Hiding in the standoff between President Obama and Congress over how to deal with international negotiations aimed at limiting Iran’s nuclear program is a very real concern: whether the United States is getting played by Tehran.
Experts have noted that throughout the 16 months of talks between the government of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and the “P5+1” group — the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China — there has been remarkable unity in Iran’s government. Some have suggested that the perceived split between moderates and hardliners in Tehran is really a myth cooked up by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to gain advantage in the bargaining.
“He has created the myth that the U.S. needs to give concessions in order to strengthen the ‘pragmatic’ or ‘moderate’ camp in power,” said Ali Alfoneh, an expert on the inner workings of Iran’s theocratic regime at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “Tehran is very, very happy with the current row in Washington.”
Ray Takeyh, another Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, praised Khamenei’s “genius” in an op-ed for the Washington Post on March 1. “He has routinely entered negotiations with the weakest hand and emerged in the strongest position,” Takeyh wrote.
Meanwhile, Obama has made clear to lawmakers that he’s going to make a deal his way, and has threatened to veto legislation that would impose new sanctions if the talks fail, as well as a bill to require him to submit any deal to Congress. The White House also is looking at ways to bypass Congress and use executive action to relieve existing sanctions written into U.S. law.
When 47 Senate Republicans highlighted the discord in Washington on Monday with an open letter warning Iran’s leaders that any deal not approved by Congress may not outlast Obama’s term in office, the president’s initial reaction was to accuse them of siding with Iran’s hardliners, in keeping with his contention that moderates in Tehran would be bolstered by a deal.
The administration’s criticism of the letter escalated over the week.
“This letter sends a highly misleading signal to friend and foe alike that that our commander in chief cannot deliver on America’s commitments — a message that is as false as it is dangerous,” Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday.
In an interview released Friday, Obama told Vice News he’s “embarrassed” for the Republicans who signed the letter.
But as the talks resume Sunday in Lausanne, Switzerland, many observers wonder why Obama didn’t use the letter as a chance to turn the Iranians’ own game back on them.
“Rather than having a temper tantrum, Obama should emulate [Bill] Clinton and use congressional and international opposition as leverage at the negotiating table to get a better deal with Iran,” Marc Thiessen wrote Thursday in the Washington Post.
Thiessen, a former adviser to the late Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., noted that Helms had dispatched him to Rome in 1998 to join the U.S. team negotiating the U.N. treaty establishing the International Criminal Court. Helms was an opponent of the treaty, but Clinton used that to gain leverage for the United States in the talks, Thiessen wrote.
It’s also what former President Ronald Reagan is widely believed to have done in 1980 after he was elected to succeed Jimmy Carter while negotiations to release 52 U.S. diplomats being held hostage by Iran dragged on. Though Reagan publicly said he would not interfere while Carter was still president, the Iranians came to believe he would take a much tougher approach once he was sworn in, reportedly through backchannel communications from the Reagan camp. The hostages were released just minutes after Reagan was inaugurated.
Lincoln Bloomfield, a former assistant secretary of state, said he’s mystified by the administration’s negotiating tactics.
“It looks to me as though no one in Iran is debating anything … but the Americans are in a debate with everyone I know,” he said, noting that creates a “pretty tough hill to climb for the negotiating team — not to mention the Congress.”
The president’s actions are raising the question, both in Tehran and in Washington, of whether he is negotiating on behalf of the American people, or just for his own legacy.
“Somebody needs to let the Iranians know that you’re going to have to deal with the American people and not just the Obama administration,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told reporters Tuesday.
Khamenei himself jumped into the controversy on Thursday, suggesting that the letter was a sign of a collapse of ethics in the U.S. political system.
“Of course I’m concerned because the other side is into deception, trickery and backstabbing,” Khamenei said in a meeting of the Assembly of Experts, a group of Shiite clerics who oversee his work in Iran’s theocratic political system.
The group recently got a new chairman, hard-line Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, amid reports that Khamenei may be gravely ill.
For now, Alfoneh said, Khamenei is managing the balancing act between hardliners such as the leadership of the Revolutionary Guards and the technocrats backing Rouhani to maintain a common front in the talks. But that could change quickly if he dies, or if his own power is threatened.
“The deal would be very fragile,” he said. “I can guarantee you that the nuclear deal and the overall relations with the U.S. is going to be an issue in the struggle for power.”
