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Why The GOP Letter To Iran Is Such A Huge, Major Deal

March 19, 2015•

Originally published by Breaking Modern:

In a supremely strange move this week, 47 Republican senators took the unprecedented step of directly writing the leader of a foreign government in order to get in the way of a US president’s foreign policy talks with it. This is even though the US constitution, as any ninth grader has learned in social studies, puts a sitting US president in charge of foreign policy.

In its letter to the Iranian government, the GOP senators said: Don’t bother cutting a deal with President Obama and the United States right. Because, it said, the next “Republican president” will just reverse any agreement “with the stroke of a pen.”

This astounded news watchers around the world. Here’s why this development is so disturbing and why you should follow these developments closely.

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But first, let’s back up and look at the Iranian reaction to the letter. It certainly didn’t do much to dissuade Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif from continuing with US talks to limit nuclear weapons production in Iran.

In a public statement, Zarif said he wasn’t buying it, but that he now has a stronger understanding of constitutional separation of powers under the American system than the signatories of the letter do.

Confused in the USA

As American legal scholars and political analysts struggle to get their heads around the GOP letter and its implications, Iran’s Zarif offered some theories. The Republican senators, Zarif said, must “not understand international law,” said Zarif, a professor of international law, and they must not understand the US constitution, either. Either they are not “fully cognizant of the nuances of their own constitution when it comes to presidential powers in the conduct of foreign policy.”

Ouch. And he’s right, as any ninth grader making a B in the social studies could tell you straight away.

Under law and by custom, the executive branch is in charge of foreign policy – including treaty negotiations, which this is not.

While the Senate specifically and the legislative branch in general have a consulting role to play, especially in the ratification of treaties, the kind of agreement being contemplated between Obama and Iran is not one of them. In fact, President Bush arrived at a similar deal with Libya, which did not require congressional consent.

Furthermore, presidents historically honor their predecessor’s international promises regardless of their political party. They have to, for all the obvious reasons.

So, bottom line, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)’s notorious “bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran” plan will have to wait.

A Sign of Political Decline?

US lawmakers, for the first time anyone can remember, have publicly set out to undermine a sitting president during talks with a longtime adversary are astounding.

US Vice President Joe Biden accurately characterized the implications in this statement:

This letter sends a highly misleading signal to friend and foe alike that our commander in chief cannot deliver on America’s commitments — a message that is as false as it is dangerous.”

Of all people, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, got right to the heart of the issue.

The GOP letter, the Ayatollah said, is “a sign of a decline in political ethics and the destruction of the American establishment from within.”

Don’t All Countries Stick To Foreign Commitments Post Elections?

Forgotten in this tempest of partisan lunacy is a fact alluded to in Khamenei’s statement: “All countries, according to the international norms, remain faithful to their commitments even after their governments change.”

Iran knows this well. Why? Because if Iran hadn’t followed such “international norms,” it would be free to develop any nuclear weapons program they felt like, no matter what it had agreed to in the past. And that means there would never be grounds for the United States or any other country to impose economic sanctions on Iran.

This is why international observers in the US, Europe and in the Middle East are so blown away by the GOP letter.

The agreement that prohibits an Iranian nuclear weapons program is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran signed it in 1968, and agreed to an inspections regime in 1974.

Ah, but that was under the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The Shah was deposed in the 1979 Islamic revolution. The new government, the one currently led by Ayatollah Khamanei, nevertheless agreed to honor the international agreements signed by its predecessor, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

And this makes the Republican letter still more outrageous.

Why You Should Care

What you are watching now is a most bizarre spectacle. You’ve got the United States playing holier than thou, screaming to high heavens that Iran can’t be trusted and that the country poses a grave danger of developing nuclear weapons that it will sell or fire at Israel or even at us.

Yet Iran is and has been honoring a nuclear treaty signed by an entirely different government, one that was overthrown back in 1979.

But now you have 47 lawmakers contacting the leader of a foreign government directly, saying that, unlike Iran, anything the President of the United States negotiates with foreign countries becomes null and void when he leaves office. And this is not even after a full-fledged revolution, mind you, but just after an election.

Whatever moral high ground as United States once held on the international stage is collapsing into a deep deep valley. I’ll be watching these developments for you in the days and weeks to come.

Far be it for me to bend my knee to President Obama — neither the office of president nor the man currently occupying said office get much respect from this news junkie — but the Republicans have crossed the line about Iran.

Over much of the past year, the Obama Administration has been conducting negotiations with Iran over its nuclear energy program. By most accounts, talks have been fruitful, moving closer to the goal of a deal under which Iran would guarantee not to build nuclear weapons in exchange for at least a partial lifting of U.S.-led trade and other economic sanctions, some of which date nearly four decades to the Islamic revolution, the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the 444-day hostage crisis.

Under an interim agreement signed a year ago to jumpstart talks, Iran has frozen its nuclear program and the U.S. has not imposed new sanctions.

Because both countries have been more open to a deal than ever before, negotiations have gone well, so well that — in light of the White House’s recent announcement that it plans to normalize relations with Cuba — many Iranians hope that Iran too may resume diplomatic relations with the United States.

Americans and Iranians would both benefit from a thaw. There would be new economic opportunities, not least due to Iran’s geography, which makes it the shortest route for a pipeline for Caspian Sea oil and gas pipelines. Iran’s sponsorship of Hezbollah and cozier ties to Hamas, not to mention its influence in post-occupation Iraq and as a Shiite counterbalance to the Saudi Wahhabism that fuels much of radical Islamism, would make it a valuable Middle East partner. Forty percent of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz on the Persian Gulf — which is controlled by Iran.

First and foremost, however, in the American system diplomatic relations are and always have been the domain of the executive branch. It is a radical breach of the separation of powers, and rude and disrespectful to the office of the president, for legislators to undermine White House efforts to forge closer ties with another nation, which is exactly what the GOP is currently doing.

Members of Congress are pushing hard for new sanctions against Iran, or at least the threat of additional sanctions should the U.S. and Iran fail to come to terms soon. Pressing the issue further, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) took the extraordinary step of inviting right-wing Israeli prime minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress — without consulting with the president. “Inviting a foreign leader to speak at the Capitol without even informing the president, let alone consulting him, is a bald-faced usurpation for which there is no recent precedent,” notes Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson.

To put it mildly, Netanyahu is cra-cra when it comes to Iran. He repeatedly compares Iran to Nazi Germany (never mind the whole Iran has never invaded another country or built a death camp thing), warning that it’s 1938 (the year before Hitler started World War II) and that the world must act militarily or risk losing everything. Worried that a speech will likely bash Iran and thus lead to the scuttling of talks, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has asked Netanyahu to stay home.

As someone who has been on the receiving end of accusations impugning my loyalty to my nation of birth, I am always hesitant to accuse other Americans of being unpatriotic. In this case, with so much at stake and so much to be gained, however, I can’t avoid the conclusion that Congressional Republicans are engaging in diplomatic sabotage so extreme as to be anti-American, bordering on treason.