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Obama, Countering Critics, Defends Iran Nuclear Deal Obama Signals a Shift From Military Might to Diplomacy
(about 4 hours later)
SAN FRANCISCO — President Obama said on Monday that “cleareyed, principled diplomacy” had produced the agreement with Iran to stall its nuclear development, pushing back against rising criticism in Congress and from allies like Israel that the pact reached in Geneva was a capitulation. WASHINGTON — The weekend ended with the first tangible sign of a nuclear deal with Iran, after more than three decades of hostility. Then on Monday came the announcement that a conference will convene in January to try to broker an end to the civil war in Syria.
Speaking at a rally in San Francisco, Mr. Obama emphasized what he described as a major achievement in the long-estranged relations with Iran. He spoke as American officials confirmed that Secretary of State John Kerry, who helped finalize the deal on Sunday, had engaged in secret communications with Iran months ago in an effort to improve relations and encourage talks. The success of either negotiation, both long sought by President Obama, is hardly assured — in fact the odds may be against them. But the two nearly simultaneous developments were vivid statements that diplomacy, the venerable but often-unsatisfying art of compromise, has once again become the centerpiece of American foreign policy.
“For the first time in a decade, we’ve halted the progress on Iran’s nuclear program,” Mr. Obama told a crowd of about 600 people. “Key parts of the program will be rolled back. International inspectors will have unprecedented access to Iran’s nuclear stores.” At one level, the flurry of diplomatic activity reflects the definitive end of the post-Sept. 11 world, dominated by two major wars and an epic battle against Islamic terrorism that drew the United States into Afghanistan and still keeps its Predator drones flying over Pakistan and Yemen.
The rally here was originally intended to promote Mr. Obama’s proposals for an immigration overhaul. But as negotiations with Republicans on domestic policy issues like immigration and the budget have continued to stall, Mr. Obama instead began his remarks with a defense of his Iran negotiations. But it also reflects a broader scaling-back of the use of American muscle, not least in the Middle East, as well as a willingness to deal with foreign governments as they are rather than to push for new leaders that better embody American values. “Regime change,” in Iran or even Syria, is out; cutting deals with former adversaries is in.
“Tough talk and bluster may be the easy thing to do politically,” Mr. Obama said. “But it’s not the right thing to do for our security.” For Mr. Obama, the shift to diplomacy fulfills a campaign pledge from 2008 that he would stretch out a hand to America’s enemies and speak to any foreign leader without preconditions. But it will also subject him to considerable political risks, as the protests about the Iran deal from Capitol Hill and allies in the Middle East attest.
Countering criticism that Iran may seek to exploit the agreement, which is effective for six months, as a way to circumvent Western sanctions on its economy, Mr. Obama sought to frame the agreement as an opportunity for Iran to show its sincerity. “If Iran seizes this opportunity and chooses to join the global community, then we can begin to chip away at the distrust that has existed,” he said. “We’re testing diplomacy; we’re not resorting immediately to military conflict,” Mr. Obama said, defending the Iran deal on Monday in San Francisco. “Tough talk and bluster may be the easy thing to do politically, but it’s not the right thing for our security.”
Together with the end of the war in Iraq, the death of Osama bin Laden and the impending departure of American troops from Afghanistan, Mr. Obama said, he has fulfilled the promise from his first campaign to bring about a “new era of American leadership, one that turned the page on a decade of war.” Still, diplomacy is a protracted, messy business with often inconclusive results. It is harder for a president to rally the American public behind a multilateral negotiation than a missile strike, though the deep war weariness of Americans has reinforced Mr. Obama’s instinct for negotiated settlements over unilateral action.
He continued, “What we can build together, that’s what brings me here today,” before transitioning in to his call for the House of Representatives to pass the immigration measures already approved by the Senate. White House officials suggest that the president always planned to arrive at this moment, and that everything that came before it — from the troop surge in Afghanistan to the commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden — was cleaning up after his predecessor.
According to American officials, Mr. Kerry passed a secret message to Iran during a visit to Oman last May in an effort to engage with the Iranians on the nuclear issue. Mr. Kerry conveyed the message to the sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said, who has long served as a conduit for American communications with the government in Tehran. “In 2009, we had 180,000 troops in two wars and a ton of legacy issues surrounding terrorism,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. “So much that was done out of the box was winding down those wars. We’ve shifted from a very military face on our foreign policy to a very diplomatic face on our foreign policy.”
It was not the first time that Mr. Kerry had used this channel. Much of that diplomacy has been on public display in the hypercaffeinated travels of Secretary of State John Kerry, who, in addition to his work on Iran and Syria, has persuaded the Israelis and Palestinians to resume peace negotiations. A few hours after sealing the nuclear deal in Geneva, he flew to London for talks on the Syria conference.
With the support of the Obama administration, Mr. Kerry made an unannounced trip to Oman when he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to see if the sultan would facilitate a dialogue between the United States and Iran. But some of the crucial dealings have occurred in the shadows. In March, administration officials said, Mr. Obama authorized a small team of senior officials from the White House and the State Department to travel secretly to Oman, the Persian Gulf sultanate, where they met face to face with Iranian officials to explore the possibility of a nuclear deal.
