RICHARD BAEHR: IRAN IS ON BOTH SIDES OF THE TABLE
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=12323
Iran is on both sides of the table
It is a general rule of negotiations that you don’t negotiate with yourself. This advice is intended to prevent one side from being the only party that offers bridging proposals or compromises, and continues to offer more even after every offer is rejected as inadequate by the second party.
In such cases, the negative party simply waits to see how far the offering party will go, and whether it will eventually come around to fully accepting every demand. The offering party proves, by its succession of improved offers and its unwillingness to give up on the negotiations, to be the more desirous, even desperate, to conclude a deal. Such a strategy inevitably means that the offering side will lose on the substance of the negotiations.
However, if the real goal of the offering side is simply to conclude a deal, any deal, and the terms of the deal itself are less significant, then it may still regard a negotiating defeat as a victory.
The negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 over Iran’s nuclear program have provided pretty clear evidence that the United States has been playing the role of the offering party, and Iran that of the negative party. The other members of the P5+1 have been somewhere in between, also anxious to reach a deal and resume commercial activity with Iran, but not as anxious as the Obama administration to give away the store on the various features of Iran’s current nuclear program that they will be allowed to retain and on the inspections regime going forward. In fact, one member of the P5+1, France, has even argued that the United States has at critical stages in the negotiations all but lobbied for Iran’s position in the negotiations with the other P5+1 members, U.S. President Barack Obama has made it clear that his real goal in chasing after Iran for almost all of his six-plus years in office, was to conclude a deal over Iran’s nuclear program that would enable Iran to rejoin the “community of nations,” whatever that term might mean to him.
As seen in the recent meeting between Obama and Cuban leader Raul Castro, nothing brings a broader smile to the president’s face than slapping hands with a former foe (even if that foe is totally unreformed, despite our reaching out to touch him). The big handshake between Obama and an Iranian leader after the next round of talks, or maybe after another round or two after the next one (if that is what it takes to give the Iranians what they want), will have the president smiling even more widely. Iran can continue to threaten to wipe out the U.S., and Israel too, and continue to aggressively push its interests all over the region, but we will have dropped our enmity, and the president can claim his policy of diplomacy rather than war has again been successful (see Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria for other success stories).
The last week of negotiations with Iran in late March provided perhaps the clearest evidence yet that the Obama administration has no meaningful red lines in these talks, and in the end will concede to pretty much every Iranian demand. As Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communication Ben Rhodes has publicly proclaimed, reaching a deal with Iran on its nuclear program during Obama’s second term is just as important to the White House as passing health care reform was for the administration in the first term. It is the biggest policy initiative in play in the foreign policy realm and Obama and his agents will stick with it until they get it done, whatever “it” may turn out to be.
In the final weeks before the last self-imposed deadline of March 31, extended of course for a few days because Iran stuck to its guns, the P5+1 made another in a long series of retreats from its initial negotiating posture. The Hill newspaper identified five major retreats by the P5+1 in the final stages of the latest round of negotiations: banning uranium enrichment; capping centrifuges at 1,500; shuttering secret nuclear facilities; ending Iran’s ballistic missile program, and finalizing a 20-year deal.
This week, it became even clearer how far the P5+1 have moved, despite the release of deal summary points after the last round ended that suggested something quite different. In fact, immediately upon their return home from Lausanne, Switzerland, the Iranians publicly boasted of their negotiating achievements, claiming that the American talking points on the deal were false. Mixed in of course were a few more “Death to America” chants, a recommitment to eliminating the State of Israel and a reiteration of all the areas in which the negotiations would have zero impact, such as Iran’s other military programs and its overseas commitments (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza, to name a few).
American negotiators, led by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and the president himself, assured Americans that Iran’s public face on the deal, and its continued bellicosity, were nothing more than what was needed for domestic consumption to cover up the concessions the Iranians had made in Switzerland. The Iranians responded by stating publicly that there would be no deal unless all sanctions were eliminated the day a deal between Iran and the P5+1 was signed.
Kerry had argued publicly that the U.S. had not and would not agree to that, but Obama signaled this week that on this, too, “Yes, we can.” The president shifted to a new line of argument: not to worry about sanctions relief since there were always sanctions “snap-backs” if Iran misbehaved. Instead of Iran earning sanctions relief by good behavior, it would get sanctions removed at the start (a quick $50 billion in their pockets, with another $80 billion soon to follow) and if it then misbehaved, some of the sanctions might “snap back.” It is pretty clear that the president’s view of things at this point was that the two sides (or at least one side) had come so far, that no single unresolved issue was going to cause his deal to go up in smoke.
If you don’t think the threat of sanctions “snap-back” is viewed as a real deterrent to cheating on the agreement once the Iranians have their money, then you don’t think like Obama. The alternative is that you think like him, and probably don’t care if they cheat (after all, he would have likely gotten his handshake with some Iranian leader at a signing ceremony by the time they started cheating) or you are part of the professional pundit class that is required as a condition of employment to approve of everything he does (e.g. you work for Vox, The New Yorker, or The New York Times, among others).
Jeff Jacoby wrote this week that the real threat from Iran was not that the Iranians were lying, but rather that they were not. What is real, whatever deal they sign, are the threats to Israel, the re-arming of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the continuation of an irreconcilable conflict with America. Iran has been truthful about what it has demanded in the negotiations and what it is getting. It is our side that seems to have been faking it with a release of a collection of deal points to suggest we were pretty much there, and the Iranians had moved on a bunch of issues.
The critics of the deal, including three former secretaries of state and experienced arms negotiators, are all voices in the wilderness at this point. Our erstwhile negotiating partner in the P5+1, Russian President Vladimir Putin, has announced that now is the perfect time to deliver an advanced missile defense system to Iran, which will make any military strike against the regime significantly more difficult (not that the military option was ever even “on the table” for Obama). Obama’s response to Putin’s announcement was the usual unflappability (perhaps better described as an Alfred E. Neuman-like “What, me worry?”).
Obama commented that he was surprised it took Russia so long to decide to do this. Keep in mind that Obama was heard on an open microphone before the end of his first term telling a Russian leader that after he was re-elected, things would get easier between the two countries, presumably meaning that there would no longer be political obstacles to making concessions to Russia to improve bilateral relations. The Russians have caught on. Their invasion of Ukraine has drawn minimal Western response, and the weapons sale to Iran will likely be the first of many such sales.
Putin has learned that he can taunt the United States and its president without any serious repercussions. Iran may have learned something more, that the president is not really an opposing party at the negotiating table. His eagerness for a deal is so strong that it trumps any resistance even as Iran hardens its terms. It must seem at times to the mullahs that Iran is on both sides of the table.
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