iranians would have a nuclear bomb in five years, and nothing Macron could say would persuade him otherwise.

May’s session with the US president two days later was equally fruitless. She used half the 50-minute meeting trying to engage Trump on the merits of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), but he grew testy in response. He said he had decided on what to do, but flatly refused to tell her what that was. And he shrugged off her arguments, telling her “You make your decisions; I’ll make mine”. A British diplomat described it later as a “robust” conversation.

Source: MENA