Sen. Tom Cotton had a tough circle to square on national television this week. The leading powers of the world--the United Kingdom, France, Germany, China, Russia, and the United States--had just scored a diplomatic victory against Iran.
And while that is good news for U.S. national security, it put our senator in a tough spot.
For the past year and a half, this broad coalition of countries--inspired by U.S. Congress-led sanctions and rallied by the Obama administration's diplomats--has been hard at work negotiating an agreement that would keep a nuclear weapon from the hands of Iran. Their initial work produced success, freezing and even rolling back parts of the Iranian nuclear program for the first time in history.
And last week they saw the greatest fruits of their labor yet: A historic framework agreement that would cut off Iran's paths to the bomb.
Senator Cotton was less than enthused about this remarkable achievement. During an interview on CNN, he hinted coyly at more aggressive ways of stopping Iran from achieving a nuclear weapon, telling the anchor "there's lots of kinds of military action."
When pressed further and asked if military action was preferable to the announced framework, the senator refused to answer.
Members of Congress like Senator Cotton who refuse to acknowledge the benefits of tough diplomacy suffer from a kind of tunnel vision that prevents them from offering any constructive criticism that goes beyond stubborn naysaying. They claim that the alternative to this deal is a better one, but they fail to provide any path to that outcome.
I like unicorns as much as the next guy, but sadly, they don't exist. To these critics, even engaging the Iranians is a grave misstep--despite the fact that inspectors on the ground are the ones ensuring Iran's compliance with any agreement.
When these folks oppose the very idea of diplomacy as a way to resolve problems, it's hard to take the rest of their commentary seriously--mainly because they can't offer any alternatives beyond military conflict. What would a "limited" military solution even look like? Are we to believe that the Iranian air force would sit idly by as their country was attacked? Or that Iranians would not retaliate with terrorist attacks throughout the Middle East or threaten to close major oil shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf?
Why risk all this--and the lives of our men and women in uniform--when we are running the table at these negotiations, providing us a more effective diplomatic way forward that has been proven successful so far?
All this is not to say that diplomacy is an easy route. Like football, diplomacy is a game of inches; our negotiators have months of hard work ahead as they hammer down Iranian commitments.
But scientists, diplomats, world leaders, journalists, and pundits have all acknowledged that this framework was a tremendous step forward for international security.
It's time to let rest the dogs of war and allow tough diplomacy to see us through to the finish line. Senator Cotton needs to either suggest realistic alternatives to the successes of our negotiators or get much more honest about the risks and costs of the military option he seems so eager to pursue.
The American people and our men and women in uniform deserve nothing less than an honest dialogue on such an essential security challenge.
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Brandon Fureigh is a native of Greenbrier and currently serves as the chief strategy officer for the Truman National Security Project.
Editorial on 04/11/2015