More prosaically, Senator McConnell seemed to have set the stage for Colorado’s campaign season. Almost immediately, an ad appeared featuring children of various ethnicities counting down from ten in different languages, with the last child saying “one” as a nuclear flash, followed by a billowing mushroom cloud, eclipsed the screen. It concluded: “A nuclear Iran is a threat to the entire world. Senator Michael Bennet supports Obama’s Iran deal and is jeopardizing our safety … Ask him why.”
The ad’s creator, who had previously run the Koch brothers’ youth outreach program, explained its significance:
[Bennet] chose global chaos and terror over world peace, America and Israel’s safety and security, and ignored the outcry from his outraged constituents … We will never forget he voted to hold the American people hostage and sided with terrorists and madmen to silence the innocent people he represents here in Colorado.
A cavalcade of Republicans then jumped into Colorado’s Senate race, citing the Iran agreement as the primary reason to oppose me. Businessman and self-funder Jack Graham seeded his campaign with $1 million of his own money. The Iran nuclear agreement “was the tipping point,” he said when asked why he was running. The National Republican Senatorial Committee recruited an Iraq combat veteran, Jon Keyser, into the race, in part as a result of my vote. Before he decided to run, Keyser traveled to Washington to attend the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Presidential Forum. When he returned home to Colorado, he claimed to have secured $3 million in commitments of soft money to back his campaign. Unsurprisingly, his first ad accused President Obama and me of wanting to “give these guys nuclear weapons” (the guys being the Iranians).15 After one debate, he told the press that he had been “taking the bark off of Michael Bennet” and that “Michael Bennet has failed Colorado on voting for Iran.” For good measure, he added that I wanted “to close Guantánamo Bay with the president” and bring the remaining ninety prisoners held at the facility “right here to Colorado.”
Darryl Glenn, an air force officer, won the Republican primary, and he beat the Iran deal drum right up to Election Day. In an October interview with Breitbart News Daily, he made it his first salvo, ahead of all other aspects of my record:
People are really angry about his support of the Iran nuclear deal. When you start thinking about the fact that he just recently spoke to the Denver Post, and he thinks everything’s fine. He’s not up there talking about how absolutely unconscionable it is with the ransom payments that are going out there, and potentially here we are feeding the number one world sponsor of terror, that could potentially use those funds against our own men and women that wear the uniform.
Glenn, like my other opponents, knew that he could claim anything about an agreement negotiated by the Obama administration and Iran—and at least some of it would stick to me. He parroted talking points, including the misleading claim that by unfreezing Iranian assets we were paying the Iranians ransom. The Republicans had seen the same polling that showed that it would be difficult for my campaign to recover against a well-funded line of attack on the Iran deal.
In the end, I won reelection to the Senate. Whatever my failings, the people I represented in Colorado seemed not to believe that voting “to hold the American people hostage and side with terrorists and madmen” was among them.
V. Throwing a Fit
The outcome of the election in Colorado may have owed something to what Coloradans were now learning about the implementation of the Iran nuclear deal. Looking forward, the deal had seemed like a close call. In the rearview mirror, the results could be seen more clearly. By early 2016, Iran:
• Had shipped twelve tons of enriched uranium out of the country
• Had filled the core of the Arak plutonium reactor with concrete, rendering it inoperable
• Had allowed the IAEA access to the entire nuclear fuel cycle of uranium enrichment, including centrifuge production shops and uranium mines and mills
• Had decreased the number of its centrifuges from 19,000 to 6,104, limited to the most basic models
• Stood to receive far less than the $150 billion claimed by the deal’s opponents during Congress’s consideration, meaning that while Iran could still fund conventional mayhem in the region, its economy would not see the lift that some of its leadership (and some opponents of the deal) had predicted
Contrary to the claims made in ads run against me, the deal had put Iran further away from a nuclear weapon. In February 2016, James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that Iran’s breakout time to a nuclear bomb had increased from a couple of months before the deal to about a year. This difference provided the United States, Israel, and our allies time to coordinate and plan should Iran attempt to bolt toward a bomb. The inspections and verification regime would also give us much greater insight into the Iranian nuclear program—information that would make any future military option far more effective if we ever had to make that fateful choice.
Moreover, because our intelligence assessments, as well as those of international observers, had concluded that the deal was working, it was increasingly seen as a successful product of American global leadership. Success had not been preordained. President Obama had taken a calculated risk that it was worth testing whether multilateral diplomacy could deliver a viable alternative to military force. Now that the deal was holding and delivering its intended outcomes, it became increasingly regarded as an example of US leadership reinforcing a rules-based international system to address a serious security threat.
These were known facts by the time the 2016 presidential election rolled around. Nevertheless, candidate Donald Trump, who possessed no experience dealing with nuclear issues and was profoundly ignorant on questions of foreign policy, campaigned on the same arguments used by my opponents in Colorado.16 He repeatedly labeled the Iran agreement “the worst deal that has ever been negotiated.” He said, “Iran should write us a letter of thank you, just like the really stupid—the stupidest deal of all time, a deal that’s going to give Iran absolutely nuclear weapons.”
