The Guardian view on the Iran nuclear talks: a matter of global security
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Version 0 of 1. Relations between Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu were never excellent. But recent weeks have demonstrated just how low the relationship between the United States and Israel has sunk. After Mr Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress lambasting Mr Obama’s diplomacy on Iran, and after the White House condemned the Israeli prime minister’s pre-election statements rejecting Palestinian statehood and casting Palestinian citizens of Israel as a kind of enemy within, it seemed things could not get much worse between the two. But they have. The US administration has now rebuffed Mr Netanyahu’s attempt to backtrack on his earlier disavowal of the two-state solution. And this week it emerged that Israel had spied on closed-door Iran talks and then passed on some of that information to US lawmakers hostile to the president. Despite Israeli government denials, the episode illustrates the amount of distrust between the two allies. Political bickering in Washington is only complicating things further. As the US administration tries to close a preliminary deal with Iran, ahead of a 31 March deadline, there is as much focus on how the US Congress will react as there is on what kind of deal is possible with Iran, the Obama team negotiating as much with US politicians as with Iranian ayatollahs. The stakes are high for a US president with less than two years left in office and a desperate urge to produce a convincing legacy in foreign affairs, something that – beyond the breakthrough with Cuba – is still largely missing. Republicans in Congress have attempted to thwart the nuclear deal with Iran and will continue doing so. They are partly driven by a determination to deny Obama any success whatsoever, even if that success could be in America’s national interest. The recent letter from 47 US senators to Iran’s supreme leader combined shortsightedness, disloyalty and naivety all at the same time. But there are also Democrats in Congress with genuine qualms about a nuclear deal, especially one that fails to guarantee that Iran will never become a nuclear military power. The political polarisation is such that these voices now hesitate to make themselves heard. Because of their excesses, Republicans may well have left themselves unable to gather the kind of majority that would tie the president’s hands. Related: Sanctions will not bring peace to Israel | Letters But while those partisan rivals have dangerously politicised a key international security issue, the Obama administration would be wrong to let domestic political considerations define the negotiation now unfolding in Lausanne. The overriding narrative should not be about who clinches a deal with Iran and with what political benefit, but about the nature of such a deal, its guarantees and whether such an accord might prevent nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Many of the current political manoeuvres are only possible because of the lack of transparency on these questions. Dealing with Iran’s nuclear programme is a strategic problem of global security. It should not be hostage to short-term partisan games – wherever they are played. |