On Tuesday of this week Senate Democrats again blocked legislation that would have stopped the agreement with Iran. In essence, the prevention of allowing Republics to block the deal is a way of getting the deal pushed through. The debate over the strength of this agreement with Iran is the big point of contention, however the Dems are messaging the pushback as simply partisan. With only one more attempt in their pockets, Republicans hope to at least get a few concessions, primarily: Prevent Obama from lifting sanctions until Iran recognizes Israel as legal state. This is a last ditch effort, Congress has essentially approved the deal already.
By a vote of 56-42, the Republican-majority Senate fell short of the 60 votes needed in the 100-member chamber to advance the legislation.
The result was similar to last week’s procedural vote on the Iran measure but two Republicans opposed to the deal, presidential candidates Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham, did not vote on Tuesday.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell failed in his attempt to lure at least a couple more Democrats into voting for the resolution of disapproval with this repeat of last Thursday’s vote.
McConnell moved to arrange a third procedural Iran vote, possibly this week, on an amendment preventing Obama from lifting economic sanctions against Iran until that country’s government formally recognizes Israel’s right to exist and releases American citizens in Iranian custody.
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VIENNA (AP) – As Congress was debating the merits of the Iran nuclear deal last week, the U.S. political world was whipping itself into a frenzy. Not so much the rest of the world – it was busy restoring relations with Tehran, selling it weapons, and inking contracts with Iranian firms.
Republicans tried last week to push through a resolution of disapproval of the nuclear deal and a second vote, also expected to fail, is scheduled for Tuesday.
But U.S. companies will be sidelined no matter how the U.S. political tussle plays out because core sanctions imposed by Washington will remain even after the nuclear-related sanctions are lifted.
These secondary sanctions are linked to U.S. charges of Iranian human rights violations, terrorism and other allegations of wrongdoing. They have the effect of banning doing business with Iran, with only few exceptions, such as supplying parts for Iran’s civilian aviation sector.
“Non-U.S. companies are not in general subject to the U.S. sanctions,” says William McGlone, a Washington-based lawyer specializing in sanctions law. “As long as a non-U.S company is not involved in using persons or operations in the United States, then in general those companies could proceed with their transactions.”
There is a lot to miss out on for U.S. firms in Iran. The country of 80 million people generates a $400 billion economy, boasts the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves, the second-biggest stores of natural gas, and has well-established manufacturing and agricultural industries.
While Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says America remains the “Great Satan” and has ruled out agreements beyond the nuclear deal, his government has not wasted time in wooing the rest of the world.
At a business forum staged by Iran in Vienna a little more than a week after the July 14 nuclear deal was reached, Amir Hossein Zamania, an Iranian deputy oil minister said his country hoped for foreign partnerships for oil and gas projects that alone were worth $185 billion (nearly 170 billion euros.)
Iranian officials also pitched the mining and financial sectors and Iran’s automotive industry to raptly listening participants from Austria, Germany, Spain, Italy and elsewhere – more than 3,000 participants each paying a 1,800 euro (more than $2,000) registration fee.
Austrian statistics tell the larger European Union story of business opportunities to a major Middle East market shut off for nearly a decade to most outsiders due to sanctions. Austrian exports were valued at 400 million euros (nearly $440 million) in 2004, before the sanctions started to bite. Last year, they were a little more than half that. But tiny Austria’s Chamber of Commerce hopes to break the 1 billion euro ($1.1 billion) mark over the next few years.
No sanctions have yet been lifted and all can be re-imposed if Iran fails to live up to its commitments. That means many multinationals are unlikely to commit to big investments in the immediate future. But in contrast to the United States, sanctions lifting by the European Union will free up most financial and business bans imposed on Iran for companies based in the 28-nation EU. Many of them already are in the starting blocks, along with their countries’ governments.
Switzerland dispatched a business delegation to Iran at the end of April, three months before the deal was finalized. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius met top Iranian officials in Tehran July 29, including President Hassan Rouhani. He asked Rouhani to visit Paris in November and said a French economic delegation is slated to visit Iran soon. Italy’s foreign and economic development ministers last month signed an agreement in Tehran to facilitate commercial relations.
Britain reopened its embassy in Tehran last month. Spain is due to send a trade delegation to Iran early in the week headed by its foreign minister, while German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier plans in October to follow up on a July trip to Tehran by Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel.
