The tumult created by that open letter signed by 47 U.S. senators, which asserted that any nuclear agreement concluded by Secretary of State Kerry with Iran would not be binding on future presidents, went well beyond what the issue merited.
President Obama has assiduously sought to keep the Senate well away from any role in the negotiations and in any agreement’s final approval, despite the legislative body’s constitutional mandate.
In a sense it is a foreign policy application of Mr. Obama’s penchant for rule by executive order. The fact is, since an agreement with Iran would not constitute a treaty, it cannot be binding on the U.S., even during the remainder of the Obama presidency. But the verbal onslaught mounted by the president and secretary of state against the signers of the letter is a very big thing.
President Obama, during interview when the episode erupted, said of the signatories to the letter:
I’m embarrassed for them…. For them to address a letter to the ayatollah – the supreme leader of Iran, who they claim is our mortal enemy – and their basic argument to them is: don’t deal with our president, because you can’t trust him to follow through on an agreement…. That’s close to unprecedented.
For his part, Secretary Kerry professed himself to be in “utter disbelief” over the letter: “This letter ignores more than two centuries of precedent in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. This risks undermining the confidence that foreign governments in thousands of important agreements commit to with the United States.”
It strikes us as inconceivable that the Iranians were unaware of the limitations of any agreement. They may be inclined toward terror and seeking regional hegemony, but they certainly do their homework.
In any event, Muhammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, was not all that troubled by the letter’s legal analysis. He said,
In our view, this letter has no legal value and is mostly a propaganda ploy…. It is very interesting that while negotiations are still in progress and while no agreement has been reached, some political pressure groups are so afraid even of the prospect that they resort to unconventional methods, unprecedented in diplomatic history.
Moreover, even Secretary Kerry indicated that the Iranians should not have been surprised: “We’ve been clear from the beginning: We’re not negotiating a, quote, legally binding plan.”
It is noteworthy that from the time the story broke, the general perception of it was as some special and poisonous communication to the Iranian leaders, a perception nurtured by the media.
Thus, a column in the liberal online magazine Slate insisted that “The letter 47 Republican senators sent to Iran is one of the most plainly stupid things a group of senators has ever done.” The Washington Post said, “47 Republican senators sent a letter to leaders in Tehran saying that any agreement reached between Obama and Iran without the approval of Congress could be revoked by the next president.”
But the letter was not delivered to the ayatollahs by special messenger, diplomatic pouch, regular mail, or even e-mail. In fact, it was not delivered to the ayatollahs at all. It merely appeared on the website of the organizer of the letter, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, so everyone in the world could have seen it at the same time as the Iranian authorities. To be sure, the letter was formally addressed to the leaders of Iran. But it was modeled after the time-honored “open letter” format to reach the public at large.
Nor did the Iranians even need Secretary Kerry’s statement that he’d been clear from the outset regarding limits to the binding nature of any agreement. The letter merely stated the obvious about the consequences of not having Senate confirmation. Iranian leaders or their legal advisers certainly knew that without Senate ratification no agreement is enforceable against the United States. Why did they go forward anyway? Perhaps they saw it as a two-way street. If a deal is not enforceable against the United States, it also is not enforceable against Iran. Yet Iran would still reap the benefits during the two years left to the Obama administration.
Why, then, the full court press against those who signed the letter? To our mind it is nothing more than a continuation of the effort by the president to keep total control over the deal-making process by any means available. Hopefully the public will see it for what it is.
