The Obama State Department Wednesday dismissed as “big words and big thoughts” an op-ed by two former secretaries of state sharply criticizing the Obama administration’s framework for a nuclear weapons deal with Iran.
“I didn’t hear a lot of alternatives,” said State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf. “I heard a lot of big words and big thoughts. I know the secretary values the conversations he has with his predecessors.”
The deal came in for very detailed criticism in a Wall Street journal op-ed published Tuesday night by Henry Kissinger and George Schultz. Kissinger led the State Department under President Richard Nixon, when Iran was still ruled by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Schultz, who served President Ronald Reagan, confronted a much-changed Iran under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
But both slammed Obama’s proposal. The two secretaries said that the version of the proposed deal detailed in the American framework differs materially from versions described by Iran itself and by the European Union; that it provides only a ten-year delay in Iran’s nuclear development; and that it does not require Iran to get rid of any of its equipment. Schultz and Kissinger also implicitly criticized Secretary of State John Kerry for allowing the Iranians to turn “the negotiation on its head” and create a situation in which “the threat of war now constrains the West more than Iran.”
Iran has mixed “shrewd diplomacy with open defiance of U.N. resolutions,” Schultz and Kissinger wrote.
“While Iran treated the mere fact of its willingness to negotiate as a concession, the West has felt compelled to break every deadlock with a new proposal. In the process, the Iranian program has reached a point officially described as being within two to three months of building a nuclear weapon,” the former secretaries continued. “Under the proposed agreement, for 10 years Iran will never be further than one year from a nuclear weapon and, after a decade, will be significantly closer.”
The op-ed also criticizes the Obama administration for failing to persuade Iran and its supreme leader to stop professing a “revolutionary anti-Western concept of international order.”
But Harf said the argument that the U.S. should have walked away from the negotiations because Iran wouldn’t fundamentally change the nature of its foreign policy “defies logic.” And she said the two former diplomats didn’t provide alternatives to the current negotiations.
“Ideally we would like them to stop supporting Hezbollah and the Houthis and to release all American prisoners but it defies logic to make that argument,” Harf said, noting that the negotiations are focused solely on Iran’s nuclear program.
“In a perfect world we would have an agreement that did all of these things but we’re living in the real world,” she concluded.