Russia, which already has the inside track in supplying Iran with nuclear technology, is also resurrecting its lucrative arms-trade. In Moscow last month, Iranian Vice-President Sorena Sattari said Tehran is in “active talks” with Russia to buy at least two types of military jets. Russian state news agencies meanwhile reported that Russia and Iran had signed a memorandum on previous plans to sell an S-300 air-defense system to Iran.
But U.S. firms will remain on the outside for some time to come.
“There is very strong political bipartisan support to maintain the core embargo on Iran,” says McGlone, the lawyer. “So (sanctions relief) benefits for U.S. companies are limited.”
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Henry Kissenger and George Shultz wrote this OPED in the WSJ back in April that we thought we’d revisit. The former Secretaries of State essentially argue that the diplomatic negotiations over the past 12 years with Iran have allowed Iran to change the terms of the negotiation from if they could develop a bomb to when they’ll be able to develop a bomb.
Just this week Democrats were able to block a Republican effort to reject the Iran deal. This means the deal will go through without a single Republican vote. Those in favor are claiming this is pure partisan politics and those opposed are saying this deal is a big mistake.
The debate divided Democrats between their loyalties to the president and to their constituents, animated the antiwar movement on the left and exposed the diminishing power of the Israeli lobbying force that spent tens of millions of dollars to prevent the accord.
While bipartisan victories tend to be those most celebrated outside of Washington, success by the president is now often measured more by the scope of the policy achieved than by any claim of sweeping consensus. And losing has its own evolving meaning as well. Republicans will use Mr. Obama’s triumph — as they did with the health care law — as a means to attack Democrats in anticipation of next year’s election.
Indeed, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, said Thursday that he would force the exact same vote again next week, just to make Democrats go through the exercise one last time. “If the president’s so proud of this deal, he shouldn’t be afraid,” Mr. McConnell said, as he stared at Democrats on the floor immediately after the vote.
It is highly unlikely that any senator will change his or her vote.
“President Obama can claim that he found a way to move an extremely important, yet controversial, diplomatic agreement through the political process,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton. “For conservatives the deal fulfills every negative view that they have about President Obama and the way Democrats handle foreign threats,” he added. “The narrative is built for the campaign trail — a Democratic president agrees to drop sanctions on a horrible regime that even most Democrats agree shows little signs of reform.”
Here are excepts from the Kissenger-Shultz OPED piece:
Debate regarding technical details of the deal has thus far inhibited the soul-searching necessary regarding its deeper implications. For 20 years, three presidents of both major parties proclaimed that an Iranian nuclear weapon was contrary to American and global interests—and that they were prepared to use force to prevent it. Yet negotiations that began 12 years ago as an international effort to prevent an Iranian capability to develop a nuclear arsenal are ending with an agreement that concedes this very capability, albeit short of its full capacity in the first 10 years.
Mixing shrewd diplomacy with open defiance of U.N. resolutions, Iran has gradually turned the negotiation on its head. Iran’s centrifuges have multiplied from about 100 at the beginning of the negotiation to almost 20,000 today. The threat of war now constrains the West more than Iran. While Iran treated the mere fact of its willingness to negotiate as a concession, the West has felt compelled to break every deadlock with a new proposal. In the process, the Iranian program has reached a point officially described as being within two to three months of building a nuclear weapon. Under the proposed agreement, for 10 years Iran will never be further than one year from a nuclear weapon and, after a decade, will be significantly closer.
Inspections and Enforcement
The president deserves respect for the commitment with which he has pursued the objective of reducing nuclear peril, as does Secretary of State John Kerry for the persistence, patience and ingenuity with which he has striven to impose significant constraints on Iran’s nuclear program.
Progress has been made on shrinking the size of Iran’s enriched stockpile, confining the enrichment of uranium to one facility, and limiting aspects of the enrichment process. Still, the ultimate significance of the framework will depend on its verifiability and enforceability.
Negotiating the final agreement will be extremely challenging. For one thing, no official text has yet been published. The so-called framework represents a unilateral American interpretation. Some of its clauses have been dismissed by the principal Iranian negotiator as “spin.” A joint EU-Iran statement differs in important respects, especially with regard to the lifting of sanctions and permitted research and development.
