Both sides of the debate about the nuclear talks with Iran are interpreting the letter from ten Senate Democrats sent to President Obama yesterday about holding back on a vote on increased sanctions as a victory for their position. Sanctions advocates believe the delay will enable wavering Democrats to join with Republicans and produce, once the March 24 deadline for an agreement with Iran stated in the letter passes, a veto-proof majority for a measure that will increase pressure on the Islamist regime to surrender its nuclear ambition. The administration, however, begs to differ. The president’s apologists think the willingness of Senator Robert Menendez to back off, even for only two months, on passing sanctions shows that the administration’s efforts to pressure members of Obama’s party into falling in line behind him are succeeding. We won’t know who is right until the end of March. But no one should scoff at the White House’s confidence that the stall will only strengthen their ability to find enough Democratic support to sustain a policy of Iran appeasement.
On the surface, sanctions advocates look to be in a strong position. The proposed legislation, dubbed the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2015, which was filed Tuesday night, is co-sponsored by Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Robert Menendez and also has 14 other co-sponsors including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and six Democrats. The bill will close loopholes in existing sanctions as well as make it even more difficult for Iran to go on selling oil. It will require any deal with Tehran to be submitted to Congress for review before the president can waive sanctions. However, the increased sanctions would not go into effect until July 6, five days after the current deadline for the talks passes, allowing plenty of time for diplomacy. Even more importantly, it includes provisions for a presidential waiver of sanctions on Iran if the White House is willing to claim it is in the national-security interest of the nation or if it would make a resolution of the issue more likely.
The extra two months of debate gives the administration several weeks to prove that Iran is serious about negotiating a deal that would truly end the nuclear threat rather than merely using the talks to stall the West. Moreover, the extra time can allow Democrats to say that they have given the president the opportunity to prove his point that diplomacy must be allowed to continue undisturbed by the possibility of more sanctions. If, as is almost certainly the case, the Iranians continue to stonewall Western negotiators, advocates of increased sanctions will be able to assert that the only thing that will prompt them to budge from their positions is the threat of even tougher sanctions on their economy. That should, at least in theory, be enough to motivate a considerable portion of the Democratic caucus as well as what it expected to be a near-unanimous Republican majority to pass a bill that would have more than enough votes to override a threatened presidential veto.
But no one should think the president is intimidated by any of this.
First, the delay until late March gives the White House plenty of time to work on Democrats to defect from the sanctions camp. As he showed us last year when a similarly overwhelming pro-sanctions majority was defeated by both former Majority Leader Harry Reid’s tactics and an administration disinformation campaign, the president is quite adept at marginalizing his foes and branding them as warmongers. He may be a lame duck, but he remains someone that most Democratic senators, with the possible exception of Menendez, don’t want to tangle with. Given enough time, Obama may be able to amass enough votes to sustain his veto.
But for all the tough talk emanating from Congress, it must be conceded that Obama has already won even before the debate really starts.
By changing the topic from his indefensible position opposing more pressure on an obdurate Iran to whether it was appropriate for the House to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress, the president subtly changed the dynamic of the debate in a way that gave him a clear advantage.
Moreover, by forcing sanctions advocates to include the presidential waiver in their bill, the White House has included a poison pill that will, even if it survives his veto, enable Obama to ensure that its provisions never go into effect. As we have seen with the issue of immigration where he resorted to executive orders unilaterally granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens to bypass the authority of Congress to change the law, this president has no compunction about governing on his own. Even if more than two-thirds of both the Senate and the House wish to impose tougher sanctions on Iran, the president is perfectly comfortably ignoring the will of Congress and allowing the nuclear talks to go on with Iran indefinitely.
The president’s unwillingness to countenance any additional pressure on Iran, even if such pressure is the only conceivable measure that might induce it to actually give up its nuclear infrastructure, has signaled again that his goal here is détente with Tehran, not an end to their nuclear program as he pledged in his 2012 foreign-policy debate with Mitt Romney. As with other issues that he considers important, he will not listen to Congress. The delay might produce a veto-proof majority for sanctions. But President Obama isn’t wrong if he thinks that none of this will halt his push to appease Iran even if the talks continue to go on indefinitely without a resolution.