More Legislative Threats to Iran Negotiations Loom
![U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry meets with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Paris, France continue their negotiations over the future of Iran's nuclear program. [State Department, 1/16/15]](/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Kerry-and-Zarif-talk-1.16.15.jpg)
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry meets with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Paris, France continue their negotiations over the future of Iran’s nuclear program. [State Department, 1/16/15]
Congress made the right move this week to postpone considering new sanctions legislation.
U.S. negotiating partners have stressed that new sanctions would sink the talks. Members of the P5+1 have taken the unusual step of appealing directly to Congress to not pass new sanctions legislation against Iran. As four foreign ministers from the P5+1 wrote in the Washington Post last week, “Maintaining pressure on Iran through our existing sanctions is essential. But introducing new hurdles at this critical stage of the negotiations, including through additional nuclear-related sanctions legislation on Iran, would jeopardize our efforts at a critical juncture. While many Iranians know how much they stand to gain by overcoming isolation and engaging with the world, there are also those in Tehran who oppose any nuclear deal. We should not give them new arguments. New sanctions at this moment might also fracture the international coalition that has made sanctions so effective so far. Rather than strengthening our negotiating position, new sanctions legislation at this point would set us back.” British Prime Minister David Cameron voiced a similar opinion in a press conference with President Obama the week before. Congress should respect the opinion of our negotiating partners. [Laurent Fabius, et al via Washington Post, 1/21/15]
Sanctions brought Iran to the table, but it’s the negotiations that are keeping its nuclear program frozen. In remarks at the University of Louisville earlier this month, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power acknowledged the coercive power of the U.S. sanctions regime, saying that “sanctions did indeed help to bring Iran to the negotiating table. But sanctions did not stop the advance of Iran’s nuclear program. Negotiations have done that, and it is in our interest not to deny ourselves the chance to achieve a long-term, comprehensive solution that would deny Iran a nuclear weapon.” Ilan Goldenberg, Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, explained this yesterday in a NSN press call. “In 2012, we needed to demonstrate to [Iran] that we could hurt them economically, and they didn’t believe it. Until they believed it, they weren’t going to negotiate with us in a real fundamental way,” Goldenberg said. “But now the problem is that we need to demonstrate we can credibly unhurt them. And they don’t believe that, they don’t believe we can ever lift the sanctions.” In fact, Goldenberg said the postponement of the proposed sanctions bill could actually strengthen the U.S. hand in negotiations. “Now we have had this big confrontation and if the President wins that confrontation, if no bill comes to the floor or proponents of sanctions aren’t able to get to a veto-proof majority…then the President looks a lot stronger in the eyes of an Iranian negotiator.” [Samantha Power, 1/12/15. Ilan Goldenberg, 1/28/15]
Negotiations will likely still be ongoing in March, and Congress shouldn’t bind itself to artificial deadlines. Many supporters of the proposed sanctions legislation, including its co-sponsor, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), said in a letter on Tuesday that they will postpone taking up the legislation until late March. Menendez wrote that “we will only vote for this legislation on the Senate floor if Iran fails to reach an agreement on a political framework that addresses all parameters of a comprehensive agreement.” This is a positive step, but it’s a mistake to fix the bill to the U.S. self-imposed deadline in March. As Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Senate Banking Committee yesterday, the P5+1 is hoping to reach a framework on “key elements” by the end of March, but “the actual deadline is June.” Even then, Blinken noted that the Administration could ask for an extension to finish working out the technical arrangement. “If we get to June, and we have the core elements in place…and it turns out we need a little more time to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, we may seek it,” he said. As Dr. Edward Levine, retired Senior Professional Staff Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, noted in the NSN press call yesterday, “when you are in the midst of a negotiation, you don’t want to take up legislation that the other side, and indeed your allies, would see as undermining the negotiation.” Those negotiations will likely be continuing past Sen. Menendez’s artificial March deadline. “The reality of the negotiations shows that patience and forbearance is what is needed now, not more sanctions,” wrote NSN Executive Director John Bradshaw and Amb. John Limbert, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iran and former Iranian hostage, today in The Hill. [Antony Blinken, 1/27/15. Ed Levine, 1/28/15. John Bradshaw and John Limbert via The Hill, 1/28/15]
Congress has a role to play in the nuclear negotiations, but it should focus on constructive proposals instead of proposals that undermine U.S. and other P5+1 negotiators. Members of Congress have pressed for a greater role in the Iranian nuclear negotiations, and they will have a critical role to play if a deal is reached and sanctions must be repealed. Some proposals, though, would undermine U.S. negotiators’ efforts. Sens. Bob Corker (R-TN) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are considering a bill to require any deal that comes out of the P5+1 negotiations to receive immediate congressional consideration and a potential vote of disapproval. This sends a message to Iran’s hardliners that the U.S. government will not be able to follow through on the commitments it makes in the nuclear talks, and as Blinken said in his testimony yesterday, “Anything we do that reinforces the hand of those who absolutely don’t want a deal under any circumstances is going to weaken [the negotiators’] hand and make it less likely that we will get to an agreement.”
Other, more constructive approaches are being worked on in the Senate. On Monday, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) proposed a resolution that “states that the Senate is prepared to enact additional sanctions against Iran if current diplomatic efforts fail, but refuses to prejudge the outcome.” Another proposal being worked on by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Rand Paul (R-KY) would tie renewed sanctions to verified violations of the Iran’s commitments under the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) and under any final nuclear settlement. (The International Atomic Energy Agency has consistently reported that Iran has abided by its JPOA obligations.) This would unequivocally be an enforcement measure, not a threat to the ongoing negotiations, and comes from “a concern that reaches across party lines that some colleagues are pushing to enact new sanctions while our negotiators are still at the table,” Sen. Boxer said. [Antony Blinken, 1/28/15. Barbara Boxer, 1/21/15]
Iran hawks are trying to distract from the nuclear negotiations by constructing a dire – and misleading – narrative about Iran. As support for proposals that would derail the nuclear negotiations has waned in recent weeks, hawks have turned toward attacking not a potential deal, but the idea of negotiating with Iran at all. Conservative pundits like Charles Krauthammer have written recently of Iran as a rising hegemon in the Middle East, with the resignation of Yemen’s government under pressure from Shia rebels as the latest example; this was echoed repeatedly by senators at yesterday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing. This narrative is exaggerated, ignoring Iran’s strapped economy and the mostly speculative nature of its relationship to the Houthi rebels. “What is depicted [by critics of the negotiations] as a grand Iranian scheme for achieving regional hegemony is instead a matter of diverse conflicts with many different causes and instigators and in which any Iranian roles have been largely reactive,” Paul Pillar wrote this past weekend for the National Interest. This misinterpretation of events serves the purpose of distracting from what Pillar identifies as the most important question: “Will Iranian policies and behavior be better for our interests with such an agreement or without it?”
“To some extent the anti-agreement forces try to make an argument that letting Iran out of its international penalty box will enable an ill-intentioned state to do even more ill-intentioned things,” Pillar wrote. “But to a large extent the appeal is simply an emotional, non-intellectual one that relies on popular distaste for doing any business with people we don’t like. It is the sort of appeal that tacitly rejects the principle that the need for diplomacy and doing business with other states is at least as great with one’s adversaries as it is with one’s allies.” The United States must take the opposite approach. As Bradshaw and Amb. Limbert wrote this morning, “To create a long-lasting, verifiable deal, the parties need to see each other as partners, not players in a zero sum game.” [Paul Pillar via National Interest, 1/24/15. John Bradshaw and John Limbert via The Hill, 1/28/15]
