President Barack Obama and his foreign policy team worry that the long and (so far) fruitless talks on Iran's nuclear capabilities will collapse if Congress passes new, tougher economic sanctions on Teheran.
The president pledged in his State of the Union address to veto new sanctions legislation. He has enlisted British Prime Minister David Cameron to press Congress to sit back and wait.
House Speaker John Boehner's response: I see your prime minister and raise you a prime minister. Without consulting with the White House, Boehner invited Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress next month on the threats posed by Iran and by Islamic terrorism.
American nuclear negotiators have a little more than five months to go before a June 30 deadline to reach a deal with Iran. But you can already see the flop sweat: Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a Senate committee this week that talks could be extended beyond the June deadline. That would be the third extension in this diplomatic slow dance.
If the deadline passes without an agreement, the bill would trigger sanctions that would torpedo Iran's oil and banking sectors and blacklist its mining, engineering, shipbuilding and construction industries.
An interim nuclear deal reached in November 2013 provided some economic sweeteners to Iran and established a six-month term for negotiations to reach a final agreement. "If Iran does not fully meet its commitments during this six-month phase," President Obama said, "we will turn off the relief, and ratchet up the pressure."
That warning was hollow. More than a year and two deadline extensions later, the relief is still in place but no final deal is in sight. The Iranians, meanwhile, don't seem worried about the West walking away from the table. Iran still stonewalls international inspectors, refusing to allow them to visit sensitive nuclear or military sites. Iranian officials have refused for years to answer questions about the country's nuclear weapons-related experiments.
Nor is Iran shelving its nuclear ambitions while talks drone on. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif recently announced that Teheran has begun to build two more nuclear reactors. That's not a good-faith gesture during negotiations to roll back Teheran's nuclear program. That's a thumb in the eye.
In his 2014 State of the Union address, Obama rightly boasted that the Iran sanctions "we put in place helped make this opportunity [for a nuclear deal] possible." Now Iran's economy is reeling from Western sanctions and the crash of oil prices. Its bargaining position is shaky. That doesn't guarantee a good deal, or any deal, particularly if Iranian negotiators figure they can stall indefinitely without more consequences.
U.S. and Iranian negotiators reportedly seek to hammer out a framework for a deal by the end of March. They'll know then, they say, if a final deal is possible by June 30.
At some point, the music has to stop. New sanctions should be set to kick in on June 30 if no deal has been reached. The president can call Congress the bad cop, but he shouldn't stand in the way.
Editorial on 01/28/2015