WASHINGTON (Tribune Content Agency) — President Barack Obama’s ambitious bid to limit Iran’s nuclear capabilities poses one of the greatest foreign policy challenges of his presidency.
With negotiators in Switzerland extending talks Wednesday for a second day past the deadline, the pressure is increasing on Obama — who has long championed diplomatic negotiations with Iran — to deliver the first installment on would be a historic agreement.
The deal underpins much of his approach to foreign policy: Even during his first presidential campaign, Obama said he’d be willing to talk with hostile regimes, such as Iran and Cuba.
“Other than protecting the continental security of the United States, this is the issue in which this president and his secretaries of state have invested more energy, taken more risks and been willing to stand up, willfully, to Congress, the Israelis and the Saudis,” said Aaron David Miller, a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former adviser to Democratic and Republican secretaries of state. “The stakes are huge on the foreign policy side, they’re huge on the domestic policy side.”
The situation already has widened a rift between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, invited by Republican House Speaker John Boehner, addressed a joint session of Congress to decry the negotiations.
Obama has opened himself up “to real vulnerability” if the deal fails, Miller said, not only among his Republican critics but among allies within his own party.
“If we end up with a train wreck, and we or Iran walk away, the next 20 months will be fraught with all kinds of unhappy scenarios,” Miller said.
He noted that the administration entered into the talks hoping to pre-empt an Israeli strike against Iran but that Obama has not ruled out military action himself.
“He can’t afford to be the first American president under whose watch Iran develops nuclear weapons, so you buy time, you slow the program down,” Miller said.
The administration has expressed hope that an agreement, which would involve easing economic sanctions against Iran, could prove transformational for its government, but that remains speculative, Miller said. Critics have also charged that Iran could still walk out on any agreement and use an improved economy to increase support to its military allies, provoking further turmoil in the already chaotic region.
“He’s either going to be a hero 20 years from now or a goat,” Miller said of Obama. “The Middle East tends to grind Americans’ ideas and visions up in a pretty nasty fashion.”
The White House wouldn’t say Wednesday when it might impose a new deadline to end negotiations. Press secretary Josh Earnest said he was unwilling to set a “definitive though arbitrary date,” but he insisted the U.S. was not “operating in an open-ended environment.”
The end-of-March deadline was initially a “soft deadline” that both sides planned to use to reassure domestic critics that they’d be able to reach a deal, Suzanne Maloney, a former State Department policy adviser and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in a blog post.
But, she added, “any failure to produce parameters for a credible bargain in this latest round of talks would reveal that the differences between the two sides are — for the moment, at least — fundamentally irreconcilable.”
That, she said, “would add fuel to the already determined Republican efforts to sabotage the process, jeopardizing Obama’s historic Iran diplomacy, and the interim arrangements that have constrained Iran’s nuclear advances since November 2013.”
But Jon Alterman, a former State Department official and director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, cautioned that the negotiations are only getting started.
“There’s a game of chicken going on where the U.S. would like this (agreement) to be broad and expansive and highly specified and the Iranians would like it to be narrow and a little vague,” Alterman said. “I think they’re likely to reach a deal which fully satisfies nobody, which enrages critics in both countries, but which each side feels is adequate to carry on.”
He noted the administration believes that getting Iran to the table “gives you both leverage and visibility into their (nuclear) program.”
Polls suggest more Americans approve of diplomatic negotiations than disapprove, but they are deeply skeptical of Iran. A Pew Research Center poll earlier this week found 49 percent approved of the talks, compared with 40 percent who disapproved.
But the poll found Americans skeptical of whether Iranian leaders are serious about addressing international concerns.
And a clear majority — 62 percent — want Congress to have final say over any deal. Just 29 percent said Obama should have final authority.
Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who once supported the negotiations, said the White House has offered too much to Iran.
“The reality is it’s going to take an enormous effort to overcome the perception that the president has been too desperate for a deal,” Dubowitz said. “The biggest disaster for this president could be he gets the nuclear deal, but it supercharges Iran aggression and a Middle East nuclear proliferation cascade.”
In Switzerland, the negotiations were expected to resume Thursday morning. There was talk that instead of an official framework agreement for an official deal by June 30 there would be a joint news conference.
If the results were less than hoped for, it wasn’t for lack of talking. The P5 Plus1 officials — from the five nations that make up the United Nations Security Council: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, plus Germany — met with Iranian negotiators until long past midnight Tuesday. That had been the deadline for reaching a framework for a final deal by June 30 when the gathering began a week ago.
Details of the snags in the negotiations are closely guarded, though the primary difference appeared to be a desire by the Obama administration to nail down details of the deal to be signed on June 30, in order to get congressional support. The Iranians, for their part, apparently hope to leave with a more vague document. The idea is that while Iran knows what it is willing to give up, it doesn’t want to give Iranian hardliners months to pick apart the details.
There was some optimism. British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond on Wednesday morning told the BBC: “I think we have a broad framework of understanding, but there are still some key issues that have to be worked through. . . . Some of them are quite detailed and technical, so there is still quite a lot of work to do.”
Anita Kumar contributed to this report from Washington and Matthew Schofield from Lausanne, Switzerland.
©2015 McClatchy Washington Bureau. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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