How can (WILL!) the Obama Iran deal fall apart? Let me count the ways.

[Obama, Brain Of A Gnat]

By Daniel W. Drezner April 3 at 9:51 AM
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at
Tufts University and a nonresident senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution.

The framework announcement regarding Iran’s nuclear deal is less
than 24 hours old, and I’m already sick of it.

For some, this is the Greatest Inspections Regime Ever. For
others, it’s an Existential Threat to Their Way of Life. But the
one implicit assumption I do see in a lot, though not all, of
the instant analysis is the assumption that the hard work has
been done, the train has left the station, and that there will
be a finished deal come June 30 — or Sept. 30, when the
inevitable three-month extension is added. This is likely based
on the fact that relative to expectations, the joint
announcement was surprisingly detailed.

I’m not a nuclear nonproliferation expert, so I’m not going to
comment on the specifics of the deal. But based on the actual
joint statement, the administration’s fact sheet, Obama’s White
House statement and all the reactions, however, I can see at
least five ways that this framework crumbles before it gets
implemented.

1) Disagreement over the sanctions timetable. Well, the euphoria
didn’t last long. As the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo
noted, the Iranians reacted strongly and negatively after
Obama’s statement and the release of the fact sheet, because
those documents/statements indicated that U.S./E.U. sanctions
would not be removed immediately:

Javad Zarif ? @JZarif
Follow
The solutions are good for all, as they stand. There is no need
to spin using "fact sheets" so early on.
1:13 PM - 2 Apr 2015

The source of the disagreement is over the precise timetable of
the sanctions removal. As Kredo writes:

Zarif went on to push back against claims by Kerry that the
sanctions relief would be implemented in a phased fashion — and
only after Iran verifies that it is not conducting any work on
the nuclear weapons front.

Zarif, echoing previous comments, said the United States has
promised an immediate termination of sanctions.

“Iran/5+1 Statement: ‘US will cease the application of ALL
nuclear-related secondary economic and financial sanctions.’ Is
this gradual?” he wrote on Twitter.

All the pre-announcement reports indicated that the sanctions
timetable was a sticking point. This is the least clear portion
of the joint announcement, which is the text that matters the
most at this point. To be fair, this is a reprise of the
backbiting that occurred after the Fall 2013 interim deal was
reached. So it’s possible that a sanctions timetable can still
be hammered out. Which leads us to…

2) Each side sabotages the other with its domestic sales pitch.
There are pretty powerful constituencies in both Iran and the
United States that do not want any deal to be reached with the
other side. In this two-level game, the leaders of both
countries will have to make hard sells that any negotiated deal
gives them an edge going forward. But that act of making the
sales pitch is going to be observed by the other side. Any
substantive difference in interpretation of the actual text that
emerges during the sales pitch will trigger a crisis in
implementation.

Frankly, this is going to be more of a problem on the American
side. It’s not that the Iranian hardliners don’t want to
sabotage the deal. It’s that the U.S. system is more open and
thus better geared toward veto players being able to exercise
their veto. And we’ve already seen some pretty desperate
attempts by members of Congress to exercise a veto.

Still, if you look at the actual body of sanctions law, it’s
conceivable that the administration will be able to execute a
deal and thwart any congressional attempt to override the
agreement. Which leads us to…

3) The regional situation melts down further. I explained why
the Middle East maelstrom created an optics problem earlier in
the week. Obviously, ongoing wars in Yemen, Syria and Iraq are
intrinsically bad, but it also makes the administration argument
of “this deal or war!” seem slightly less scary.

The more substantive issue is that if, say, the situation in
Yemen deteriorates further, it will be easy to see Republicans
switch from claiming that this nuclear deal is meaningless to
saying that any deal should be put on hold as a way to punish
the Iranians.

Or, think of it this way. Even if Congress is deterred from
sanctioning Iran over the nuclear question, it will be easy to
envisage broad bipartisan support for new sanctions against Iran
for their support of regional proxies.

Which leads us to…

4) The Sunni Arab states remain unconvinced. The strongest
foreign policy argument in favor of a nuclear deal is that it
strengthens the nonproliferation regime. An Iran with nuclear
weapons could trigger a cascade effect across the region in
which the Sunni Arab states decide they need their own nuclear
deterrent. Earlier this month the Saudis did some throat
clearing that highlighted this possibility. So an Iran with a
constrained nuclear program should lessen the worries of Sunni
Arab partners in the region.

It’s not an accident that in his statement Obama said that he’d
already spoken with the new Saudi king, and then said:

I am inviting the leaders of the six countries who make up the
Gulf Cooperation Council, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates,
Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Bahrain to meet me at Camp David this
spring to discuss how we can further strengthen our security
cooperation while resolving the multiple conflicts that have
caused so much hardship and instability throughout the Middle
East.

All of this before he’d spoken with Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu.

This suggests that: a) the White House is still super mad at
Netanyahu; and b) Obama knows that the Sunni Arab states are the
pivotal constituency. Because even if an agreement is signed and
sealed, it won’t matter much if Saudi Arabia or Egypt or the UAE
decide they need a weaponizable nuclear program.

The fact that the White House is aware of this problem and is
going to go all out to sell this agreement to these countries is
encouraging. But Obama won’t be president after January 2017.
Which brings us to the final wild card:

5) Scott Walker (R) is elected president. It’s no surprise that
Republican presidential contenders pretty much hate the deal.
Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio already made statements to that
effect.

At the same time, Rubio’s and Bush’s statements are confined to
general disapproval. As The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has
noted, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s rhetoric goes way beyond
that. In an interview with Wisconsin radio host Charlie Sykes,
the following exchange happened:

SYKES: You have said that you would cancel any Iranian deal the
Obama administration makes. Now would you cancel that even if
our trading partners did not want to reimpose the sanctions?

WALKER: Absolutely. If I ultimately choose to run, and if I’m
honored to be elected by the people of this country, I will pull
back on that on January 20, 2017, because the last thing — not
just for the region but for this world — we need is a nuclear-
armed Iran.

It leaves not only problems for Israel, because they want to
annihilate Israel, it leaves the problems in the sense that the
Saudis, the Jordanians and others are gonna want to have access
to their own nuclear weapons…

The foreign policy pledges that candidates make during the early
primary season are not worth a whole hell of a lot (See: NAFTA,
renegotiation of after 2008 election). Still, that was a pretty
damn specific question to Walker, and his answer was pretty damn
unequivocal.

Maybe as the tutoring proceeds, Walker will learn what a God-
awful mess that would create. But since this is consistent with
the Wisconsin governor’s other inane foreign policy statements,
there’s a possibility that no amount of tutoring is going to
matter.

If it looks like Walker will be the next president, the key
players mentioned above are going to have more doubts that this
deal will be implemented. Which would erode the odds of its
successful implementation even more.

So, yes, there’s a framework in place. Whether that framework
leads to what it says it’s going to lead to is another question
entirely.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/03/how-
can-the-iran-deal-fall-apart-let-me-count-the-ways/