Comparable ambiguities apply to the one-year window for a presumed Iranian breakout. Emerging at a relatively late stage in the negotiation, this concept replaced the previous baseline—that Iran might be permitted a technical capacity compatible with a plausible civilian nuclear program. The new approach complicates verification and makes it more political because of the vagueness of the criteria.
Under the new approach, Iran permanently gives up none of its equipment, facilities or fissile product to achieve the proposed constraints. It only places them under temporary restriction and safeguard—amounting in many cases to a seal at the door of a depot or periodic visits by inspectors to declared sites. The physical magnitude of the effort is daunting. Is the International Atomic Energy Agency technically, and in terms of human resources, up to so complex and vast an assignment?
In a large country with multiple facilities and ample experience in nuclear concealment, violations will be inherently difficult to detect. Devising theoretical models of inspection is one thing. Enforcing compliance, week after week, despite competing international crises and domestic distractions, is another. Any report of a violation is likely to prompt debate over its significance—or even calls for new talks with Tehran to explore the issue. The experience of Iran’s work on a heavy-water reactor during the “interim agreement” period—when suspect activity was identified but played down in the interest of a positive negotiating atmosphere—is not encouraging.
Compounding the difficulty is the unlikelihood that breakout will be a clear-cut event. More likely it will occur, if it does, via the gradual accumulation of ambiguous evasions.
When inevitable disagreements arise over the scope and intrusiveness of inspections, on what criteria are we prepared to insist and up to what point? If evidence is imperfect, who bears the burden of proof? What process will be followed to resolve the matter swiftly?
The agreement’s primary enforcement mechanism, the threat of renewed sanctions, emphasizes a broad-based asymmetry, which provides Iran permanent relief from sanctions in exchange for temporary restraints on Iranian conduct. Undertaking the “snap-back” of sanctions is unlikely to be as clear or as automatic as the phrase implies. Iran is in a position to violate the agreement by executive decision. Restoring the most effective sanctions will require coordinated international action. In countries that had reluctantly joined in previous rounds, the demands of public and commercial opinion will militate against automatic or even prompt “snap-back.” If the follow-on process does not unambiguously define the term, an attempt to reimpose sanctions risks primarily isolating America, not Iran.
The gradual expiration of the framework agreement, beginning in a decade, will enable Iran to become a significant nuclear, industrial and military power after that time—in the scope and sophistication of its nuclear program and its latent capacity to weaponize at a time of its choosing. Limits on Iran’s research and development have not been publicly disclosed (or perhaps agreed). Therefore Iran will be in a position to bolster its advanced nuclear technology during the period of the agreement and rapidly deploy more advanced centrifuges—of at least five times the capacity of the current model—after the agreement expires or is broken.
The follow-on negotiations must carefully address a number of key issues, including the mechanism for reducing Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium from 10,000 to 300 kilograms, the scale of uranium enrichment after 10 years, and the IAEA’s concerns regarding previous Iranian weapons efforts. The ability to resolve these and similar issues should determine the decision over whether or when the U.S. might still walk away from the negotiations.
The Framework Agreement and Long-Term Deterrence
Even when these issues are resolved, another set of problems emerges because the negotiating process has created its own realities. The interim agreement accepted Iranian enrichment; the new agreement makes it an integral part of the architecture. For the U.S., a decade-long restriction on Iran’s nuclear capacity is a possibly hopeful interlude. For Iran’s neighbors—who perceive their imperatives in terms of millennial rivalries—it is a dangerous prelude to an even more dangerous permanent fact of life. Some of the chief actors in the Middle East are likely to view the U.S. as willing to concede a nuclear military capability to the country they consider their principal threat. Several will insist on at least an equivalent capability. Saudi Arabia has signaled that it will enter the lists; others are likely to follow. In that sense, the implications of the negotiation are irreversible.
If the Middle East is “proliferated” and becomes host to a plethora of nuclear-threshold states, several in mortal rivalry with each other, on what concept of nuclear deterrence or strategic stability will international security be based? Traditional theories of deterrence assumed a series of bilateral equations. Do we now envision an interlocking series of rivalries, with each new nuclear program counterbalancing others in the region?
