A critical milestone in the Iran nuclear talks came and went Tuesday as the Obama administration brushed aside its end-of-March deadline for a deal, placing the president in an even worse position to sell any forthcoming agreement to a skeptical American public.
The broken March 31 deadline for reaching a political framework followed two previous elastic target dates that played into the perception that Obama is desperate for a deal and unwilling to walk away from the negotiating table without one.
The administration tried to put the best spin on the decision Tuesday with State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf arguing that enough progress had been made to warrant talks continuing until Wednesday, even as she acknowledged that “several difficult issues” remain.
Earlier in the day White House spokesman Josh Earnest said it doesn’t make sense to “abruptly end” the talks if both sides are “making progress toward the finish line” even as he signaled that Obama was growing increasingly frustrated by the delays.
But the latest extension only ratcheted up the pressure on Obama, giving critics plenty of new ammunition to attack the talks as overly conciliatory.
“It’s a reflection of the fact that there are still fundamental gaps between the two sides — that the Iranians have not made a strategic decision to give up their nuclear program in a fundamental way and turn the corner, and the president is showing a certain degree of desperation for a deal,” said Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“Obama needs the outlines of a deal he can sell that can pass the smell test or it will be laughed out of Washington,” he added.
The Brookings Institute’s Suzanne Maloney said the last-minute suspense demonstrates just how difficult negotiations with Iran can be.
Americans already have made serious concessions, allowing Tehran to retain a larger proportion of its centrifuges — 6,500 — than previously planned as long as Iran agreed to invasive inspections.
That concession was supposed to be balanced by vigorous enforcement and an equally painful compromise on the part of Tehran.
But over the past few days, Iran appeared to reverse course on an earlier agreement to ship enriched uranium stockpiles to Russia and instead wants to keep it, with promises to dilute it to non-weapon grade material.
One chief American negotiator, Maloney noted, compared the quest for a comprehensive agreement to trying to solve the Rubik’s cub. “Where one makes progress on one element may mean there’s more trade space on another element.”
Maloney is more cynical.
“For Iran, perhaps a more relevant analogy is to a shell game, where sleight of hand and a little showmanship bamboozle the unwitting observer,” she wrote in an article this week.
Tuesday’s extension also ramps up the timing pressure on Obama.
The administration undoubtedly would like to avoid announcing one of the most significant disarmament deals since the Cold War Wednesday on April Fool’s day or on Friday, which is both Good Friday and the beginning of Passover.
Any accord that will be reached over the next 48 hours will be vague by design, an attempt to reassure both sides’ domestic critics that a more comprehensive deal is still achievable and stave off action by Congress when it returns in mid-April.
The administration has a political problem, Dubowitz argues, because many Democrats and Republican in Congress don’t understand why the president is preventing them from weighing in on the most important disarmament agreement in the post-Cold War era.
“This is one of the few non-proliferation arms control agreements in which Congress hasn’t had a vote,” he said. “For the president to try to come back and sideline Congress, which was responsible for passing the sanctions that brought Iran to the negotiating table, is not going to play well on the Hill.”
Obama and his supporters will inevitably hail even the broadest framework announcement as a major breakthrough with Iran worthy of the history books. But the true test of Obama’s Iran legacy will likely take years for historians to evaluate.
“Did it lead to a more responsible Iran or a less responsible Iran?” Dubowitz asked. “Will it lead to a more violent Iran in sponsoring terrorism or a less violent Iran? In 10 years’ time, that’s when history will judge the wisdom of any deal.
And if talks end this week without a deal, Obama will have lost crucial momentum, leaving critics more convinced than ever that the two sides are fundamentally irreconcilable.
Such an impasse also would jeopardize Obama’s attempt to leave a historic Iran legacy and erase all interim agreements, know as the Joint Plan of Action, that have placed constraints on Iran’s nuclear advances since November 2013.