In March 2016, early in the race, Trump stood before a crowd of about twenty thousand members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, in Washington’s Verizon Center and said his “number one priority” was “to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.” Speaking from a circular stage at the center of a basketball arena, he claimed he had “studied this issue in great detail. I would say, actually, greater by far than anybody else, believe me, oh, believe me.” The reaction from the crowd of AIPAC activists, perhaps the planet’s best-educated people on the deal, was uncertain laughter. In a related TV appearance, citing no evidence, Trump said: “I think it’s going to lead to a nuclear holocaust.”
By 2017, with Donald Trump now president, the State Department’s assessment was that Iran was complying with its obligations. Ambassadors from France, Germany, the UK, and the EU met with Congress and also expressed their strong view that Iran had complied. The IAEA, whose inspectors continued their work, confirmed the same.
Congress had required the president to certify every three months that Iran was complying with its commitments. It had drafted the certification requirement for a president acting in good faith. That oversight structure lost its meaning in a Trump presidency. Despite the known facts, the assessment of our intelligence agencies, and the opinions of our allies and multiple international authorities, and against the counsel of his own advisers, the new president, according to an administration official quoted in the Washington Post, “threw a fit” when asked to certify Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal.17
The second time he had a chance, President Trump refused to certify, claiming that the agreement was not in the national security interest of the United States. He kicked the issue to Congress, saying, “I am directing my administration to work closely with Congress and our allies to address the deal’s many serious flaws … In the event we are not able to r
each a solution working with Congress and our allies, then the agreement will be terminated.” To America’s allies, he said, “I hereby call on key European countries to join with the United States in fixing significant flaws in the deal, countering Iranian aggression, and supporting the Iranian people. If other nations fail to act during this time, I will terminate our deal with Iran.”
In Washington, people often make elaborate promises with no intention of keeping them—something President Trump has often done. In the case of the Iran agreement, he behaved differently but even more destructively: keeping a promise even when the facts proved he should break it.
President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the deal, announced on May 8, 2018, was an act of national self-sabotage. While we were right to make a critical—even skeptical—examination of the deal when it was first presented to Congress, the decision to scuttle it even though it was working and even though there was no alternative in place was like abandoning a lifeboat at sea because we wanted a better one, even with no better one in sight. Further, blowing up the Iran deal isolates our country from our closest allies while diminishing the credibility of America’s intention to abide by the agreements we negotiate. It drives a wedge in the transatlantic alliance—a community of interests and values we forged from the ashes of World War II. This outcome represents a gift to Russia and China, which benefit from a divided West. President Putin and President Xi wasted no time presenting themselves as defenders of the rules-based world order Trump had just abandoned.
Many of my Republican colleagues have defended President Trump’s decision by saying that the deal was flawed. Let’s think about that for a moment. All deals that are the product of tough negotiation between parties with divergent interests are going to be imperfect representations of the parties’ maximalist positions. Indeed, in this respect, the Iran deal has shortcomings; we didn’t get everything we and our partners would want (and neither did Iran get what it wanted). And, while I have no reason to believe that American negotiators did anything but use their leverage and expertise to press for as much as possible (the domestic politics surrounding the deal created a powerful incentive to do so), we might even grant that we didn’t get every last thing that we could have gotten in the deal. But even if we grant both these points, it does not then follow that we should tear up the deal we had. President Macron of France had even offered to build on the foundation of the deal by seeking additional concessions from Iran. President Trump refused. The deal was working, and President Trump now owns the consequences of abandoning it. My fear is that all of us, and particularly our women and men in uniform, will pay for his recklessness.
One of the grave consequences is the precedent President Trump has set for any future nuclear negotiations. As we now know, even the Trump administration sees the value of a potential settlement with North Korea. Any negotiation will occur in the shadow of his abandonment of the Iran deal. Knowing that the United States withdrew when Iran had complied with its terms ought to make Kim Jong-un skeptical about whether any deal he struck with the United States would be honored.
In addition, President Trump has the challenge of negotiating a better agreement with North Korea than the Iranian deal he ripped up. This will not be without its challenges. Until recently, President Trump has proved so eager to tie up a deal with North Korea that he has trumpeted Kim Jong-un’s commitment to denuclearize—a promise that North Korea has broken repeatedly in the past and has not actually made in the present. There is no timeline for denuclearization and no provision for an international inspections and verification program—the kind of program Obama had carefully put in place to constrain Iran. Intelligence assessments indicate that North Korea’s nuclear program is continuing. Up to the moment when the negotiations predictably fell apart in Hanoi, the president seemed to care only for the good opinion of his new best friend. “Cross my heart” was the extent of his verification regime.18
For its part, Iran will be liberated to build a bomb in secret if it chooses to do so. This will ensure that Iran is in the driver’s seat to decide whether to test our resolve to go to war. The regime will be free to creep toward a line that may leave us no choice but to attack its nuclear capabilities. As we knew before the nuclear deal was negotiated, military action would, at best, set Iran’s nuclear program back by several years. At worst, it would drag the United States into a protracted war in the Middle East—something our allies may very well let us fight alone.
