U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry officially announcing the conclusion of an Iran deal at the Vienna International Center, Vienna, Austria, on June 14, 2015. Leonhard Foeger/Reuters/Corbis.
Will Congress Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory?
Reza Marashi
July 21, 2015
It’s not often that you get to witness
history being made. Even more rare: Watching the process of history unfold.
Over the past two years, I’ve had the good fortune of experiencing both. After
attending nearly every round of nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran
since 2013, I watched U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign
Minister Javad Zarif accomplish in Vienna what conventional wisdom said was
impossible. But living in Washington DC for ten years can make you paranoid: As
I watched Secretary Kerry discuss the comprehensive nuclear deal at the Vienna
International Center, I couldn’t help but focus on a huge challenge waiting for
him at home. We should be clear-eyed about the fact that some members of Congress
will spare no effort to kill this deal.
It was arguably the worst kept secret
in Washington that some in Congress would reject any deal that American
negotiators brought home. And while it is understandable to draw an equivalency
between perceived obstacles in Washington and Tehran, the reality is that Tehran
has cleared the way for successful implementation – if Washington follows
through on its end of the bargain. In Iran, parliament recently passed
legislation that ceded its authority to accept or reject the deal to Iran’s
Supreme National Security Council (SNSC). Most key SNSC members – including
Khamenei himself – are on the record supporting a deal, so there are fewer
domestic political complications in Tehran compared to what the White House now
faces in Washington.
Looking ahead, Congress will have a sixty-day
review period–until September 17–in which it can accept the deal, reject it, or
do nothing. After that, there will be a maximum of twenty-two days in which
President Obama can veto congressional rejection if necessary, and Congress can
then try to override Obama’s veto. Right now, successful Congressional sabotage
will be an uphill battle, but they can still turn things around. A Senate staffer
painted a clear picture of what lies ahead: “AIPAC [the American Israeli Public
Affairs Committee] went to [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu and told him
point blank, ‘We don’t have the votes.’ Netanyahu’s response? ‘Do it anyway.’”
Thus, it should be clear that the White
House has a fight on its hands. Another Senate staffer said last week that in
the immediate aftermath of the nuclear deal being announced, his office was
getting calls at a ratio of 10-1 against
the deal, almost entirely from supporters of pro-Israel groups trying to kill
diplomacy. They are a small minority compared to the overwhelming number of
Americans who support the deal, but they are more organized, better funded, and
ideologically rigid–a powerful combination in American politics that cannot be
discounted.
However, their efforts will not go
unchallenged because President Obama holds a powerful trump card. Unlike his
opponents who make hollow arguments about American weakness and Iranian
hegemony, Obama can try to win this fight the same way he won the battle over
ObamaCare: Using universally respected, bipartisan validators–military,
intelligence, political, and civil society–to appeal to America’s national
interests rather than the personal political interests of individual members of
Congress. The Obama administration has already embarked on a media blitz, and
its outreach efforts to Capitol Hill thus far range from public testimony to
private rounds of golf with the President himself. Supporters of the deal
within American civil society are also not taking this fight lightly. Rather
than sit passively, they are taking steps to fight fire with fire: Organizing
their own lobbying efforts, phone calls to Congress, and media outreach, among
other initiatives.
Obama can also remind members of
Congress that it would be unwise to turn their back on the international
community: If Congress vetoes the deal, it would be putting America in
noncompliance with an agreement made not just with Iran, but also five other
global powers. That will allow Iranian officials to say the problem lies in
Washington rather than Tehran, as well as restart various aspects of their
nuclear program with little international unity against such actions. The U.S.
would find itself in a Bush administration redux–having no good options because
its own policies eliminated all of them. By making this comprehensive case
together with the aforementioned validators, Obama can increase the likelihood
that he can peel off enough fence-sitting senators to resist the inevitable
pressure that comes with being in the crosshairs of powerful pro-Israel lobby
groups who are opposed to the deal.
Perversely, the nuclear deal has
another parallel with ObamaCare: the initial effort by Congress to torpedo it will
not be its last. Rather than graciously accept defeat and bow to popular will,
hawks in Congress will introduce and try to pass a variety of legislation that
kills the deal by blocking various aspects of American implementation–death by
a thousand paper cuts rather than with a shotgun. 171 House Republicans already
introduced such legislation before the
White House even submitted the deal to Congress for review. However, just like
the fight over ObamaCare, the hawks have no easy path to the numbers required to
kill it in Congress, the Supreme Court likely won’t overturn it, and future
presidents are unlikely to create unnecessary crises for themselves by
tampering with success. The vote count in Congress might be close, but as
things stand today, Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement should survive.
The White House and its supporters are playing this game wisely: They
understand that premature celebration could produce inadvertent defeat.
As Washington and Tehran carry out the
various steps to implement this deal, there is no doubt that the path will be
fraught with complications. On the technical side, the joint dispute resolution
process that was created as part of the deal will be critical to resolving
issues that may arise, big or small. On the political side, a variety of
volatile security issues in the Middle East have the potential to blow up in
their respective faces–literally and figuratively. The reality, however, is
that neither side wants this deal to fail. The political investment they have
made is massive and unprecedented, and the U.S. government now openly
acknowledges that the consequence of failure is war. For these reasons–and
despite the best efforts of some in Congress–the nuclear deal increasingly
looks like the banks in 2008: Too big to fail.
Reza Marashi is
research director at the National Iranian American Council in Washington, DC.
He previously served in the Office of Iranian Affairs at the U.S. Department of
State. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Atlantic,
and National Interest. On Twitter:@rezamarashi.