Does Congress Know???

Does Congress Know What Trump Wants on Iran?

The president has been sending confusing messages to Capitol Hill about his intentions. That’s never good.

By DANIEL B. SHAPIRO

As President Trump feuds with key senators and lobs the Iran nuclear policy ball over to Capitol Hill, I am reminded of a key moment in Congress’ role in the making of the deal he has called “an embarrassment to the United States.” This story may tell us something important about how Congress will handle this delicate issue in the months ahead.

During five years as the United States’ ambassador to Israel, I hosted hundreds of congressional delegations. Making the pilgrimage to Israel is a political rite of passage for ambitions new members, and it’s a vital way for veteran lawmakers to hear directly from one of America’s closest allies. But there was never a visit more consequential than that of seven senators in January 2015.

It was a period of high tension in U.S.-Israel relations over the ongoing Iran nuclear negotiations. To the consternation of many in the White House, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had announced his intention to speak at a joint meeting of Congress to lay out his opposition to the deal. That’s when a bipartisan posse of senators landed in Tel Aviv, led by John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and also including John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) and Angus King (I-Maine). A smart, seasoned group.

McCain and Graham stopped in Israel frequently, often with other, more junior senators, on the way home from checking in with the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, as they did in this case. I always enjoyed their visits. They were close to Netanyahu and could be critical of President Barack Obama, but they were fair and tried to be serious problem solvers.

What made this delegation unusual was the last-minute decision of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Bob Corker, to join them. He did not arrive with the others, but flew directly from Washington to meet them in Israel.

Corker had made clear that his main reason for coming was to hear the views of then-Mossad Director Tamir Pardo on the Iran negotiations. He had lobbied the Israelis for this meeting while in Washington and gotten the support of Ron Dermer, Israel’s influential ambassador to the United States.

But upon his arrival, the prime minister’s office announced that the meeting with Pardo was canceled. Corker was furious and threatened to get on the next plane out of Israel, skipping the delegation’s meeting with Netanyahu altogether.

At my urging, and with the help of Ambassador Dermer, the Israelis reversed course. They knew nothing good would come of alienating such a powerful and consistently friendly senator.

The meeting occurred, and Corker was able to ask Pardo penetrating questions about what would happen to the nuclear talks if Congress passed new nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, in the form of a pending bill sponsored by Mark Kirk (then a Republican senator from Illinois) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.).

Corker’s understanding after that conversation was that new sanctions would kill the negotiations and prospects for any agreement, allowing Iran to reanimate its nuclear program, which had been frozen since the interim nuclear deal in 2013. Some version of Pardo’s remarks leaked from the delegation, leading Netanyahu to rebuke the powerful Mossad director for undercutting Israeli policy (even though Pardo did not endorse any specific deal).

The senators on that delegation then took the lead in crafting a bipartisan consensus, on both Kirk-Menendez and how Congress should respond to any deal that was reached. Their views on the direction of the talks ranged from supportive to skeptical to opposed, but they all agreed they wanted to avoid Congress being blamed for the collapse of the talks or for the resumption of Iran’s frozen nuclear weapons program if a deal was reached and then failed.

But Congress would also need to have its say on the deal. Over dinner in Jerusalem, they hatched the idea that ultimately developed into the Corker-Cardin legislation—which Trump invoked on Friday. It allowed Congress to express its view, but set the bar very high (a veto-proof majority) for Congress to be able to kill it.

Corker was no fan of the deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, once it was reached. He has repeatedly criticized it, and, counter to Trump’s claims, he voted against it. But he and his colleagues also understood that once a deal with Iran was reached, it would be very costly to see it fail at Congress’ hand. Corker-Cardin (formally the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act), which enabled Congress to review the Iran deal, but only defeat it if it could pass a joint resolution over the president’s veto, and which requires the president to certify Iran’s compliance with the deal every 90 days, passed overwhelmingly.

Does that mean Corker and others facilitated the Iran deal’s survival through the congressional review, even though many of them opposed the agreement and, had the review process been structured differently, they might have had the votes to kill it? In a sense, yes. But there is a long history of this kind of congressional deference to the president’s foreign policy prerogatives.

When it comes to foreign policy, Congress is always betwixt and between. It lacks the tools and information available to the executive branch to make policy — envoys, embassies, the daily reports of intelligence services, the United States military and an interagency process that, when it works, weaves together all the available assets of the U.S. government. Congress is also composed of many disparate voices, rather than (again, when it works) a unified administration.