Finally, we must be mindful of the dangers that President Trump’s decision poses to American leadership of the international order. Taken together with his decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement and his even more mercurial decision to bring American troops home from Syria, his withdrawal from the Iran deal endangers an international agreement that the United States took the lead in negotiating, after also taking the lead in building an international sanctions regime. Given this casual disregard for our own international commitments, we should worry about whether Trump’s decision undermines America’s ability to lead in the future. Will other nations go along with our sanctions policies? Will the major powers defer to us to lead important diplomatic initiatives? Will other nations trust us to keep our word?
VI. The Value of Values
The Iran nuclear agreement challenged the Senate to consider how to recalibrate our strategy toward one aspect of the turmoil in the Middle East. The insertion of domestic partisanship into the debate denied the American people the chance to consider fully the implications of the deal as well as broader questions relating to America’s role in the world. Throughout the Cold War, we were able to sustain decades of bipartisan consensus about how to fight Communist expansionism, even if different administrations of different parties pursued different policies and priorities. We badly need a similar bipartisan consensus to deal with the even more complicated world of today. In losing this opportunity on Iran, we postponed any attempt to develop a bipartisan consensus about America’s foreign policy in the twenty-first century.
The United States lost a fundamental organizing principle when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Cold War was not just a fight against the Soviets; it was a fight against tyranny. They were the builders of the Berlin Wall; the erectors of barbed wire fences and secret prisons; the invaders of Hungary and Czechoslovakia; the snoopers into people’s everyday lives; the grandstand of medaled gray men atop Lenin’s mausoleum watching tanks roll by during May Day parades. The United States was the champion of liberty and opportunity; architect of the Lend-Lease Act, which built the military strength of other nations in their struggle against fascism; sponsor of the Marshall Plan, which helped reconstruct a devastated postwar world; advocate of free expression, human rights, and democracy; underwriter of health, infrastructure, and agricultural projects across the developing world; principal sponsor of international law and the network of institutions anchored in the United Nations. If World War I had taught Americans that they were unavoidably part of the larger world, World War II taught us that we would have to lead it. The strategic objective was remarkably constant, and at its center was the idea that the citizens of the United States would benefit from a system of global politics governed by rules grounded in human dignity and freedom.
For Americans of my generation, the Cold War defined our foreign policy, for good and for ill. It also defined us as a people and defined who we were not. It gave us purpose, unified us, and made us deliberate about our role in the world. In important ways, it also constrained our actions—limiting to some extent our behavior abroad and disciplining our politics at home. In the fight against Communism, we made more than our fair share of egregious mistakes: among them, the witch hunts that come under the name McCarthyism; our ignominious penchant for supporting “loyal” dictators in developing nations; and the Vietnam War, which divided us as a people as well as greatly diminished our esteem among the world’s nations. Nevertheless, our foreign policy in those days and the values that underlay it strengthened our repu
blic at home and advanced US interests abroad.
The fall of the Berlin Wall disoriented us. Could America continue to lead the world without the moral and political organizing principle of an ideological foe? One answer was to reject the question; the triumph over Soviet Communism meant that the liberal order had been endowed with its own momentum. There were those who believed our political project was done; the trajectory of the world was set: we just had to be ready to watch democracy spread. That naive optimism ended when Osama bin Laden orchestrated his plot to fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. If the 1990s were characterized by a relatively benign incoherence, the first decade of the 2000s was characterized by a single-minded focus on responding to the pain, shock, and tragedy of 9/11. Since then, we have been fighting not a Cold War against a single rival superpower but a perpetual global war on terror that finds enemies everywhere and has led to catastrophic decisions. A perpetual war on terror has terrorized us.19
Americans’ ambivalence about our engagement in the world made us susceptible to the disjointed bluster of Donald Trump’s foreign policy in the first place. On the one hand, he decried (after supporting) the Iraq War and President Bush’s instinct to “nation build” or export democracy. On the other, he has overseen one of the largest increases in defense spending since Ronald Reagan’s buildup in the 1980s—rivaled only by President George W. Bush’s buildup at the height of his administration’s response to the September 11, 2001, attacks. He has deployed additional troops to Afghanistan and escalated all of our military engagements in the Middle East—before abruptly changing his mind just before Christmas 2018 and deciding to pull US forces out of Syria (where they were assisting Kurdish forces in the fight against ISIS) and letting it be known that he would likely cut the US presence in Afghanistan by half. The sudden announcement prompted the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis—the first resignation in history by a defense secretary over a matter of policy. Meanwhile, Trump has leveled threats of nuclear “fire and fury,” and of “CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.” He has blurred our doctrine for the use of nuclear force, asked the Department of Defense to develop low-yield tactical nuclear weapons for use on the battlefield, and suggested that Japan should think about developing its own nuclear capability. All of this undermines global nuclear nonproliferation.
The Land of Flickering Lights Page 19