That trip occurred on Dec. 8, 2011. Mr. Kerry missed an important vote in the Senate and never explained his absence. The cloak-and-dagger was necessary, the officials said, because it allowed the United States and Iran to discuss the outlines of a nuclear deal without fear that details would leak out. Cutting out others eliminated the competing agendas that come with the six negotiating partners engaged in the formal Geneva talks.
Mr. Kerry was just one point of contact for a series of secret talks that the White House and State Department had with Iran before the nuclear agreement announced on Sunday. But the disclosure that the United States and Iran had been talking privately angered France, which registered its displeasure two weeks ago by warning that the proposal then being discussed was too lenient and that it would not accept a “sucker’s deal.”
William J. Burns, the deputy secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan, an aide on the National Security Council, also held back-channel communications in Geneva in an effort to move the nuclear talks along. For all of Mr. Obama’s emphasis on diplomacy, analysts noted that the United States often depends on others to take the initiative. In the case of Iran, it was the election of Hassan Rouhani as president, with his mandate to seek a relaxation of punishing sanctions.
Despite the secret communications, the nuclear accord that was announced was at risk until the final hours. In the case of Syria, it was a Russian proposal for President Bashar al-Assad to turn over and destroy his chemical weapons stockpiles, an option the White House seized on as a way of averting a military strike that Mr. Obama first threatened and then backed off from.
At one point on Saturday Mr. Kerry became concerned that the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, might be under pressure from the authorities in Tehran not to make additional concessions. “The C.W. deal made the Iran diplomacy much more viable and attractive to the administration,” said Vali R. Nasr, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a former Obama administration official. But he added, “Neither in Syria or Iran is there an ambition for something larger.”
Some of the final issues were worked out in a three-way meeting early Sunday between Mr. Kerry, Mr. Zarif and Catherine Ashton, the foreign policy chief for the European Union. Mr. Obama has called for Mr. Assad to give up power. But his diplomatic efforts on Syria have done little to bring that about, and next month’s conference in Geneva is likely to demonstrate that far from negotiating his departure, Mr. Assad is digging in.
“The last meeting,” a State Department official said, “was pretty much make or break.” Similarly with Iran, the administration is adamant that it is negotiating what amounts to an arms-control agreement in response to a specific security threat. A broader opening to Iran — one that could make it a partner on regional issues like Syria or Afghanistan, or even open its political system — seems far-off.
The State Department official declined to specify the final stumbling blocks. But toward the end of the negotiating session, American officials pressed successfully for a commitment from Iran not to test fuel or install components for a heavy water reactor that would produce plutonium. The reactor has been under construction near the town of Arak. In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September, Mr. Obama listed his priorities in the Middle East as Iran, Syria, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Promoting democratic principles, while still important, was no longer an overriding interest.
The State Department official said that Ms. Ashton was informed of the Obama administration’s back-channel communications with the Iranians. That more pragmatic approach was on display earlier this month when Mr. Kerry visited Egypt, where the military-backed government is prosecuting its ousted president, Mohamed Morsi, and cracking down on his Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Mr. Kerry stressed continuity with Egypt’s generals and said little about their brutal tactics.
Russia and China had been willing to accept a less strict nuclear agreement than the United States concerning language on uranium enrichment and on limits on the Arak facility, according to a Western official, who asked not to be identified because the official was discussing private diplomatic conversations. For Mr. Obama, all of this may matter less than resolving the nuclear threat from Iran, an achievement that would allow him to reduce America’s preoccupation with the Middle East and turn to another of his foreign-policy priorities, Asia.
The new accord, which freezes much of Iran’s nuclear program for six months, is intended to buy time so that international negotiators can pursue a more comprehensive accord. “This was a president who was elected on the promise to wind down two wars responsibly,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a former administration official who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “He can now also say he has avoided a third war.”
The interim accord has come under criticism from some American lawmakers who assert that it did not do enough to roll back the Iranian nuclear program while Iran will receive sanctions relief valued at more than $6 billion. Before he can be sure of that, though, Mr. Obama faces the treacherous task of negotiating a final agreement. This time, the administration will have to do the bargaining with its partners, and it faces vocal skepticism from Israel and members of Congress.
The Obama administration is planning a major effort to persuade lawmakers to support the interim accord. Mr. Kerry planned to call lawmakers on Monday following his return to Washington and intended to visit lawmakers after the Congressional Thanksgiving break. “The Iran talks are a four-ring circus,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary of state who coordinated Iran policy during the Bush administration. “This is going to be among the most complex and difficult diplomatic cases ever.”
Mr. Kerry spoke with his counterparts from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on Monday in an effort to ease their concerns over the accord. “We’re trying to deal with very difficult, cynical countries through different means,” said Mr. Burns, who now teaches at Harvard, where he has started the Future of Diplomacy Project. “But the public is weary; they want us to work things out without fighting.”

Sarah Wheaton reported from San Francisco, and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from London.