Supporters of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal wanted to ease pressure on the rogue regime in other areas as soon as the agreement was finalized, according to a former top U.S. diplomat.
“Unfortunately, some countries were so pleased by the nuclear agreement that they felt it was unnecessary to run an annual U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning Iran’s human rights abuses,” Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in President Barack Obama’s second term, recalls in her new memoir.
Power, 48, doesn’t identify the countries that wanted to scrap the traditional denunciation in the months after the Security Council’s July 2015 endorsement of the nuclear agreement. But the episode dovetails with long-standing criticisms from Iran hawks, who argued that the agreement short-circuited Western efforts to counteract Tehran’s other aggressive policies, in order to avoid provoking Iran to leave the deal.
“I insisted we proceed, lobbying frenetically to ensure that the Iranian government’s deplorable treatment of its people got attention in its own right,” Power writes in The Education of an Idealist.
Such successes were all too rare, according to the leading opponents of the agreement, who maintained that the deal gave Iran the money to finance a multinational terrorism campaign while tying the hands of the United States and Western European powers.
“Against this aggression, what tools did the deal give us? Only the threat of snap-back sanctions, after Iran has already received its end of the bargain,” Sen. Tom Cotton said in October of 2017. “But when that’s the only enforcement measure, it’s like the death penalty being the only sentence for all crimes, from jaywalking to murder. The West is too afraid to pull the trigger, and as a result the Iranian regime gets away with everything short of murder, and many times murder itself.”
But Power dismisses such attacks on the agreement as “disheartening and extremely counterproductive,” a “politicization” of a pact that defused a nuclear crisis.
“The deal greatly reduced the likelihood that American service members would have to put their lives on the line in another American-led military conflict in the Middle East, which had seemed an imminent possibility at various points in Obama’s first term,” she writes.
That comment, from an adviser who worked in the administration throughout both terms, might surprise Iran hawks who believe Obama turned a blind eye to Iran’s malign behavior from his earliest days in the White House. Cotton, for instance, argued that Obama had decided to “appease the ayatollahs” by ignoring the 2009 Green Revolution protests, in order to open a door to nuclear talks.
“President Obama was willing to overlook Iran’s long history of treachery to pursue a nuclear deal at any cost,” Cotton said.
Power offers a different explanation for that silence.
“The president had been reticent when Iran’s ‘Green Revolution’ erupted in 2009, fearing that offering his vocal support would allow the Iranian government to caricature protesters as American-backed agents,” she writes in a brief aside.
