What Price Peace in Our Time? An author looks at the Iranian nuclear deal with hope.

Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy

By Trita Parsi (2017, Yale University Books) 472 pages including note, and index

Trita Parsi begins this odyssey of the Iranian nuclear negotiations with an anecdote.

On Jan. 12, 2016, Navy Lt. David Nartker and the nine American sailors under his command lost power on their riverine boats near Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf. They had to cannibalize parts from one vessel to try to get the other one running again.

They had drifted into Iranian waters. Before they knew what was happening, two patrol boats operated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) swooped down on them and took the U.S. crew at gunpoint.

Given the hostile nature of the relationship between the United States and Islamic Republic of Iran since the 1979 revolution overthrew the shah, a strong American ally, such an incident in the Persian Gulf had the makings of a possible armed conflict between two countries that had not had formal relations since the revolution and Iranian students’ seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

Nartker said soon after the incident that he believed he and his crew had acted responsibly. And, in light of the nuclear agreement between Iran and the United States, the other four members of the U.N. Security Council–the United Kingdom, France, China and Russia–and Germany, relations between Iran and major players in the world had begun to improve, which gave the sailors a bit of diplomatic wiggle room.

Parsi follows the intricate twists and turns of the talks through all their stages and iterations. Reading these chapters is a bit like trying to hack one’s way through dense jungle, with all the names, positions, and comments duly recorded.

Parsi notes that because Washington and Tehran were then talking and their top diplomats, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, had come to know each other through the nuclear negotiations, the matter of defusing the incident at Farsi Island could be handled at the highest level through phone calls.

Indeed, the 10-member American crew was freed after 16 hours. While the incident embarrassed the U.S. Navy, no shots were fired and no one was seriously injured. Nonetheless, in January 2016, Nartker received a letter of reprimand for violating Article 92, failure to obey an order or regulation, while others in the chain of command were relieved or punished according to Navy regulations. Though he was not drummed out of the Navy, his career was finished.

Parsi, an advisor to President Barack Obama during the long, secret negotiations with Iran and the leaders in both houses of Congress, had intimate access to the U.S. State Department’s negotiating team, as well as others from the Security Council countries and Iran’s negotiating team.

A native of Iran, Parsi founded the National Iranian American Council and is the author of two other books about U.S diplomatic relations with Iran, A Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (2008) and A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran (2013). His role as a policy advisor allowed him to interview many of the players and quote them throughout the book.

Though he clearly was in favor of the Iranian agreement in the summer of 2015 that limited Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapons capability in return for lifting sanctions, the strength of this account is Parsi’s ability to speak to many of the players and to make the rational argument for the agreement known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Parsi follows the intricate twists and turns of the talks through all their stages and iterations. Reading these chapters is a bit like trying to hack one’s way through dense jungle, with all the names, positions, and comments duly recorded. For scholars interested in the negotiations, these pages are rich with detail. For those who want a little less tedious minutiae, they can be cumbersome.

However, Parsi skillfully notes how the Israeli foreign policy positions often seem to influence the U.S. role in the Middle East, since Israel gains from having Iran as a supposed nuclear threat and supporter of various terrorist Shi’ite factions and armed non-state actors. He argues that Israel, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, clung to the Iran-is-a-mortal-threat argument lest the Jewish state be neglected by the administration of President Barack Obama and future American administrations.

Parsi skillfully notes how the Israeli foreign policy positions often seem to influence the U.S. role in the Middle East, since Israel gains from having Iran as a supposed nuclear threat and supporter of various terrorist Shi’ite factions and armed non-state actors.

In the final chapters of his account, however, Parsi leads us out of the diplomatic underbrush and into the open, with his chapters on the fights in Congress about trying to defeat the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy deed and, finally, a helpful analysis.

He notes that the congressional votes split the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the hardline Israel supporters in the Congress from those members in the House and Senate who wanted the agreement to stand. Because the Obama White House carefully did not structure the agreement as a treaty, it did not have to follow the constitutional route of only Senate ratification.

Each house of Congress would have had to disapprove the agreement, which Obama could veto. So the key to preserving the agreement in Congress was to ensure that neither body had the two-thirds votes to override a presidential veto. There was a lot of politicking among key members of both houses, and Parsi brings the readers into the very public debate as it played out in news accounts, interviews, and editorials.

No one can say the agreement was slipped past the members of Congress. Those who opposed the agreement, for a variety of reasons, simply did not have the votes to deny Obama the agreement.

Parsi writes: “It was a stunning victory for Obama. In the words of The New York Times, it was ‘a stinging defeat’ for AIPAC, as well as a personal humiliation for Netanyahu. Conventional wisdom had been turned upside down. Not only could the United States negotiate with the regime in Iran; it could even strike a deal with Tehran and prevent Netanyahu, AIPAC, and the GOP from blocking it in Congress. … The isolation of Iran had come to an end: Iran was no longer the most isolated country in the region.”

