WASHINGTON — On one thing, at least, both sides in the fierce debate over President Obama’s nuclear accord with Iran agree: He will go down in history because of it. The disagreement relates to how. As a peacemaker or an appeaser?
For all of the focus on details like the number of centrifuges or the scope of inspections, the emerging battle represents a larger conflict of visions between Mr. Obama’s faith in diplomacy as the most rational way to resolve differences and his critics’ deep skepticism over the wisdom of negotiating with what they see as an adversary that cannot be trusted.
The Iran agreement, after all, is the culmination of an approach stemming from Mr. Obama’s first campaign for president, when he vowed to talk with America’s enemies without preconditions, a promise that drew scorn not just from Republicans but even from his Democratic rival at the time, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Now, with the Iran deal in hand and the reopening of an embassy in Cuba this month after more than a half-century of estrangement, Mr. Obama, for good or bad, is realizing the aspiration he espoused from the start.
What Obama Says the Iran Nuclear Deal Means
In an exclusive interview with Thomas L. Friedman, the president explains why he has no second thoughts about the accord with Iran.
This has become a season of diplomacy. At the same time he is securing pacts with Tehran and Havana, Mr. Obama hopes to work out a trade agreement with 11 Pacific Rim nations by the end of this month. European leaders have just negotiated at least a temporary economic accord with their Greek debtors. And the United States is trying to broker a global climate change agreement before a Paris summit meeting in December.
Fatigued by the warfare of recent years, the world in effect is testing whether it can work out at least some of its problems at the bargaining table instead of the battlefield. For Mr. Obama, the flurry of negotiations offers a chance to leave behind accomplishments in a foreign policy arena that otherwise has been dominated by stalemated armed conflicts in the Middle East.
“Part of our goal here has been to show that diplomacy can work,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times. “It doesn’t work perfectly. It doesn’t give us everything that we want.” But, he added, “what we can do is shape events in ways where it’s more likely that problems get solved, rather than less likely, and that’s the opportunity we have now.”
Still, there are many examples in which diplomacy did not achieve what it intended to, especially in cases where one of the parties has been less committed. An agreement reached by President Bill Clinton to constrain North Korea’s quest for nuclear weapons fell apart when the country was caught cheating. It now has at least 10 nuclear bombs.
More recently, Russia joined not one but two agreements to bring peace to Ukraine, but the first collapsed and the second is widely expected to do the same as the West accuses Moscow of violating its terms. The United States also recently accused Russia of violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed by President Ronald Reagan.
With time in Mr. Obama’s presidency running short, critics said he had grown so enamored of diplomacy that he cast aside conditions he once set for a nuclear agreement with Iran. Some of the more virulent opponents compared it to Neville Chamberlain’s infamous Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938.
“The president disagrees with himself — everything that’s in this deal is what he said he would not do,” said Danielle Pletka, a national security scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “The analogies to Chamberlain are much too facile, but I do think at a certain moment he needed to stop and say to himself, ‘Why have I given on all of the things I said I wouldn’t give on?’ And the answer is because ultimately the deal itself became more important than what was in it.”
The divide over diplomacy was just as stark during the presidency of George W. Bush, but it played out inside his administration. Hawks like Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to keep the pressure on Iran and North Korea. “We don’t negotiate with evil,” Mr. Cheney once said at a meeting. “We defeat it.”
But more moderate figures like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wanted to try talking. Mr. Bush sided with the Cheney view in his first term while turning to the Rice approach in his second.
Republicans said Mr. Obama had abandoned what they called a tougher line under Mr. Bush, who reached out to Iran and North Korea but never secured enduring agreements. Former Bush aides said Mr. Obama should have taken advantage of the increased economic pressure on Iran to hold out for a better deal.
“Most Republicans supported efforts to use diplomacy, backed by our considerable economic leverage, to deny Iran a nuclear weapons capability,” said Kristen Silverberg, an ambassador to the European Union under Mr. Bush. “Instead, President Obama is sacrificing a decade’s worth of sanctions for a deal that grants Iran rights to a vast nuclear infrastructure. It’s part of his effort to pull the U.S. back from key challenges in the Middle East. It’s not diplomacy. It’s retreat.”
Others argued that critics were unrealistic in expecting a deal with no compromise. Among those supporting the agreement with Tehran on Tuesday was R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state who led the Iran diplomatic effort for Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice.
“If I could have designed a perfect alternative, it would be a 100-to-0 victory for the United States and the submission of Iran,” Mr. Burns, a career diplomat who worked for Democratic and Republican presidents, told a House committee. “That alternative is not available to the United States, and whether we oppose it or whether we support it, we’ve got to think in the real world about what the alternatives have been.”
Mr. Obama argued that the only real alternative was war, since sanctions alone could not force Iran to capitulate, and many nations would abandon sanctions if the United States walked away from an agreement. “Put simply,” he said, “no deal means a greater chance of more war in the Middle East.”
That argument offends critics, who say it reveals a lack of imagination by Mr. Obama about other options and a cynical effort to frame his opponents as warmongers.
“Americans have been presented with a false choice: diplomacy or war,” said Mark Wallace, the chief executive officer of United Against Nuclear Iran, an advocacy group, and another Bush ambassador.
Here is a look at what Iran and the United States wanted, and what they got.
“Some of my former colleagues in the diplomatic world suggest that we must put all our eggs in the diplomatic basket to the exclusion of the other tools,” Mr. Wallace said. “President Obama subscribes to this theory.”
And in making clear “that diplomacy was the only option,” he said, he effectively emboldened Iran.
Mr. Obama’s approach should come as no surprise. In a July 2007 debate among Democratic presidential candidates, he was asked if would be willing to meet “without precondition” during his first year in office with the leaders of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela.
“I would,” he answered, contrasting himself with Mr. Bush. “And the reason is this: that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them — which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration — is ridiculous.”
In the end, Mr. Obama did not meet with those leaders in his first year in office, but by his seventh, he has met and talked on the telephone with President Raúl Castro of Cuba as part of their diplomatic reconciliation. He once talked briefly on the phone with President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, and he has sent letters to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
He has stayed away from the others. Rather than meet with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Mr. Obama has called on him to step down after he waged brutal warfare against political opponents. During peace talks that proved fruitless, Mr. Obama barred members of the Syrian government from even participating, although he did accept a Russian-mediated deal with Mr. Assad to give up his chemical weapons.
As for North Korea, Mr. Obama has increased sanctions and otherwise largely ignored the isolated nuclear state. Efforts to engage or support peace talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan have gained little traction over the years. And Mr. Obama has increased sanctions on Venezuela.
What distinguishes Mr. Obama is his willingness to see the situation from the other side’s position, a trait that tends to outrage domestic critics because the other side is generally viewed as loathsome.
“When we are able to see their country and their culture in specific terms, historical terms, as opposed to just applying a broad brush, that’s when you have the possibility at least of some movement,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Friedman.
He compared it to Reagan’s negotiating arms agreements with the Soviet Union. “And the same was true,” Mr. Obama said, “with respect to Nixon and Kissinger going to China, which ended up being a very important strategic benefit to the United States.”
The question now is whether Mr. Obama’s going to Iran, at least figuratively, will provide the same.