Congress is not without influence. Through the power of the purse, vigorous oversight and sustained attention on narrow issues, Congress can shape policy at the margins. But that’s about it. In the big picture, it is no match for a willful president with the vast federal bureaucracy at his beck and call.

I cut my teeth in foreign policy on Capitol Hill, working for Rep. Lee Hamilton, one of the great congressional statesman of the latter half of the 20th century. Even when he was the powerful chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he showed deference to the executive branch, and he never strayed from his analysis: When a president is sufficiently determined on a major foreign policy issue, it is very rare for Congress to stand in the way.

Examples abound. President Bill Clinton overcame deep congressional skepticism, with the support of key Republicans, to authorize the U.S. intervention in Bosnia, secure passage of NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China, and ensure ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention. He even got a stalemate in Congress that did not block his intervention in Kosovo. President George W. Bush won bipartisan support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, although many Democrats later expressed regret for this vote. And Obama secured ratification of New START, his arms control treaty with Russia, and ensured at least initial congressional facilitation of the Iran deal and the reopening of relations with Cuba.

For decades, key members of Congress have followed Hamilton’s logic. They have been especially notable in the Senate, where past leaders like Arthur Vandenberg, Mike Mansfield, John Warner, Dick Lugar, Nancy Kassebaum and Sam Nunn have pursued responsible, bipartisan, internationalist solutions that show appropriate deference to the executive branch. More recently, McCain, Graham, Corker and Kaine have played this role, along with Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin.

A rare contrary example was in 1999, when the Senate considered the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty at President Clinton’s urging. Through parliamentary maneuvers, the most vigorous opponents of the treaty, led by Republican Sens. Jesse Helms, James Inhofe and Jon Kyl, locked in a truncated process that limited amendment opportunities and ensured a final vote could only be canceled by unanimous consent, which they refused to grant. When it became clear there were not the 67 votes for ratification, prominent Republicans like Warner, Lugar and Pete Domenici tried desperately to gain a postponement, rather than have the Senate inflict a blow on U.S. leadership by rejecting a treaty the United States had helped craft and that was seen as key to restraining emerging nuclear powers like India and Pakistan. The anguished speeches in that debate by the internationalist senators—even some who voted against the treaty in the end—stood out, because it was so uncommon for an administration to lose such a high-profile foreign policy battle.

How will these executive-congressional dynamics play out following Trump’s decertification of the Iran deal? By all indications, Trump wants it both ways. He hates the JCPOA (whether or not he understands it) and hates even more having to regularly certify that it is in U.S. interests or that the Iranians are abiding by its terms, as Corker-Cardin requires. But based on the new strategy he outlined on Iran, it does not appear he wants to abrogate the deal by reimposing nuclear sanctions, thus provoking a crisis with Iran and our allies and the resumption of Iran’s nuclear program.

Trump’s mixed message is confusing to Congress. And the doubts expressed by Corker, undoubtedly speaking for nearly all Democrats and many Republicans, about Trump’s fitness and stability to lead, add an unpredictable new element to the calculus, which could call into question Hamilton’s dictum. Even many members who voted against the JCPOA, like Corker and Cardin, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, or their counterparts in the House, Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce and ranking member Eliot Engel, recognize the risks associated with the United States—indeed, Congress itself—being the party that pulls the plug on the agreement. So, many members will have conflicting impulses: deferring to the administration (itself clearly divided on the question); not wanting to own the consequences of the death of the agreement; and wanting to support ways of strengthening the JCPOA. Some proposals, such as amending the Corker-Cardin bill to unilaterally impose new “trigger points” for reimposing nuclear sanctions, walk right up to the line of breaking the agreement and, depending on how they are drafted, might cross it.

The potential for consensus on toughening non-nuclear sanctions on Iran, targeting its ballistic missile program and support for terrorist organizations and the murderous Assad regime in Syria, mightgive Congress and the administration an off-ramp that avoids frontally attacking the JCPOA by reimposing nuclear sanctions. That would also leave room for seeking consensus with European allies on long-term adjustments to the agreement, by extending sunset clauses and facilitating inspections of military sites.

That’s the least risky, best managed potential outcome of Trump’s reckless decertification decision. But to nudge Congress in this direction, it would sure help to have the administration leading clearly.

I can still hear my old boss, Lee Hamilton, asking the critical question he always wanted to know when tackling a foreign policy challenge, regardless of who the president was: What does the administration want?