Only someone with zero focus on the new US political landscape would have been surprised by President Donald Trump’s White House address on Friday that comprised a long-anticipated announcement that he was decertifying Iran’s compliance with the 2015 nuclear arms agreement. Twice since he came into office, Trump recertified the agreement but on the second go he was reportedly upset that his team appeared to be steering him away from one of his chief pledges to voters.

Trump has not ripped up the deal. What he has done, besides not certifying it, is to send the deal to Congress, which has 60 days to decide whether to fix the deal in a manner in which satisfactory changes are made or to reimpose sanctions that in effect will kill the agreement.

So, the deal’s fate is now in the hands of members of Congress who Trump wants to adopt new measures that might keep the deal intact while spelling out parameters by which the US would impose new sanctions should Iran violate its agreements. Trump now wants new provisions that will allow him to kill the accord or keep it.

His warning: if he does not get the changes he wants, he will unilaterally abrogate the agreement, which as president, he has the power to do.

In ticking off the reasons why the deal was flawed, Trump cited that it was too lenient, and that Iran had “committed multiple violations of the agreement”. It was “not living up to spirit of the deal”, he said, but was receiving the benefit of sanctions relief regardless.

On two occasions, he said, Iran had exceeded the limit of 130 tons of heavy water, a source of plutonium suitable for a nuclear bomb. Among the changes he is seeking is the end to the “sunset” clauses in the deal, one of which sees restrictions on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program lifted after 2025, greater access to nuclear sites and the inclusion of Iran’s ballistic missile program which the deal makes hardly mention of.

He said that Iran had “failed to meet our expectations in its operations of advanced centrifuges,” and “intimidated” international inspectors into not using their full authority. He also accused the Obama administration of lifting sanctions on Iran under the terms of the deal at a moment when the Iranian regime was about to collapse. He also ordered US intelligence agencies to mount a new assessment of Iran’s compliance.

He said the revisions must ensure that Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon. As such, in Trump’s view, the nuclear deal has significant flaws that must be addressed if that objective is to be accomplished. He seeks to address these flaws by holding Iran strictly accountable to its commitments.

There are things Trump and his administration could do to try to improve the deal before deciding whether to scrap it altogether. They could slap Iranian companies and organizations with new non-nuclear sanctions allowed under the deal, insisting on making permanent the sunset clauses that only temporarily restrict Iran’s nuclear program and testing, and demanding thorough and complete inspections of Iranian facilities to ensure compliance.

Until that time comes, Trump has decided that the Iranian nuclear deal must be reevaluated. Decertification does not formally torpedo the deal but creates serious threats to it. It starts a process that could cause the agreement to ultimately collapse.

Trump’s decision has dismayed America’s West European allies who are part of the deal and who oppose re-opening it. But they must have seen Trump’s decertification coming. It is the least they should have expected.

Trump has repeatedly made clear his view that the Iran deal was a diplomatic debacle, starting something he had promised to do on the campaign trail, fulfilling a core promise to at least rethink and fix agreements he deems were poorly negotiated, harmful and not in America’s national interests.