This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 6, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Just days ahead of a deadline to recertify the Iran nuclear deal,

it now appears the president plans to decertify the agreement and sets the

stage for Congress to consider alternatives to the deal like sanctions. A new Cato Institute

paper by Cato's Emma Ashford and John Glaser discusses those alternatives in

detail their conclusion whatever you might think of the Iran deal the alternatives

are worse.

Emma and I spoke earlier about Nicky Haley's sort of pitch, it seemed like to the president

to decertify Iran with respect to compliance with the JCPOA so-called the so-called Iran nuclear deal and

She didn't really laid out many options that existed before them. She just laid out ideas that said, well, look, this Iran is not doing things that aren't a part of the deal.

And that seems like a weird argument to make, but it also is the kind of thing where, you know,

we have certain expectations and the United States

would like to have more options.

So where do we stand right now with the administration and the deal the nuclear deal is a really interesting

one.

The case that's being made by a lot of high-ranking officials, everyone from

Nicki Haley to Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, basically relies on an argument

that Iran is not fulfilling the spirit of the deal even if they're technically within the letter of the

deal or they say well the deal was designed to bring peace to the Middle East and

it hasn't done that but the fact of the matter is that the nuclear

deal is so called because it was very narrowly focused on nuclear issues. The deal basically only concerns Iran's enrichment of nuclear material, what they can do

...