Time will tell whether this apparent spirit of collegiality will last – international dipomacy is a tricky business. But for now, at least, there’s this urgent reality check:
When Prime Minister Netanyahu full court press against the Iran deal, even accepting an invitation from the Republican speaker of the House to plead his case, he was widely seen as having effectively declared war against President Obama.
Although he was doubtless consumed by what he believed was a looming existential threat to Israel, Mr. Netanyahu was perceived in Democratic circles as having inserted himself in the partisan squabbling between a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. A sense of alienation from the Israeli government took root among many Jewish Democrats (not to mention non-Jewish Democrats), even those with long track records of support for Israel.
In retrospect, the charge that the prime minister was taking sides in the great American political divide was unfair to Mr. Netanyahu. To be sure, every Republican in Congress opposed the Iran deal, which President Obama took to describing as his signature foreign policy achievement, and virtually every Democrat in Congress supported it. Yet, in unprecedented fashion, almost every Democratic supporter of the agreement expressed strong reservations about it, such that the support was doubtless a partisan political gift to a beleaguered Democratic president.
So those Democrats who accuse the prime minister of fomenting a partisan battle over the Iran deal need only look at the tortured rationale for the agreement offered up by Mr. Obama’s own backers. If they’re honest with themselves, they’ll acknowledge that the partisanship was due mainly to the interest most Democrats had in handing Mr. Obama a key foreign policy victory.
On a related note, one of the controversial issues in the debate over the Iran nuclear deal was the process by which economic sanctions imposed on Iran would be lifted. It now appears there was an unanticipated wrinkle that slipped through under the radar. The Iranians are claiming that any imposition of new sanctions would be a violation of the agreement to lift previously imposed sanctions.
Given that the Iranians are showing no inclination to downsize their support for terror; that they recently took two Americans hostage; and that they’ve launched various cyber attacks on U.S. institutions, one wonders what recourse the U.S. has in addressing these new challenges.