Touting the Iran nuclear deal as a major foreign policy accomplishment was one of the most uncomfortable moments in President Obama’s final State of the Union address Tuesday night.
Only hours before, the Iranians upstaged Obama’s big speech by detaining 10 U.S. sailors whose patrol boats had accidentally strayed into Iranian waters. The timing couldn’t have been worse, exacerbating growing tensions between the White House and Capitol Hill over the Iran deal after Tehran’s recent ballistic missile tests.
Many Democrats, pressured not to buck Obama on the biggest legacy-building foreign policy initiative of his presidency, swallowed hard and backed the deal, or at least didn’t vote to disapprove it.
Now those same Democrats, some of the president’s staunchest allies, feel particularly stung by Obama on the deal and have joined Republicans in calling on the administration to sanction Iran for its recent illegal missile tests, a violation of United Nations resolutions that falls outside the nuclear agreement.
Far from touting the Iran deal as the one bright spot in Obama’s foreign policy legacy, some Democrats are openly questioning how history will judge the administration’s deal-making with Tehran after early signs that Iran has no intention of playing by international rules when it comes to areas outside its nuclear program.
The optics became far worse on Wednesday, when Iran released footage of one of the sailors apologizing to Iran and complimenting his captors.
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a member of the Foreign Relations Committee who came out in late support of the nuclear deal last year, has called on the administration to stop dragging its feet and level sanctions on Tehran over its illegal missile testing in October and November.
“I think the U.S. needs to remain aggressively and vigilantly active in sanctioning Iranian bad behavior or we will wake up some day, this year, next year or 15 years from now and regret the [Iran deal],” he said last week. “We have to remain diligent in its enforcement.”
In December, the White House notified Congress of plans to impose sanctions for the missile launches, but abruptly reversed course without offering an explanation.
In the meantime, Tehran publicly argued that any new sanctions for the missile tests would jeopardize that agreement.
Critics quickly seized on the Obama administration’s reversal, viewing it as proof that a weak-kneed White House had caved to Tehran’s threats.
Iran, the Obama administration has argued, is making steady progress on some of its most essential commitments, and Implementation Day, when billions of sanctions will be lifted as a reward for compliance with the nuclear deal, could be just weeks away.
The White House insists it still intends to penalize Tehran over the ballistic missile tests and says the sanctions will come at the appropriate time. But critics argue the administration’s about-face in December has already damaged U.S. foreign policy credibility, perhaps irreparably.
“The administration’s hesitancy in imposing these sanctions and in general pushing back against Iranian aggressions has set in motion a dangerous dynamic that Iran will threaten to walk away from the deal any time a U.S. president tries to use pressure to respond to any malignant Iranian activity,” said Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonpartisan policy institute that forcefully opposed the nuclear deal with Tehran.
Others chalk up the administration’s December sanctions reversal to a bureaucratic snafu of little consequence over the long haul.
“It sounds like there was some very sloppy bureaucratic work,” said Barbara Slavin, the acting director of the Atlantic Council’s Future of Iran Initiative.
The Obama administration has been preparing sanctions for Iran’s ballistic missile testing for months, Slavin said, and is delaying them only to allow the administration time to navigate U.S. domestic politics and avoid “more headaches for the Iranian government.”
The U.S. penalties for Iran’s illegal missile launches will be so minimal compared to the nuclear deal’s sanctions relief that they won’t have much impact anyway, Slavin said.
Meanwhile, she said, Iran is checking off steps the nuclear deal requires in order for the windfall sanctions relief to begin. Just Monday, Tehran reported that it removed the core of its Arak heavy-water nuclear reactor and filled it with cement.
Members of Congress who are reconisdering their decision to back the nuclear deal are simply worried about their own re-elections, she said.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate to have second thoughts about it now. The Congress allowed this deal to go through” last year, she said. “We have to give it the test of history. If it holds up for a decade or more, it will be a major accomplishment.”
But others say that the Obama administration negotiated so poorly that the Iranians are rolling back only areas of its nuclear program that it’s already mastered, such as the heavy-water reactor, so that it can devote its time and resources to technologies that it hasn’t perfected, such as advanced centrifuges and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“When [the president’s] resting in his presidential library in Chicago and giving speeches, many of these Democrats are going to have to live with this deal and defend it in the face of evidence about how deeply flawed it is, in its architecture and construction,” Dubowitz said.