For Obama, who had made ending the Iranian push to develop nuclear weapons for many years a major foreign policy goal, the victory was sweet, even as it seems to be threatened two years later by the Trump administration.

“At the White House,” Parsi writes, “the president could finally celebrate. He had passed through all the hurdles–securing an authoritative channel to Iran, clinching an interim deal, getting the Iranians to agree to massive cuts in their nuclear program, and winning the battle on Capitol Hill.”

As Parsi notes, the Iranians claimed that their goal never was to develop a nuclear weapon but to get the U.N. sanctions lifted so Iran could become part of global civil society and be integrated into the trading and diplomatic patterns that had developed since the Iranian revolution 36 years earlier.

Parsi cites four reasons the Iranian nuclear deal came at the right the time.

First, was “the strength of the deal itself. … The combination of the limitations imposed on the [Iranian weapons] program and the intrusive inspections made it virtually impossible for Iran to embark on a weapons program—a point the critics never managed to refute.”

The second reason the deal got past Congress, Parsi argues, “was that the president succeeded in framing the issue as a choice between war and peace. Mindful of the American public’s war fatigue, lawmakers found the idea that rejecting the deal could lead to war tremendously worrisome; lawmakers who deeply regretted their vote in favor of the Iraq [war] found it even more so.”

Third, Parsi argues, the Democrats in both houses stuck together. He credits this to the highly unusual and controversial speech Netanyahu made to Congress calling on it to reject any deal with Iran. This move, pro-Israel lobbyists later said, helped to unite the Democrats because they saw how Republicans in both houses backed Netanyahu’s opposition.

The fourth reason, the author writes, is that the opposition was splintered and confused. “They were put in an unusual situation that they had neither prepared for nor anticipated. They were untrained to deal with the Israeli prime minister being seen as a pariah in many parts of Washington.”

The jury, as they say, is still out on the Iran nuclear deal.

The European countries that wanted to do business in Iran are in there. Its isolation is over.

International inspectors report that Iran is holding to its commitments. Moreover, attention to a nuclear threat has shifted to North Korea and its provocative tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles that could carry a nuclear payload and hit the continental United States.

Meanwhile, reports from Israel and its not-too-secret ally Saudi Arabia show that Tehran seems to be supporting terrorist groups throughout the Middle East, from Yemen to Gaza and Lebanon.

Israel continues to make the argument that Iran is not living up to the spirit of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. However, for the United States to argue that Iran is violating the spirit of the agreement is likely to leave Washington isolated, since the other signatory countries will point to the language in the pact.

A similar argument has come from the Trump administration in statements from the State Department and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

This is a useful point to understand, and Parsi does not put a lot of emphasis here because his focus, like Obama’s, was that by stopping nuclear weapons development and bringing Iran into the global community–and recognizing that it too has a role to play in the Middle East of today and tomorrow—the so-called moderates in the duly elected Rohani government will eventually gain the upper hand in domestic affairs and therefore moderate Iran’s foreign policy.

That is a bet that we have yet to see pay off.

Meanwhile, President Trump has attacked the Iran nuclear deal harshly. Who knows whether that is because he finds it deeply flawed or because it comprises a central part of Obama’s legacy.

Despite his verbal attacks on the Iran nuclear deal, Trump has yet to pull out of it. Should he do so, Kim Jung Un of North Korea surely will take note and decide that any deal with the United States is not worth the paper it is written on. That will undermine any diplomatic efforts the United States may make.

Parsi writes that Obama believed the United States cannot manage the conflicts in the Middle East, that the future of the United States lies more in the Asia-Pacific region. Again, Trump with the withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact that Obama supported, has undercut that initiative in the Far East.

Despite his verbal attacks on the Iran nuclear deal, Trump has yet to pull out of it. Should he do so, Kim Jung Un of North Korea surely will take note and decide that any deal with the United States is not worth the paper it is written on. That will undermine any diplomatic efforts the United States may make.

Scholars and general readers alike will find much to think about as they read Parsi’s book. He is well informed and well connected, and he is clearly on the side of his president. That is always worth keeping in mind. But his reporting and his analysis is never shrill.

And what comes regarding the Iran nuclear deal over the next three to seven years of a Trump administration remains to be seen.

However, because of Obama’s efforts to reduce the risks of war, even perhaps an eventual nuclear conflict and to open up a diplomatic channel to Tehran that had not been open for many years, the Trump administration, if it chooses, can enjoy and use the diplomatic foundation the Iran nuclear deal provides.

It is still there, and leading global powers want to see it remain in place.

Repps Hudson

Repps Hudson is an adjunct instructor of international affairs and journalism at Washington University in St. Louis and a freelance writer.

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