Yesterday, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power spoke at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center in what was clearly intended as a shot fired over the bow of the new Republican Senate majority on the question of new sanctions on Iran. Any doubt about the purpose of the speech was reinforced by the presence of the majority leader after whom the public policy center is named. But Mitch McConnell and his Senate colleagues should ignore the ambassador’s attempt to pressure them to back off plans to toughen sanctions on the Islamist regime. In fact, rather than persuading them that the administration should be left to pursue détente with Tehran without congressional interference, her lecture should serve as a warning that they must act before President Obama’s foreign policy forfeits any chance of forestalling an Iranian bomb.
Power’s case is the same one the administration has been making ever since it concluded a weak interim nuclear deal with Iran in November 2013. The administration threw away the considerable political, economic, and military leverage it held over Iran at the time in exchange for an agreement that tacitly recognized Iran’s right to enrich uranium and granted legitimacy to the country’s nuclear program while loosening sanctions on the regime. In exchange, Iran supposedly froze its nuclear progress and converted its stockpile of fuel to a non-active state. This was to be followed by final-status talks that were supposed to be finite in length and therefore prevent Iran from drawing out negotiations in the same way they’ve been stalling the West on this issue for a decade.
Armed with what he termed a diplomatic success, President Obama successfully headed off an attempt by majorities in both houses of Congress last year to tighten the sanctions in such a way as to strengthen the hand of Western negotiators. The message then was that such help was not needed and would only scare off an Iranian government that was thought to be tempted to end its isolation by giving up their nuclear ambitions.
A year later Power was selling the same bill of goods to McConnell and his caucus telling them that more sanctions will not only spook the Iranians but isolate the U.S. from its Western coalition partners. Give us more time, she asked, and if we fail to get Iran to agree to a satisfactory agreement, then you could pass more sanctions.
Some in the Republican caucus may be inclined to heed her advice. Senator Bob Corker, the new Foreign Relations Committee chair, has been sounding as if the last thing he wants is a confrontation with the administration on Iran. This is in marked contrast to the statements of his Democratic counterpart, Senator Bob Menendez, who has been doing a slow burn over administration policy on Iran for years. With the GOP and the White House set to clash over a host of domestic issues like immigration and ObamaCare, some senators may think deferring to the president’s foreign-policy prerogative is the safest play.
But they’d be wrong both in terms of policy and politics.
That’s because ever since they managed to persuade Obama and Secretary of State Kerry to bend to their dictates and sign an interim accord that jettisoned the president’s previous pledges on the issue, the Iranians have been acting as if they had the whip hand over the Americans, not the other way around. Far from moving closer to giving up their nuclear goal, they have stood their ground in the talks and the two sides remain far apart. They continue to insist that they will not give up their centrifuges and have stonewalled on their plutonium plant and refuse to discuss their ballistic missile program or allow United Nations inspectors into facilities where their military research is going on. The question of their support for terrorism isn’t even being raised.
Predictably, the administration has inched closer to the Iranian position, proposing preposterous compromises such as disconnecting the pipes between the centrifuges that could easily be reversed.
Even worse, rather than keep his pledge to hold the Iranians to a finite period of talks, the president has allowed two extensions that have turned a six-month period into a year and counting. There’s no indication that he will ever deliver an ultimatum to the Iranians to yield or face the cut off of talks and the increased sanctions that Power says are still on the table for consideration.
In other words, the administration has spent the last year giving a public clinic in incompetent, weak diplomacy that has strengthened the Iranian position and left many in Europe waiting impatiently for the end of the farce so they can forget about the nuclear question and go back to doing business with Tehran.
But it doesn’t take much insight or imagination for senators or the rest of us to read between the lines of Power’s speech as well as recent statements by the president and to understand that the purpose of his process stopped being about the nuclear threat a long time ago. Rather than the negotiations being aimed at fulfilling the president’s 2012 campaign pledge to force the end of Iran’s nuclear program (a promise that was thrown down the administration memory hole a long time ago), it is now focused on fostering détente between the U.S. and the Islamist regime.
If forcing the Iranians to come to their senses and give up their nukes were the goal, the president wouldn’t have any hesitation about passing and enforcing tougher sanctions that would altogether shut down Iran’s sale of oil. If it were, he’d be calling for them himself, especially at a time when the decline in oil prices should be increasing the West’s economic leverage over Tehran. Instead, the administration is looking to coddle the Iranians and insulate them against the consequences of their actions. Sanctions might make a deal that would not allow Iran to become a threshold a nuclear power a possibility. But if your objective is making nice with the ayatollahs, then putting your foot on their throats is not what you want to do.
The point is, Congress must act on sanctions if there is to be any hope of convincing the administration to get serious about stopping the nuclear threat as well as to scaring the Iranians into thinking they have more to worry about than the paper tiger in the Oval Office they’ve been schooling for the last six years. Tougher sanctions might give the diplomacy that Obama and Power believe in with religious-like faith a chance. It would also be a good way to foster bipartisan agreement since Menendez and many other Senate Democrats will probably join them.
McConnell had nothing to say about Power’s speech, but let’s hope he tells Corker not to be fooled by this lesson in how not to conduct a negotiation. If appeasement of Iran is to be stopped, it will have to start in the Senate.
