Iran: Congress’s push for new sanctions

last updated 8 January 2015

Will Congress kill the Obama administration’s deal with Iran? asked Zeke J. Miller in Time.com. The White House believes it’s on the cusp of a possible breakthrough with Tehran, after reaching a tentative agreement last week to freeze the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program for six months. The two sides will now try to forge a permanent framework for limiting Iran’s nuclear activity to energy production, not bomb building. But the deal is facing strong opposition in Congress, with Republican hawks and some key Democrats vowing to pass legislation imposing even tougher new sanctions if Iran fails to demonstrate it’s sincere. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said that voting now on future sanctions “sends a message to Iran…that there is a consequence if you don’t strike a successful deal.” Issuing new threats to Iran in response to its conciliatory overture would indeed send a message, said Jamal Abdi and Ryan Costello in TheHill.com—that the U.S. is “refusing to negotiate in good faith.” Why would Congress want to “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”?

Tough sanctions brought Iran to the table in the first place, said John Podhoretz in the New York Post. So it’s logical to assume that tougher sanctions would give us an even better deal, perhaps to shut down Iran’s nuclear program completely. But the naïve President Obama would rather relieve the pressure now—even though his deal leaves the Iranians with all the nuclear material and facilities they had before. Without the threat of greater punishment down the line, “what incentive is there for them to go beyond the freeze-in-place to which they’ve agreed?”

The crippling economic sanctions did bring Iran to the table, said Peter Beinart in TheDailyBeast.com. But instead of forcing the “monolithic Iranian regime to cut a deal,” as the hawks think, the sanctions split that regime. With Iran’s economy in tatters, the nuclear hard-liners lost influence, giving new power to moderates such as the newly elected President Hassan Rouhani. If Congress spits on Rouhani’s diplomacy, it will only empower Tehran’s nuclear hawks. In the 1980s, President Reagan helped end the Cold War by working with moderate Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. To remove the threat of a nuclear Iran, the U.S. must do the same with Rouhani. “If he fails, America will get far less.”