President Obama’s quest to get a deal with Iran on its nuclear program hinges on not only reaching across the aisle in Congress but also across oceans to find common ground with enemies.
That strategy — which links two themes that have dominated his presidency, a yearning for post-partisan politics and a belief in engagement — receives a new test Tuesday as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee begins debate on a bill that would severely restrict Obama’s ability to cut a nuclear arms deal with Iran.
The bill would force him to send an Iran accord to Congress for approval and require Tehran to renounce terrorism. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday that Obama would veto such a bill.
The issue of Iran has pushed Obama’s core principles to the limits on two fronts. His overtures to Iran have inflamed already-simmering partisan politics at home. Abroad, they have tested his broader theory of engagement, straining relations with U.S. allies without any guarantee of easing sectarian fighting that appears to be spinning out of control throughout the Middle East.
Success may be close, but failure looms almost everywhere.
Even if the Iran deal holds, the result will lack the pomp and promise that mark some of the historic foreign policy of the past, such as President Richard M. Nixon’s opening to China. There will be no equivalent of Nixon’s walk on the Great Wall or banquet in the Great Hall of the People. Obama will not stroll through the ruins of Persepolis or dine in Qom.
“The big disappointment for Obama is what he was hoping would be his signature foreign policy agreement, even if he gets a deal, will be one that generates enormous opposition abroad and political discord at home,” said Richard H. Solomon, former president of the U.S. Institute of Peace and a former U.S. ambassador who worked with then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger on Nixon’s trip to China. “Internationally, it’s going to mean further gaps and tensions, not just with the Israelis, but with a number of the Sunni states.”
Despite Republican victories in November, Obama began his presidency’s seventh year with high hopes and an impassioned plea for what he called a “better politics” to replace the partisan divisions that have marked much of his time in office.
“Imagine if we broke out of these tired old patterns,” Obama told lawmakers at his State of the Union address in January. “Imagine if we did something different.”
As a deadline on Iran talks neared, Republicans did, indeed, produce something “different” — an open letter, signed by 47 GOP senators, that sought to undermine the talks by warning that a future president or Congress could undo any nuclear deal.
Now, Obama has stopped talking about a “better politics.”
Even as the administration works to resolve contentious details before a June 30 deadline for the Iran negotiations, the White House will be scrambling simultaneously to stop or alter legislation that could prompt the Iranians to back out of the deal.
The biggest worry is the Senate Foreign Relations Committee bill, sponsored by committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). Obama has praised Corker as “a good and decent man” and spoke with him by phone Wednesday as part of an effort to find common ground. Some Democrats want to strip the terrorism portion out of the bill, but some Republicans would go even further. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a presidential candidate, would demand that Iran explicitly recognize Israel’s right to exist.
If Obama’s outreach to Congress fails, it could doom the Iran accord and extend bitter partisan infighting far beyond “the water’s edge,” where, in the mid-1940s, Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg famously said it should end. “Essentially we would have 535 secretaries of state,” Earnest said. “Not just one.”
Such an outcome would damage not only relations with Iran, but with Britain, France and Germany — members of a group that also includes Russia and China and that has been negotiating alongside the United States. “The impact on alliance structure would be devastating,” said Charles W. Freeman, Jr., former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a veteran diplomat. “Who would trust us after that”
The coming months will also test Obama’s broader world view that “principled” engagement — even with America’s longest-standing enemies such as Cuba and Burma, also called Myanmar — can produce sweeping change. “I believe that engagement is a more powerful force than isolation,” he said of Cuba during a stop in Jamaica on Thursday.
It is a view born in part of Obama’s criticism of President George W. Bush’s strategy of removing dictators by force, in the hope that democratic leaders, with help from the United States, would come forward.
On Iran, Obama has navigated this issue carefully, saying the framework deal was primarily about stopping Iran from producing a nuclear weapon and heading off an arms race in one of the most unstable regions of the world.
But he also has voiced repeatedly the hope that an Iran free of sanctions and open to Western investment would change, spending more money on improving living standards and less on destabilizing proxy militias and terrorist groups.
In the near term, though, the nuclear deal seems just as likely to increase tribal infighting between Iran and America’s allies abroad.
Saudi Arabia remains deeply suspicious of Iranian intentions. Before the framework was complete, a former Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal, warned that a flawed deal could spark a global nuclear arms race. In early March, Kerry traveled to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, to calm nerves, assuring Saudi leaders that the nuclear deal would not mean a U.S. rapprochement with Iran — and that the old divisions Obama once talked about overcoming would remain comfortably and familiarly intact.
Obama has begun providing weapons and intelligence to help Saudi Arabia in its battle against Iranian-supported Houthi fighters in Yemen. Last week, the Pentagon said that it would expedite weapons deliveries to the Saudis and that it was using air-refueling planes to support the Saudi-led coalition conducting airstrikes in Yemen.
In return, Saudi Arabia has given the nuclear deal tepid support. The state news agency said that the kingdom’s council of ministers “expressed hope for attaining a binding and definitive agreement” and stressed a need for “good neighborliness and non-interference in the affairs of Arab states.”
The statement hinted at an important question: How far will U.S. engagement go Should the technical details of an agreement be linked to understandings about Iran’s conduct in the region — where it lends support to allies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iraqi government and Houthi rebels while questioning Israel’s right to exist
Obama has said that those sorts of demands would torpedo the preliminary deal.
Instead, the president, as part of his overseas sales job, has promised to bolster security assistance to America’s Arab allies so that they can better defend themselves against what he said are some “very real external threats.” By that, Obama principally means Iran. He has also vowed new efforts to make sure that the Israeli people are “absolutely protected.”
At the same time, the president hopes that Iran will keep at home whatever money it gets from a full or partial lifting of economic sanctions. Some critics doubt that will be the case.
“I mean it’s an authoritarian regime,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, a former top Obama administration State Department official and director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “It has never focused on its people and sanctions relief won’t change it.”
The extra money that comes from lifting sanctions would give Iran more resources to fund proxy fighters and terror groups.
“It is much more likely that Iran will react to a nuclear deal by acting more aggressively in other domains,” Wittes said, adding that such an outcome doesn’t mean the nuclear deal is a bad idea. Rather, she said, it puts new pressure on the Obama administration to articulate a clearer vision for how it plans to counter Hezbollah and Iranian influence, especially in Syria where critics have said that the administration lacks a coherent strategy.
“It really matters that the administration has to be willing to up its game in the region,” Wittes said.
