• Limit the centrifuges at its Natanz plant to 5,060, compared with the 19,000 it currently possessed
• Reduce its proportion of uranium enrichment from 20 percent to 3.67 percent for fifteen years
• Reduce its uranium stockpile from ten thousand kilograms to three hundred kilograms for fifteen years
• Convert one of its enrichment facilities, known as the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, into a nuclear, physics, and technology center, with no centrifuges operating
• Disable its plutonium reactor and rebuild a modernized heavy water reactor in Arak under international supervision to support peaceful nuclear research and production for medical purposes while rendering it impossible to produce plutonium for a nuclear weapon
• Refrain from building any additional heavy water reactors in Iran for fifteen years
• Ship out of the country all spent fuel
• Provisionally apply the Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which ensures the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to continuously monitor Iran’s nuclear supply chain as well as to seek access to any undeclared suspicious location
• Allow the IAEA to monitor 24/7 the implementation of these measures for their respective durations, as well as to implement additional transparency measures
Those who understood its malign and dangerous role in the region, as I did, had doubts about whether Iran would adhere to the provisions of the nuclear deal and concerns about what might happen when the deal ended. But the agreement addressed the fundamentals of Iran’s nuclear program, subjected Iran to the most robust nuclear verification scheme ever negotiated, and earned support from virtually the entire international community, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, China, and Russia.
On its face, such an agreement might have seemed worthy of serious consideration. Instead, the day the agreement was released, Majority Leader McConnell set the tone for the Republican caucus, all but charging the deal’s negotiators with treason—“the Obama administration approached these talks from a flawed perspective: reaching the best deal acceptable to Iran, rather than actually advancing our national goal of ending Iran’s nuclear program.” Fifteen Republican senators issued statements, formally or in tweets, opposing the deal the day it was announced—some before the text had been submitted to Congress. In the days that followed, senators raced one another to the floor, held press conferences, and stoked social media accounts to exhibit their outrage.
“The deal shreds the legacy of arms control and nonproliferation that the United States has championed for decades—it will spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East that will be impossible to contain,” said Senator Jim Risch, of Idaho, who was the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after the chairman. “This deal falls disastrously short of what the Obama Administration originally promised and gives the Iranian government what it desires.”
Senator David Vitter, of Louisiana, also took to Twitter on July 14: “I think this #Iran agreement is a really, really bad deal for America, for Israel, and for freedom.”
As soon as the deal was announced, Senator Ted Cruz released a long statement—so long that it had to have been written beforehand—condemning the agreement. He wrote: “This is a staggeringly bad deal. It is a fundamental betrayal of the security of the United States and of our closest allies, first and foremost Israel.”
Presidential candidate Donald Trump was typically succinct: “The fact is, the US has incompetent leaders and even more incompetent negotiators. We must do better for America and the world. We have to Make America Great Again.”
Some senators opposed the deal simply to punish President Obama or to preempt a foreign policy win for the administration. Others saw an opportunity to score points on the campaign trail. Opponents of the deal popped up an advocacy group called Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran to teach Americans “about the dangers of the proposed Iran deal.” The group promised to run a thirty-five-state ad campaign during the sixty-day review period—in the crosshairs were undecided Democrats. Prime Minister Netanyahu, as well as many other elected Israeli leaders, made their opposition widely known.
For Republicans with national ambitions, the fight over the Iran deal became a chance to court megadonor Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate, multibillionaire, and avowed opponent of the nuclear agreement. In 2012, Adelson had contributed $93 million to support Republican candidates and causes.9 To the crowd of Republican presidential hopefuls in 2016, Adelson’s support was potentially decisive. Winning it meant outdoing competitors in parroting his views on the Middle East.
To get a sense of those views, consider Adelson’s suggestion that we start negotiations by dropping a nuclear bomb in the Iranian desert:
And then you say, “See! The next one is in the middle of Tehran. So, we mean business. You want to be wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position and then continue with your nuclear development.”10
Adelson also favored unilaterally moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem before the conclusion of final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians—which now has come to pass under the Trump administration—and embraced the construction of Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Adelson’s worldview seeped into Washington’s debate about the nuclear agreement as Republicans routinely solicited the casino magnate’s advice on the proper conduct of US foreign policy. Over the course of this debate, a parade of Republican presidential hopefuls made the trek to Adelson’s Venetian hotel in Las Vegas, tripping over one another to stake out ever more hawkish positions to win his endorsement. This became known, informally, as the “Sheldon primary.” In effect, the gravitational force of a single donor pulled Republicans toward a position that practically speaking had no chance of achieving the same outcomes as the agreement, short of war. A debate over national security had been reduced to the cruder forms of partisan calculation.
