Ambassador Wendy Sherman, lead negotiator for the Iran nuclear agreement, on Thursday defended the Iran deal narrative presented by senior Obama adviser Ben Rhodes in his controversial New York Times Magazine profile.
The profile paints Rhodes as a Machiavellian media manipulator who relayed a “largely manufactured” timeline of the nuclear deal to the press, think tanks, and the like (what Rhodes calls an “echo chamber”), in order to capture popular support for it. The author of the piece, David Samuels, writes that Rhodes crafted a “politically useful” “new reality:” he made it seem like nuclear negotiations with Iran began in 2013 with the election of President Hasan Rouhani, a “moderate” who allowed “a policy of “openness,”” though in reality they had begun months or years before.
Sherman echoed the Times Magazine profile timeline during an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and said that the election of Rouhani made the prospect of a nuclear deal real. As Rhodes reiterated in his Medium essay, which he wrote in response to heavy criticism and accusations that he misled the American public, discussions pre-Rouhani “did not get anywhere.”
“For two years, the P5+1, European Union, Iran ran around the world … We got nowhere,” Sherman said, using a term for the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. “When … Rouhani became president and … our secret channel had begun, we got a sense that there might be some traction, and timing made it possible.”
Sherman rebuffed Rhodes’ critics who claimed that nuclear negotiations “started a couple years before,” Rouhani’s election. But she also added nuance to Rhodes’ Times Magazine timeline and his ‘refined’ timeline in Medium: the “P5+1 process” concerning Iran’s nuclear activity, she said, “had started before [Rouhani became president].” However, “the world wasn’t ready” for a nuclear agreement in “the early 2000’s,” when Iran had 164 nuclear centrifuges rather than 19,000.
The ambassador softened her prior claim that Iran’s winter parliamentary elections were a choice between “hardliners and hard-hardliners,” an assertion which originally seemed to contradict Rhodes’ narrative that Iran agreed to the nuclear deal because of the “openness” created by the “moderate” Rouhani.
“I tend to talk about hardliners and hard-hardliners, but when [we] use the word ‘moderates’ it means something to us, which is not what it means in Iran,” Sherman said. “President Rouhani is a conservative cleric. He is a supporter of the Supreme Leader, and for us not to understand that would be naïve on our part. He certainly is trying to move to a more open economy, whether it moves to a more open society, we do not know the answer to.”
She also defended Rhodes’ defense of the Obama administration’s advocacy for the Iran deal, penned after the Times Magazine piece, and said it was transparent process.
“This process … was, I think, one of the most, if not the most transparent processes that have ever taken place for such a complex negotiation,” she said. “We literally held hundreds, literally, hundreds, well over two-hundred, briefings with the U.S. Congress, both secure and non-secure. We … had a very public process after the deal, where every single detail of this deal was public, every single detail.”
And the ambassador said, like Rhodes, that the agreement was met with heavy debate — a sign of its legitimacy.
“There was incredibly robust discussion throughout our country, throughout the Congress,” Sherman said. “There was nothing that was not above board here in this debate.”
