RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the multiyear talks between Iran and the P5+1 nations carried on toward an interim agreement, and eventually the unsigned final deal that one side (ours) hailed, the Iranians played a card that they continue to play today. That card was the bluff that they would walk away if unsatisfied with the concessions offered by the U.S., other permanent U.N. Security Council members and Germany. The Iranians caught on that President Barack Obama was legacy-obsessed and would always concede rather than risk them walking away.

In his first two years in office, blessed with a huge majority in the House of Representatives and a filibuster-proof 60 Senate seats, Obama’s Democratic Party was able to push through health care reform (the Affordable Care Act), financial reform (the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act) and a near trillion dollar stimulus package to tackle the economic downturn caused by the real estate and related Wall Street collapse. Then in the 2010 midterm elections, the evil empire struck back (if one was to believe America’s mainstream media). Tea party Republicans provided the energy for an enormous political shift that gave the House of Representatives back to the Republicans and greatly reduced the Democrats’ Senate advantage. The nation was in for four years of political gridlock. 

After Republicans had another successful midterm elections triumph in 2014, capturing control of the Senate following Obama’s re-election in 2012, Obama’s strategy shifted. To become a significant president, he needed to accomplish things that the Republican-controlled Congress could not thwart in his final two years in office. This led to executive orders on immigration (effectively not to enforce the nation’s immigration laws) and continued lawmaking by executive branch agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Democratic-controlled National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Communications Commission. Most significantly, it led in foreign affairs to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran nuclear deal) and the initiative to restore relations with Cuba. 

One thing that become clear both in the final month of negotiations ahead of the Iran agreement and in the president’s recent trip to Cuba and Argentina was his single-minded pursuit of completing his objectives. In Cuba, nothing was going to interrupt the president’s mission to cozy up to and open the door to the Communist regime, not even horrific terrorist attacks in the heart of Europe. The president posed before a monument depicting Che Guevara, did the wave at a baseball game, and later danced the tango in Argentina, while forensic teams picked up body parts in Brussels. The president was able to spare close to a minute in his speech in Cuba to condemn the attack by “extremists,” who of course he did not identify as part of a larger problem of Islamic radicalism. 

Virtually every day in the final weeks of the Iran nuclear talks in Vienna, there were media reports of additional concessions by the American negotiating team, led by Secretary of State John Kerry and top State Department official Wendy Sherman. The team in Vienna, or the State Department back in Washington, had their talking points prepared to argue with the media that the administration had not backed down from previous red lines and things were more complex and balanced than they seemed. In the face of some better informed journalists who knew the truth, the administration;s representatives fell back on arguments that the deal was balanced and good for the security of the U.S., Europe, Israel and Arab nations, and would serve to keep Iran from becoming a nuclear power for 15, maybe 20 years. 

After the deal was supposedly done, regular and increasingly provocative violations by Iran have been ignored, including the capture of American sailors and their degrading treatment before being released. A prisoner exchange allowed for the release of some but not all Americans held captive in Iran, with side payments (bribes) to Iran for a few billion (on top of the $100-150 billion in frozen Iranian funds released through the JCPOA) to sweeten the prisoner deal. Naturally, the State Department argued that the cash transfers were an unrelated payment, connected to earlier unsettled issues. 

Iran conducted tests of ballistic missiles in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and put in a large order from Russia for new weapons and an air defense system.

Michael Rubin, a critic of the Iran deal, wrote, “Secretary of State John Kerry front-loaded Iran’s payday for all the wrong reasons. If the [nuclear deal] was meant to last 10 or 15 years, it would make sense to release the cash over that time frame.

“But, because Kerry didn’t want any successor holding Iran’s feet to the fire on compliance with the deal, he gave Iran its payday up front. It was wholly predictable — and indeed, it was predicated early and often — that Iran would invest that money disproportionately in its military and not actually help its own people.”

In essence, had the $100-150 billion been released in tranches, Iran would have had incentives to comply with other terms of the deal and stick with it. But with all the money released at once, Iran was free to do as it chose and it held all the leverage going forward. 

Why did the administration’s team take this approach? It is easy enough to answer this one as well as any other question about the reason for any similar negotiating concessions made in the final months in Vienna. Iran threatened to walk away from the deal if its demands were not met. So Iran’s demands were met over a period of several weeks, another piece of the agreement revealed every other day it seemed. And the extent of American capitulation never received the full media impact it should have. Some of our P5+1 partners mentioned in off-the-record leaks to reporters that the Americans seemed to be behaving like Iran’s lawyers with its supposed partners in the final stages of negotiations to insure the deal got done. 

It should therefore not be all that surprising to read of the latest brouhaha, concerning Iran’s access to the U.S. financial system or the use of dollar denominated transactions. In testimony just months back, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew went on the record. “Iranian banks will not be able to clear U.S. dollars through New York,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, or “hold correspondent account relationships with U.S. financial institutions, or enter into financing arrangements with U.S. banks.” But now Iran wants to be able to do this and is demanding this additional concession from the Americans. 

Why should one expect that for the first time in this process the American team will demonstrate it has a spine? After all, the Iranians now have had much or all of their oil funds already released and might feel free to walk away from the agreement. Obama is still president, and that would be destructive of the legacy he is trying to solidify these last two years. The Iran agreement was described by the president as the signature foreign policy achievement of his presidency. There simply is no chance that the U.S. team will hang tough if there is any risk of the deal collapsing. 

Does the president need to fear that Democrats in the House or Senate will turn on him because of the record of Iranian misbehavior, and American indifference to it, after having walked the plank under intense pressure by the president and his whips in the Senate last summer to support the agreement? The intense partisanship in Congress and the country argues against any serious challenge by enough Democrats to make any difference. The president is their man from their party. So they will stick with him now as they did then. In the Senate, where half the members may pose as president-elect each night, there are memories for Democrats of their vote on the Iraq war with a president from the other party and how that has created problems down the road for national candidates. Senate Democrats would rather double down and stick with the administration rather than admit they were wrong about something so important, so soon after their vote on the deal. 

In poker, there is an expression that if you don’t know who is the patsy (someone easily taken advantage of) in the game, then the patsy is you. The American negotiating experience with Iran has carried over for years and there is a pattern. Iran makes demands and it either explicitly threatens that if we do not agree it will walk away and tear up the nuclear deal or have us fear this without saying it. So we break down and give away the store. Iran may be continually bluffing, because so far the deal has been very good for it, and as long as we continue to fall for the bluff of an early exit if we don’t accede each time, it can continue to make new demands and make the deal even better from its perspective. If you are bluffed out of a winning hand in poker time after time by the same player, chances are pretty good you are a champion patsy. Welcome to America in year eight of the Obama administration.