Back in Washington, politicians of both parties understood the peril of crossing Adelson on this issue. Without the specter of Sheldon Adelson in the background, Tom Cotton’s letter to the mullahs would never have received forty-six signatures. When Netanyahu addressed Congress in March 2015 about the Iranian nuclear program, Sheldon and his wife, Miriam, sat as guests in the House gallery. As Netanyahu spoke, Miriam’s purple Hermès purse fell from the balcony, landing on a congressman. Fair warning!
IV. “A Proof of Our Strength”
As the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent up for election that year, in what is very much a swing state, I was acutely aware of the political realities influencing the Senate’s consideration of the Iran deal. A cross section of Republican and Independent leaders in Colorado warned me that a vote for the Iran deal would demonstrate that I was the president’s lackey, not an independent voice for my state. A vote of approval, they said, would ensure that opposition super PACs would descend on Colorado throughout the campaign. A vote against would keep them at bay.
As chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, I had seen national security become an Achilles’ heel in the 2014 elections, with Democrats blamed for many vexing foreign challenges, including the proliferation of ISIS.11 In my case, internal polling showed that the Iran deal was the only line of attack from which I would be unable to recover using response ads. In other words, a series of negative ads hitting me on my support for President Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal—opponents for some reason always felt compelled to mention Obama’s middle name—could be a fatal blow.
A no vote, on the other hand, would provide a vote against President Obama and seem to project “strength”—as certain voices on the right conceived of strength—on national security. It would also relieve me of responsibility if Iran conducted an attack on US interests during the course of the campaign.
By mid-August, a super PAC began to air ads in various states, including Colorado, urging members of Congress to vote against the agreement. Presented un
der the tagline “Veterans Against the Deal,” the ads featured a retired staff sergeant describing how he had been injured by an Iranian bomb. The sergeant explained:
Every politician who is involved in this will be held accountable. They will have blood on their hands. A vote for this deal means more money for Iranian terrorism. What do you think they’re going to do when they get more money?
The ad concluded, “Call your senator. Tell them no deal with Iran. If you don’t call, who will?”
I began placing a series of my own calls. Former senator Barack Obama—now the source of my political discomfort—once wrote that the best part about being in the Senate was that you could get your phone call returned from anyone in the world at least once. I have found that to be largely true and have used this privilege, in particular, to meet journalists and writers whose books matter to me. In the case of the Iran deal, so many people were anxious to voice their opinion that we could have filled the schedule without making any calls at all. Still, my office added numerous people to the schedule in an effort to seek a variety of perspectives and to examine more closely the technical details.
Meanwhile, President Obama made his case for the Iran deal in a speech at American University. He argued:
So this deal is not just the best choice among alternatives—this is the strongest non-proliferation agreement ever negotiated. And because this is such a strong deal, every nation in the world that has commented publicly, with the exception of the Israeli government, has expressed support. The United Nations Security Council has unanimously supported it. The majority of arms control and non-proliferation experts support it … I’ve had to make a lot of tough calls as President, but whether or not this deal is good for American security is not one of those calls. It’s not even close.
As his speeches often are, this one was a logical and careful exposition of the merits of the agreement.12 One by one, he addressed the arguments of the deal’s opponents. But, in this case, he was overselling. For many of my Senate colleagues, just beginning to deliberate, this was indeed a close call or at least a very difficult one. Some were facing voters—not to mention organized interest groups—who believed that rejecting the deal was the call that was not close.
I myself had several contextual misgivings about the agreement even before studying its details. First, I thought it possible that administration officials had been too hungry for a deal, wanting to score a dramatic diplomatic win entering the last year of a presidency. Although I had no way really to know, it was not apparent to me that Iran ever believed we would walk away from an agreement. (In my days working for Phil Anschutz, we used to say that any deal worth doing would be one that the parties would have walked away from at least three times.) This made me wonder whether we had negotiated its terms as vigorously as we could, including, vitally, the length of some of the restrictions.
Second, some proponents of the deal asserted that we should approve it because it might strengthen President Rouhani and isolate hard-liners, leading Iran to moderate. This overestimated the upside. I had heard enough—from people with on-the-ground experience in the Middle East of Iran’s dangerous behavior—to conclude that in evaluating the deal, prudence required assuming that Iran would never moderate, would likely cheat, and would remain our committed adversary.
Third, even if the terms of the deal were acceptable, I wondered whether the United States had the attention span to enforce them. For Iran, this deal represented its most important piece of business. Its leadership, therefore, would focus on Iran’s equities at every moment. The United States, on the other hand, had a vast array of other concerns, and popular support at home for any of them could be fickle. Many Americans could not distinguish between Iraq and Iran, Sunni and Shia. The Middle East was also very far away. Sheer distance might create political distortion that could distract us from securing our interests over the long term.13
The Iranian Americans I met who opposed the deal were particularly insistent that the United States had been outnegotiated. This seemed to have less to do with the substance of the agreement than with our differing worldviews. One person who had left Iran in 1979 after the fall of the shah told me that we in the West are always asking what time it is, while Iran is building the watch. Iranians think in centuries, he said, and we think in two-year election cycles.
