This week in the United States seven Republican senators did a sensible thing. Or, rather, they did not do a stupid one. For a variety of reasons they failed to sign an open letter sent by the other 47 Republican senators to the Iranian government disowning the negotiating stance of President Obama.
In a manner reminiscent of a child’s epistle to Santa, the letter was addressed to “leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” and warned this body that any treaty concerning Iran’s nuclear capability concluded by their president and other world leaders was unlikely to be approved by the Senate. Reminding their addressees that President Obama will leave office in January 2017, the letter threatened that “most of us will remain in office well beyond then — perhaps decades”. In other words, we may scupper any concord that the president agrees to and we probably will.
It is one thing for Congress to criticise the work of an administration, quite another to communicate directly with a foreign power in the midst of a negotiating process. That undermines not only the president but the whole of the western diplomatic approach to Iran. The Senate does not, as the letter claims, ratify treaties, but it can prevent the president from ratifying them.
Thus the purpose of the letter is not entirely clear — unless it was to appear so patronising to the Iranians that they would be provoked into walking off in a huff. The last time something similar happened was in 1968 when Richard Nixon, then a presidential candidate, wrote secretly to the government of South Vietnam to sabotage the Johnson administration peace talks. This is not quite such a grave sin. It remains unclear, however, why the Republican threat should improve the deal that President Obama and others can extract from Iran.
As this newspaper said at the time of Binyamin Netanyahu’s recent address to Congress, there is plenty to worry about in the conclusion of an agreement with Iran that leaves any realistic possibility of Tehran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. But it is also true that getting the right deal and avoiding the danger of a new conflagration is a matter of fine judgment.
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That is why Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, refused to support the letter.
There is a larger point too. Americans elect and re-elect their presidents in the belief and expectation that this person will represent their country in a big and increasingly dangerous world. By convention he or she is generally allowed to do their best when dealing with international matters, with criticism and debate taking place within Congress and the administration.
All presidents of both major parties have been jealous of this privilege. In the past when Democrats have travelled abroad carrying different mes- sages from those of their Republican presidents, the latter have professed themselves to be scandalised. There are good practical reasons for this.
Allies as well as enemies have to be able to believe that what the President of the United States says, goes. If it is genuinely the position of Congress that an international agreement concluded by the leader of the free world is good only until the moment he or she vacates office, then the word of the US president means very little. It is a political game that can only weaken the United States.