The Republican chair of the Senate foreign relations committee said on Friday that the incoming Trump administration should not and would not “tear up” the 2015 Iranian nuclear agreement, but rather focus on enforcing the deal more strictly.

“In spite of the all the flaws in the agreement, nothing bad is going to happen relative to nuclear development in Iran in the next few years. It’s just not,” Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee told journalists on Friday morning.

In tweets and other comments throughout his campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly attacked the deal by which Iran accepted curbs on its nuclear activities in return for sanctions relief from the international community, and which represents the cornerstone of Barack Obama’s foreign policy legacy.

Last week, Trump referred to it as “the horrible Iran deal” and portrayed it as “the beginning of the end” in the Obama administration’s relations with Israel.

“Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching!” he tweeted, implying his White House would take a radically different course after inauguration.

Although Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has publicly portrayed the agreement reached in Vienna in July 2015 as a betrayal, Israeli officials have said privately that an imminent US abrogation could be destabilising and is not a priority from their point of view.

Corker, a central figure in the Republican party, took the same line on Friday.

“The Iran deal from my perspective was flawed. It was not negotiated in a good way, because as almost all of us know, so much leverage was given up on the front end,” the foreign relations committee chairman said.

“At the same time,” Corker added, “you’ve got a choice. You can come in and figuratively tear it up ... and you can create a crisis on the front end by doing so. Or you can understand that we have lots of challenges to deal with around the world.

“What you can do instead is to begin to radically ensure its being implemented properly,” he added.

Corker has been criticised by hardline Republican opponents of the deal for failing to kill it in the Senate in 2015.

On Friday, the senator pointed to Iranian infractions of the accord, such as a slight excess in its stock of heavy water that accumulated temporarily last year, above the level stipulated in the agreement, and missile tests that were not covered by the agreement but represented defiance of a UN resolution that called on it to refrain from such ballistic tests for eight years.

Corker said the new administration should “push back” on such violations and on alleged Iranian support for extremist groups in the Middle East, destabilising the region.

“Over time, if the Iranians hang themselves and the UN security council show themselves to be feckless in actually implementing it – those would all be reasons for the US to not be part of the agreement anymore,” the senator said. “But tearing it up at the front end, in my opinion, is not going to happen. Instead, we will begin to radically enforce it.”