Top Democrats must lead the fight against the recently concluded nuclear deal with Iran, if for no other reason than to prevent the demise of their party, Martin Peretz, the longtime editor-in-chief of The New Republic and a board member of The Israel Project, wrote in The Democratic Party, on the Edge of the Abyss, published in the August issue of The Tower Magazine. The Israel Project publishes The Tower.
Two of the most powerful members of the Democratic Party, former and current senators from New York, now hold the fate of the putative deal with Iran in their hands. Because they alone can overturn it, this means that presumptive presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and presumptive Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer carry a heavy burden that will deeply affect their personal reputations and, most probably, the trustworthiness of the Democrats in foreign policy for at least a generation.
Clinton and Schumer, as colleagues of the main players in the Obama administration, are uniquely positioned to challenge its growing alignment with Iran, of which the deal is only one component.
This dissonance between Administration aims and the facts on the ground has reached its nadir in the negotiations with Iran. Strangely, the President and the Secretary of State wanted to separate the issue of the nature and conduct of the Iranian regime from the nuclear issue. Most would think that a negotiation over the details of uranium enrichment would take into account the behavior of those who will control the uranium once it is enriched. And that the government of the United States, which provides hundreds of billions in sanctions relief, might also want to consider how that money would be spent. The Iranians certainly recognized these two issues as linked, and used that linkage to their advantage, insisting, with Russia’s predictable help, on the easing of the arms embargo. (No surprise there: The Russians are delighted to constrain American power and undermine American interests.) This was the capstone achievement of our team’s incompetent approach: The U.S. excluded nonnuclear issues that conduced to our interests in order to get a deal, while Iran then included nonnuclear issues to their benefit because the U.S. wanted to get a deal. Obama calls this “negotiating from strength.”
Given that Iran re-opened already-agreed elements of the interim understandings reached at Lausanne, “[t]here is no reason Senator Schumer, with Secretary Clinton’s backing, cannot lead a consensus in Congress to tie a set of focused, reasonable conditions to their support for the existing deal.” Among the improvements Peretz mentioned are cancelling the lifting the arms embargoes agreed to at the last minute, making those and similar rewards contingent on improvements of Iranian behavior, insisting that Iran come clean about its past illicit nuclear research, and insisting on much quicker access to suspected sites than the 24 days specified by the deal.
Obama and Kerry will naturally protest, as will the allies, that we are re-opening the so-called agreement. The “awe” reported by Bloomberg might dissipate. But Iran happily reneged upon the April agreement, so why do Americans and the Democratic Party have to be shackled permanently to a poorly conceived and weakly negotiated deal? The outcome will be imperfect. You could anticipate a situation where the Europeans lift sanctions and the U.S. does not. Such are the consequences of incompetence. But U.S. sanctions do matter, and their continuation (in the absence of reasonable satisfaction of congressional conditions) will affect Iranian calculations. Moreover, the uncertainty created in the Iranian leadership will restore some leverage to the next American president. If Schumer and Clinton instead passively capitulate to the flawed approach of the administration, they will bear their full share of responsibility for the substance of the deal and the consequences for their party.
Peretz’s call for Clinton and Schumer to lead a Congressional push for a better deal stems from a desire to have Democrats remain a credible voice in formulating American foreign policy.
About this matter of political consequences: has the Democratic Party forgotten the McGovernite legacy from which it fought for so long, and for a time so successfully, to free itself? The George W. Bush Administration’s post-invasion missteps in Iraq, and their grisly consequences, have given the Democrats a dangerous sense of their own freedom: Americans may oppose aggression without strategy, but history has shown that they also oppose idealism without strength and pragmatism without principle.
[Photo: NASA HQ PHOTO / Flickr ]