President Barack Obama has been “making one concession after another in response to Iran’s post-deal demands” in order to keep last summer’s announced nuclear agreement alive, former Clinton White House official Lawrence J. Haass wrote in an op-ed in the U.S. News and World Report on Tuesday.
America’s concessions on ballistic missiles and access to U.S. dollars not only mark reversals of long-articulated American positions, Haass wrote, but also serve “to expand Iran’s military capability, strengthen its economy and leave U.S. allies in the region feeling more abandoned.”
This continues a pattern of concessions that the administration made in order to reach the deal in the first place, such as discarding guarantees that the deal would include “anytime, anywhere” inspections. Haass, now a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, summed up the ongoing dynamic:
As the president and his team discarded these and other pledges during the many months of negotiations, they essentially mocked Obama’s promise to walk away from a “bad deal.” Now, in their post-deal maneuvering, they’re doing whatever they can to ensure that Iran doesn’t walk away.
The administration originally said that last month’s Iranian ballistic missile tests were a violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231, but later backed away from that statement. Haass also observed that the administration is moving towards allowing Iran to carry out transactions in dollars, a move that “would be signaling Western banks, which have long faced fines for doing business with Iran, that they should no longer worry about such things.”
The administration’s concessions to Iran have prompted bipartisan concern. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R – Calif.) and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D – Md.), among others, have voiced opposition to further giveaways.
“That the administration is making post-deal concessions is bad enough,” Haass wrote. “That it’s doing so as Iran continues to prop up Syria’s brutal strongman, President Bashar Assad as it continues to send arms to the Houthi rebels in Yemen and as it just announced that it will beef up the power of its warheads, is even more galling.
Eli Lake of Bloomberg View noted earlier this month that “the terms of the agreement we thought was completed in July keep changing to the benefit of Iran.”
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