Previous thinking on nuclear strategy also assumed the existence of stable state actors. Among the original nuclear powers, geographic distances and the relatively large size of programs combined with moral revulsion to make surprise attack all but inconceivable. How will these doctrines translate into a region where sponsorship of nonstate proxies is common, the state structure is under assault, and death on behalf of jihad is a kind of fulfillment?
Some have suggested the U.S. can dissuade Iran’s neighbors from developing individual deterrent capacities by extending an American nuclear umbrella to them. But how will these guarantees be defined? What factors will govern their implementation? Are the guarantees extended against the use of nuclear weapons—or against any military attack, conventional or nuclear? Is it the domination by Iran that we oppose or the method for achieving it? What if nuclear weapons are employed as psychological blackmail? And how will such guarantees be expressed, or reconciled with public opinion and constitutional practices?
Regional Order
For some, the greatest value in an agreement lies in the prospect of an end, or at least a moderation, of Iran’s 3½ decades of militant hostility to the West and established international institutions, and an opportunity to draw Iran into an effort to stabilize the Middle East. Having both served in government during a period of American-Iranian strategic alignment and experienced its benefits for both countries as well as the Middle East, we would greatly welcome such an outcome. Iran is a significant national state with a historic culture, a fierce national identity, and a relatively youthful, educated population; its re-emergence as a partner would be a consequential event.
But partnership in what task? Cooperation is not an exercise in good feeling; it presupposes congruent definitions of stability. There exists no current evidence that Iran and the U.S. are remotely near such an understanding. Even while combating common enemies, such as ISIS, Iran has declined to embrace common objectives. Iran’s representatives (including its Supreme Leader) continue to profess a revolutionary anti-Western concept of international order; domestically, some senior Iranians describe nuclear negotiations as a form of jihad by other means.
The final stages of the nuclear talks have coincided with Iran’s intensified efforts to expand and entrench its power in neighboring states. Iranian or Iranian client forces are now the pre-eminent military or political element in multiple Arab countries, operating beyond the control of national authorities. With the recent addition of Yemen as a battlefield, Tehran occupies positions along all of the Middle East’s strategic waterways and encircles archrival Saudi Arabia, an American ally. Unless political restraint is linked to nuclear restraint, an agreement freeing Iran from sanctions risks empowering Iran’s hegemonic efforts.
Some have argued that these concerns are secondary, since the nuclear deal is a way station toward the eventual domestic transformation of Iran. But what gives us the confidence that we will prove more astute at predicting Iran’s domestic course than Vietnam’s, Afghanistan’s, Iraq’s, Syria’s, Egypt’s or Libya’s?
Absent the linkage between nuclear and political restraint, America’s traditional allies will conclude that the U.S. has traded temporary nuclear cooperation for acquiescence to Iranian hegemony. They will increasingly look to create their own nuclear balances and, if necessary, call in other powers to sustain their integrity. Does America still hope to arrest the region’s trends toward sectarian upheaval, state collapse and the disequilibrium of power tilting toward Tehran, or do we now accept this as an irremediable aspect of the regional balance?
Some advocates have suggested that the agreement can serve as a way to dissociate America from Middle East conflicts, culminating in the military retreat from the region initiated by the current administration. As Sunni states gear up to resist a new Shiite empire, the opposite is likely to be the case. The Middle East will not stabilize itself, nor will a balance of power naturally assert itself out of Iranian-Sunni competition. (Even if that were our aim, traditional balance of power theory suggests the need to bolster the weaker side, not the rising or expanding power.) Beyond stability, it is in America’s strategic interest to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war and its catastrophic consequences. Nuclear arms must not be permitted to turn into conventional weapons. The passions of the region allied with weapons of mass destruction may impel deepening American involvement.
If the world is to be spared even worse turmoil, the U.S. must develop a strategic doctrine for the region. Stability requires an active American role. For Iran to be a valuable member of the international community, the prerequisite is that it accepts restraint on its ability to destabilize the Middle East and challenge the broader international order.
Until clarity on an American strategic political concept is reached, the projected nuclear agreement will reinforce, not resolve, the world’s challenges in the region. Rather than enabling American disengagement from the Middle East, the nuclear framework is more likely to necessitate deepening involvement there—on complex new terms. History will not do our work for us; it helps only those who seek to help themselves.
Messrs. Kissinger and Shultz are former secretaries of state.
Here’s another view:
