Opposition’s Futile Middle East Foreign Policy

An open letter to Iran from Obama’s opponents in which they take a tough stance against a possible nuclear agreement enrages Democrats. But this won’t change Obama’s unwillingness to accept advice.

In the U.S., foreign policy is first and foremost the domain of the president. So what 47 Republican senators have just done is somewhat brazen. They have written a letter to the rulers in Tehran in which they give them a lesson about American constitutional history. “It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system,” they write.

The senators point out that the president may make international treaties, but that Congress plays an important role in ratifying them. International treaties, they say, have to be approved by both houses. Because of the way the Senate works, this means that two-thirds must agree. Everything which does not receive the blessing of the Republican-dominated Congress is just a governmental agreement.

These could be cancelled at the stroke of a pen by the next president or modified by Congress under a future government. This means that if [they] don’t like the nuclear agreement with Iran, it won’t be worth the piece of paper it’s written on.

This is a clear attempt by Republican senators to sabotage the negotiations by sowing doubts among Iranians about how reliable agreements with Obama are. This is a scandal on the one hand because it undermines the foreign policy authority of the commander in chief. On the other hand, Obama has brought it upon himself.

Obama Administration Is Unwilling To Accept Advice

Given everything that we already know about the upcoming agreement, it really is a bad deal. But the Obama administration is completely deaf to even well-founded criticism of the agreement. Obama accuses critical voices from within his own ranks, such as Sen. Bob Menendez, of adopting their positions only because of (not explicitly, but implied, Jewish) donors.

Or critics are declared to be warmongers, lock, stock and barrel. Or the leader of a closely allied country is systematically disavowed, in order to let critics’ justified criticism come to nothing, as happened in recent months with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The government wants to conclude this agreement for better or worse, and has therefore been too accommodating toward Tehran. And the government wants to conclude this agreement because it knows that in the White House, every criticism of the deal is disparaged all the more as lèse-majesté. To this impudence, Republicans — headed by the young Sen. Tom Cotton — have added an even greater impudence. The White House reacts angrily and unwraps, once again, the old warmonger accusations.

“The rush to war, or at least the rush to the military option that many Republicans are advocating, is not at all in the best interest of the United States,” said White House spokesman Josh Earnest. The fact that a better agreement could perhaps have been reached with more patience and pressure is something the Obama administration simply does not want to believe. The president has put the hard-liners in Tehran — hard-liners who have built up a murderous, terrorist and repressive regime — on a level with the Republicans who wrote the letter. This is a morally pathetic display which shows how much Obama himself is contributing to polarization on the question of Iran.

Once It’s Signed, It’s Signed

Nevertheless, the letter will probably hardly prevent an agreement. And it is incumbent on Congress to finally lift the sanctions. But existing law gives the president some range to temporarily lift the sanctions at his discretion. Then there would be “path dependency,” as it is known in social science.

It is extremely rare for an international agreement to be repealed after a change of government — even if the new ruling powers are critical of it — not only because it causes considerable irritation in the international system, but also because it undermines the basis of trust for deals between states and damages the reputation and credibility of a country that goes back on its word.

If Tehran keeps to the agreement during the less than two remaining years of Obama’s time in office, any new president would have difficulty risking an international diplomatic incident.

Obama Still Intransigent

International treaties develop a factual power which is hard for the most powerful man in the world to escape, even if he happens to be a Republican.

There are optimistic commentators who think that the Republicans’ letter could have the effectively paradoxical consequence of improving the negotiating position of the Obama administration vis-à-vis Tehran in a sort of good cop-bad cop game, because Obama could point out that he has to produce a persuasive agreement in order to appease the Republicans.

But this would require American negotiators to want to use this argument. Given the intransigence of the Obama administration’s position on Iran so far, this can hardly be considered agreeable.