It was about a month ago when Biden administration officials held a closed-door briefing with senators on Iran’s nuclear program. As we discussed soon after, it was apparently a sobering discussion: Politico reported that U.S. intelligence agencies believe Iran is now at a stage in which it could produce enough material for a nuclear bomb in as little as two months.
With this in mind, the United States and its partners have spent months working on a new international nuclear agreement with Tehran, and an agreement was very nearly complete until late last week. Russian negotiators made eleventh-hour demands that threatened to derail the entire process, and created a diplomatic “pause” in the talks.
Whether the process can be salvaged is unclear, though U.S. officials have reportedly explored the possibility of an agreement that excludes Russia altogether.
The contours of a deal seem obvious: Iran shelves its nuclear program and allows international inspections of its facilities, and in exchange, the West pulls back its sanctions that severely weaken Iran’s economy. As Politico reported yesterday, it’s an agreement Senate Republicans still hope to prevent.
The entire Senate GOP conference — except for Rand Paul — is vowing to oppose the revived Iran nuclear deal that the Biden administration is pushing for…. The GOP senators, who backed Donald Trump’s move to exit the deal and impose crushing sanctions on Iran, are slamming the new agreement, which would include sanctions relief. “By every indication, the Biden administration appears to have given away the store,” the senators wrote in a joint statement.
Note, last month, a group of Senate Republicans warned in a letter to the White House that any deal would “likely be torn up” the next time there’s a GOP president. That letter was signed by 33 Republican senators.
Yesterday’s joint statement was endorsed by 49 GOP senators, suggesting Republican opposition is intensifying.
Part of what’s amazing about this is the fact that these lawmakers still consider themselves credible on the subject. Circling back to our earlier coverage, we’ve arrived at this dangerous point because Donald Trump abandoned the original international nuclear agreement with Iran — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). After that move, which congressional Republicans endorsed, the West lost verification access to Tehran’s program, and Iran almost immediately became more dangerous by starting up advanced centrifuges and ending its commitment to limit enrichment of uranium.
It fell to the Biden administration to clean up the Republicans’ mess.
In the short term, it doesn’t much matter whether GOP lawmakers approve of an agreement — if a deal eventually exists — since the policy wouldn’t have to be ratified by Congress. Members could vote on a measure to block the policy, but even if such a resolution were to pass — an unlikely scenario — President Joe Biden would veto it.
But that doesn’t make the 49 senators’ statement irrelevant. Indeed, the mere fact that these GOP lawmakers are speaking out and making threats may have an adverse effect on the process. Let’s not forget that in 2015, during the original JCPOA talks — known at the time as the P5+1 talks — 47 Senate Republicans wrote an open letter to Iranian officials, telling them not to trust the United States, as part of an effort to sabotage American foreign policy and derail the international diplomacy.
According to our allies, the GOP’s stunt had the effect of helping Iran during delicate negotiations and embarrassing the United States.
Seven years later, Senate Republicans aren’t being quite as bold in their sabotage efforts, but their efforts aren’t unfolding in a vacuum: Negotiators will almost certainly take note of the fact that one of the United States’ two major parties is already opposed to the deal they’re currently working on.
What’s more, the GOP’s rejection of the as-yet-unfinished policy appears wholly detached — again — from the discussion over whether the agreement actually works. As we’ve discussed in detail, the original JCPOA, as negotiated by the Obama administration, did exactly what it set out to do: The agreement dramatically curtailed Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and established a rigorous system of monitoring and verification. Once the policy took effect, each of the parties agreed that the participants were holding up their end of the bargain, and Iran’s nuclear program was, at the time, on indefinite hold. Soon after Donald Trump took office, the then-president held a lengthy White House meeting with top members of his national security team. Each of the officials told Trump the same thing: It was in the United States’ interest to preserve the policy. The Republican expected his team to tell him how to get out of the international agreement, not how to stick with it. When his own foreign policy and national security advisers told him the policy was working, Trump “had a bit of a meltdown.” Soon after, he abandoned the deal anyway, not because it was failing, but because Trump was indifferent to its success. Years later, his party is still reading from the same script. As for why Iran might enter an international agreement, knowing that a future Republican administration would rip up the deal, the calculus is straightforward: Something is better than nothing. The New York Times recently reported, “Even if a new agreement lasts three years, American diplomats and other supporters said it would still meet its main objectives: easing Iran’s economic pain while slowing its suspected march to a nuclear bomb.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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