Who’s Foreign Policy Is It Anyway?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thinks the tide has
turned and that the new Republican-controlled Congress now runs the country, so he plans to bypass President Obama and the White House and go directly to a joint session of Congress in March to urge its members to subvert the negotiations with Iran by the United States and five other nations.

He comes at the invitation of House Speaker John Boehner, who evidently thinks Congress should remove foreign policy from the President's portfolio. Obama "expects us to stand idly by and do nothing while he cuts a bad deal with Iran…Two words: 'Hell no!'…We're going to do no such thing," was Boehner's response to criticism of what the White House gently called his "departure from protocol".

The invitation was issued right after the President's State of the Union speech in which he made a bid for greater cooperation between the government branches."I did not consult with the White House", admitted Boehner, because "the Congress can make this decision on its own". Except that Boehner decided for the whole Congress on his own. On "60 Minutes" he said he gave Obama "a heads-up that morning" and referred to Israel as "our longest ally", which would come as a surprise to a number of other nations.

Netanyahu is all too eager to brandish his influence on U.S. policy because his pitch will be delivered just weeks before the Israeli elections, which has Boehner and the Israel-fawning

Congress choosing sides in another country's politics.

At issue is legislation that would impose deeper sanctions on Iran if they fail to come to heel in the latest round of negotiations. To justify the Netanyahu intervention, Republicans cite U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron's lobbying certain members of Congress not to pass that legislation on his recent visit, but Cameron going to bat for the President with a few phone calls fell well short of appearing before the entire Congress to enlist action against the President.

Netanyahu has chosen to go yet another round against Obama, working behind his back to persuade Congress to subvert White House policy. "Bibi", as he is called, has repeatedly ignored White House calls to end the West Bank settlement expansions that are the principal cause of collapsed peace proposals between Israel and the Palestinians; has brusquely told the Obama administration "not to ever second guess me again" during the Gaza war — while pocketing an extra $225 million from the U.S. for replenishment of Israel's "iron dome" defense missiles (the House voted 395-8 for that); rudely lectured Obama before the cameras in the Oval Office in 2011 for assuming that a return to Israel's 1967 borders is fundamental to the two-state solution; and pulled the same end-run during that visit, going before an adoring Congress that applauded him 56 times and gave him a standing ovation. Conservative pundit Pat Buchanan refers to Capitol Hill as "Israeli occupied territory."

Republicans and a number of Democrats, the latter led by Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, find the Obama administration weak in allowing the talks to drag on inconclusively, and argue that sanctions are what brought Iran to the table. “The more I hear from the administration and its quotes, the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran,” said Menendez, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has for years been crafting sanctions in an alliance with Israel greater than that with a president from his own party.

The next course of sanctions on their menu would take effect if an agreement is not reached by the end-of-June deadline. They say that Obama would be able to apply to Congress for monthly waivers on specific items as a way to slow their taking effect. It is not surprising that Obama does not want to be on the end of Menendez' leash.

The Obama administration and other negotiants foresee that the talks may need to be extended yet again — a third time — and therefore caution that newly-imposed sanctions, or even merely voted-on sanctions, a violation of the interim agreement under which the talks are continuing, would be enough to end the process. Menendez finds it “counter-intuitive to understand that somehow Iran will walk away because of some sanctions that would never take place if they strike a deal”. Intuition isn't needed; the Iranians have said they would. Possibly a bluff, but our negotiating partners — the U.K., France, Germany, Russia and China — say with one voice to Congress to not sabotage the talks.

The President has said he would exercise his veto. The question is whether Congress, whose members — Republican and Democrat alike — regularly pander to Jewish voters and the Israel lobby (the Senate voted an unprecedented 100-to-0 on a set of sanctions in 2012), might succeed in overriding the veto.

It is plainly obvious that the Obama administration will opt for extended talks whenever there is the faintest hope of resolution. Ending or allowing Congress to disrupt the talks with added sanctions would lead to a stalemate in which Iran will continue on its path of developing nuclear weapons. All of our past bluster about not allowing that to happen will come to the fore. Israel will feel the "existential" need to attack. Speaking alongside Cameron, Obama said, “If in fact our view is that we have to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, then we have to recognize the possibility that should diplomacy fail we have to look at other options to achieve that goal”. The deputy national security adviser Benjamin Rhodes had once put it more bluntly: "It just stands to reason if you close the diplomatic option, you’re left with a difficult choice of waiting to see if sanctions cause Iran to capitulate, which we don’t think will happen, or considering military action.”