Not surprisingly, as a general matter I discovered that people from the Middle East had a far more nuanced view of the situation than people—especially politicians—in the United States. Not that they disagreed among themselves about the merits of the deal any less than Americans did; if anything, they may have disagreed more heatedly. But they offered an informed, if sometimes self-interested, view. (In general, they also had a more sophisticated understanding of the United States than my colleagues and I had of their countries. They certainly did not need a civics lesson from Tom Cotton.)
Finally, I met a former high-ranking Israeli defense official who expressed ambivalence about the deal but concluded that it was the best of the available bad choices. During the course of our conversation, he observed, “There are no prophets in our time.” As I reflected on the blazing partisan rhetoric in Washington—particularly from those who had objected before reading the deal—it occurred to me that this was a particularly useful observation: grounded in humility and informed by a recognition that diplomatic solutions come more often in small steps than in a thunderclap of revelation.
By the end of the summer, my review had included briefings from American defense, national security, and intelligence experts; international inspection and verification experts; regional experts; former Israeli military and intelligence officials; and the P5+1 ambassadors as well as Israel’s ambassador to the United States. I had read countless pages of background material. Sheldon Adelson had called me twice.
And I had spoken with President Obama. Obama was not a schmoozer and arm-twister in the manner of Lyndon Johnson, to put it mildly, but if he thinks you’re heading the wrong way—not so much politically as intellectually, on the merits—he can be effective in making you feel the force of that perception. On one occasion he invited the entire Democratic caucus to the White House to discuss the Iran deal. He had reasoned, compelling answers to each question and every criticism. His arguments did not eliminate the need for me to complete work with outside experts, or consider the perspectives of my constituents, few of whom were as convinced as the president. I concluded in August that the agreement presented the best available way to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, to protect our ally Israel, and to avoid another war in the Middle East.
Among other things, it did not seem plausible to me that new—particularly unilateral—sanctions would result in a better deal. Failure to conclude the deal on the table would exhaust our allies’ patience and their willingness to sustain the multilateral sanctions that created leverage for the negotiators in the first place. The lifting of sanctions in the absence of a deal would send billions of dollars to Iran without any oversight of its nuclear program.
I retained deep concerns about what Iran’s nuclear program could look like beyond the ten- or fifteen-year time horizon of some elements of the deal, but I also knew that shortsighted decisions had left us with an array of bad choices. Iran used the Iraq War—and the suppurating chaos that had infected the region ever since—to expand its sphere of influence across the Middle East and to bolster its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen.
During the pendency of the Iran debate, I never took issue with Coloradans who believed it was morally wrong to deal with Iran: “Don’t shake this dirty hand,” as one friend expressed it to me. Although I did not agree with where that sentiment led, I understood it to be a principled position. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s statement that the “barbaric” Jewish state “has no cure but to be annihilated” would be sufficient for some to say no to any deal. However, it seemed to me that Iran’s dangerous tendencies and ill intentions would only become more of a threat
if backed by nuclear weapons. I also believed that even as we implemented the nuclear deal, we would have to do more to counter Iran’s conventional threat in the Middle East.
In September 2015, I put out a public statement to explain my position. It made an additional point:
We live in dangerous times. Our young men and women in the military—so many Coloradans, so many Americans—have been asked to sacrifice so much. None of us can have any doubt that if called upon again, our men and women in the Armed Forces would rise to any challenge, anywhere in the world. We honor their courage and spirit of sacrifice—and we demonstrate confidence in ourselves—by exhausting diplomatic options before we turn to military ones. This is not a sign of weakness but a proof of strength, and it will help us rally our allies to our side if ultimately we need to act militarily.
Later that month, Majority Leader McConnell attempted to move a resolution of disapproval to the Senate floor pursuant to the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act. A procedural vote failed, 58–42. It fell below the sixty votes required to end debate. Four Democrats joined all fifty-four Republicans to support moving to the resolution of disapproval. Maintaining the pressure, McConnell filed the identical motion again immediately after it failed. Twice in the next week, we took exactly the same vote with exactly the same result.
It is interesting to consider the dimensions of these votes. They permitted individual members of Congress to signal their endorsement or rejection but allowed Congress as a whole to refrain from upending the agreement—or provoking a constitutional crisis with the Obama administration—unless the deal really was egregious. Only then could both chambers pass a resolution of disapproval and overcome the administration’s veto with supermajority votes. This balance may have favored the executive branch to the detriment of the legislative, but that tendency is not unknown or unwelcome in American diplomatic history.14 The Senate engages in its share of theater by voting on symbolic measures designed to score political points; the two parties took shots at each other with measures on Keystone XL. But McConnell, smelling blood in the water, was aggressive in this case.
The Land of Flickering Lights Page 18