[Netanyahu is sure to lobby against this deal on Capitol Hill in the coming weeks, just as he lobbied against the negotiations in his dreadful but politically potent speech before Congress in March. Republicans—keen to cheer the Israeli prime minister and to pummel their own president—probably won’t realize that they’re being played as pawns in someone else’s game.]
Hint: It has nothing to do with the
deal.
By Fred
Kaplan
 |
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a statement in his office
in Jerusalem on July 14, 2015, after world powers reached a historic
nuclear deal with Iran. Photo by Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images
|
Here’s the
thing to keep in mind about most critics of the Iran nuclear deal that was
signed Tuesday morning: Their objections have nothing to do with the details of
the deal.
The most diehard opponents—Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi King Salman, and a boatload of neocons led
by the perennial naysayer John Bolton—issued their fusillades against the
accord (“an historic mistake,” “diplomatic Waterloo,” to say nothing of
the standard charges of “appeasement” from those with no
understanding of history) long before they could possibly have browsed its 159
pages of legalese and technical annexes.
What worries these critics most is not that
Iran might enrich its uranium into an A-bomb. (If that were the case, why would
they so virulently oppose a deal that put off this prospect by more than a decade?)
No, what worries them much more deeply is that Iran might rejoin the community
of nations, possibly even as a diplomatic (and eventually trading) partner of
the United States and Europe.
European leaders, especially Federica
Mogherini, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, and Philip
Hammond, Great Britain’s finance minister, have said that the deal holds out hope for the reopening of broad relations with
Iran—and that is precisely these critics’ fear.
Netanyahu and King Salman believe to war-war
is better than to jaw-jaw.
The fear is hardly without reason. The
lifting of sanctions, which this deal will trigger in the next few years, will
certainly enrich Iran. This might embolden the government’s expansionist
tendencies and its support of militant movements across the Middle East—or it
might moderate the country’s stance, as the population (much of it literate and
pro-Western) interacts more with the rest of the world and the reigning mullahs
die off. There is some basis for this hope of transformation. How long can the
mullahs sustain their cries of “Death to America” and their claims of Western
encirclement—the rationale for their oppressive domestic policies—when the
country’s president and foreign minister, clearly with the approval of the
supreme leader, are shaking hands and signing deals with the Great Satan’s
emissaries? Nonetheless, the hope is a gamble, and one can’t blame Israelis for
refusing to stake too much on its payoff.
The Saudi royal family is another matter.
King Salman sees the entire Middle East through the prism of a grand Arab cold
war between Sunnis and Shiites—with the Shiites led by Iran and all Shiite
movements, for instance the Houthi rebels in Yemen, as nothing
more than Iranian proxies. It’s a zero-sum game: American diplomacy with Iran,
in this view, amounts to an American betrayal of Saudi Arabia.
What Netanyahu and King Salman want Obama to
do is to wage war against Iran—or, more to the point, to fight their wars
against Iran for them. That is why they so virulently oppose U.S. diplomacy
with Iran—because the more we talk with Iran’s leaders, the less likely we are
to go to war with them. Their view is the opposite of Winston Churchill’s: They
believe to war-war is better than to jaw-jaw.
President
Obama needs to be (and clearly is) sensitive to these
parochial views of the region and the world, but he shouldn’t (and clearly
isn’t) holding American interests hostage to them.
Netanyahu is sure to lobby against this deal
on Capitol Hill in the coming weeks, just as he lobbied against the
negotiations in his dreadful but politically potent speech before
Congress in March. Republicans—keen to cheer the Israeli prime
minister and to pummel their own president—probably won’t realize that they’re
being played as pawns in someone else’s game.
It may be that Netanyahu is overplaying his hand this time. In a
speech on Tuesday, he described Iran’s aggression as “several times more
dangerous than that of ISIS” and claimed that Iran’s “ultimate true aim” was
“taking over the world.” Does anyone believe this? Does Netanyahu, really?
I’m not saying Republican senators and
presidential candidates should roll over and endorse this Iran deal without
serious scrutiny. But maybe they should read the document, attend some informed
briefings, and analyze all the players’ political motives before endorsing a
foreign leader’s claim that their own country’s president and secretary of
state have surrendered their interests and “capitulated” to Tehran’s.
