An agreement with Iran could be the president's big foreign policy triumph - if the newly-empowered Republicans allow it:
The personal stakes for Obama are immense as he seeks to restore his footing following last week's election drubbing. A deal would elevate his legacy, which lacks a defining foreign policy triumph, and validate his vow to talk to leaders of U.S. enemies first made in a CNN campaign debate seven years ago.
It would also mark a stunning diplomatic breakthrough after 35 years of estrangement between Washington and Tehran and represent a major advance on one of the world's thorniest non-proliferation problems.
Some of the president's critics doubtless sense a chance to deny Obama a diplomatic win.
But others, including some Democrats, worry that Obama is being hoodwinked by Iran. They fear the mullahs will pocket sanctions relief and then cheat their way to a nuclear bomb.
Well yes, there's that too. The White House is assuming that the Iranians are actually negotiating in good faith, rather than taking advantage of a weak president with very few cards left to play. It's a huge assumption.
As Claudia Rosett reminds us, this has unfortunate echoes of the Clinton administration's attempts to broker a nuclear deal with North Korea. The chief negotiator then was Wendy Sherman. The chief negotiator now is....Wendy Sherman:
So, now that crunch time has arrived, what might we expect? If precedent is any guide, it’s worth revisiting Sherman’s record from her previous bout as a lead negotiator, toward the end of the second term of the Clinton administration. Back then, Sherman was trying to clinch an anti-proliferation missile deal with another rogue despotism, North Korea.
That attempt failed, but only after then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, together with Sherman, had dignified North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Il with a visit to Pyongyang in late October, 2000. These American top diplomats brought Kim the gift of a basketball signed by one of his favorite players, Michael Jordan. Kim entertained them with a stadium display in which tens of thousands of North Koreans used flip cards to depict the launch of a long-range missile.
Less well remembered was the encounter shortly before Albright’s trip to Pyongyang, in which the State Department hosted a visit to Washington, Oct. 9-12 of 2000, by one of the highest ranking military officials in North Korea, Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok. The centerpiece of Jo’s trip was a 45-minute face-to-face meeting at the White House, in the Oval Office, with President Clinton. It was historic, it was the first time an American president had met with an official of North Korea’s totalitarian state.
And it was a deft piece of extortion by North Korea, which had parlayed its missile program — including its missile trafficking to the Middle East, and its 1998 test-launch of a missile over Japan — into this lofty encounter in which the U.S. superpower was pulling out all the stops in hope of cutting a deal before Clinton’s second term expired in Jan., 2001. By 2000 (or, by some accounts, earlier) the Clinton administration was also seeing signs that North Korea was cheating on a 1994 denuclearization arrangement known as the Agreed Framework. Eight months before Jo arrived in Washington, Clinton had been unable to confirm to Congress that North Korea had abandoned its pursuit of a nuclear weapons program. Nonetheless, Jo’s visit rolled ahead, with Sherman enthusing in advance to the press that “Chairman Kim Jong Il has clearly made a decision — personally — to send a special Envoy to the United States to improve relations with us.”
Officially, Jo was hosted in Washington by Albright. But it was Sherman, then the Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State for North Korea Policy, who orchestrated the events, squired Jo around Washington and briefed the press. It was Sherman who had helped prepare the way while accompanying her predecessor, the previous North Korea policy coordinator and former defense secretary, William Perry, on a trip to North Korea in 1999.
Jo arrived in Washington on Oct. 9, staying at the venerable Mayflower Hotel, where Sherman went to greet him. The next morning Jo and his delegation began their rounds with a courtesy call on Albright at the State Department. Then, before heading to the White House, Jo engaged in a symbolically freighted act. According to an account published some years later in the Washington Post by the senior State Department Korean language interpreter, Tong Kim, who was present for the occasion: “The marshal arrived in Washington in a well-tailored suit, but before going to the White House, he asked for a room at the State Department, where he changed into his mustard-colored military uniform, with lines of heavy medals hanging on the jacket, and donned an impressive military hat with a thick gold band.” Perhaps it did not occur to anyone at the State Department that North Korea was still a hostile power, a brutal rogue state fielding one of the world’s largest standing armies, and that this donning of the uniform on State premises was not just a convenience, but an implied threat. Or perhaps the zealous hospitality of the occasion just over-rode any thought at all. In any event, it was in his uniform that Jo went from the State Department to the White House.
Following those meetings, Sherman briefed the press. She made a point of mentioning that Jo had worn a business suit to the State Department. but changed into full military uniform for his meeting with the President of the United States. Sherman chose to interpret Jo’s wardrobe change as happy evidence of North Korean diversity under Dear Leader Kim: “We think this is very important for American citizens to know that all segments of North Korea society, obviously led by Chairman Kim Chong-Il in sending this Special Envoy, are working to improve the relationship between the United States and North Korea and this is obviously an important message to the citizens of North Korea as well.”
Actually, there were substantial segments of North Korean society whose chief preoccupation was finding enough food to stay alive, toward the end of a 1990s famine in which an estimated one million or so had died — forbidden by Kim’s totalitarian state to enjoy even a hint of the freedom that had by then allowed their brethren in South Korea to join the developed world. This was known at the time, but did not figure in Sherman’s public remarks.
In short, the whole business was an embarrassing fiasco.
Now, with Iran, the stakes are much higher. But has anything been learned since the last time?
Last word to Terry Glavin:
The Iranian theocracy’s diplomatic rehabilitation and normalization, locked in with a sanctions-ending nuclear deal, is the bet that Obama has wagered all his foreign-policy chips on winning. It’s the big play that has subsumed and fatally compromised American foreign policy from Baghdad to Ramallah. It’s why Tehran has enjoyed the latitude to mobilize Hezbollah in Syria on behalf of the mass murderer Bashar Assad and its sectarian Shia militias and death squads against the Sunni tribes in Iraq. It’s out of that bedlam that the Islamic State (ISIL, ISIS) arose.
Obama’s entire foreign policy legacy is now riding on a nuclear deal with Tehran that offers an end to sanctions in exchange for the ayatollahs’ commitment to stick with what they already unconvincingly insist is a merely “peaceful” nuclear program. If the enterprise falls to pieces – a not unlikely event, given that IAEA officials aren’t even scheduled to meet with Tehran’s stonewallers until after Nov. 24 – the obfuscating alibis and counter-spins will be flying so thick and heavy it will take telescopes and magnifying glasses just to get fleeting glimpses of how badly everything went south.