The administration’s desperation for a deal despite Iran’s continued support for global terrorism and aggression in the Middle East would lead one to believe that the United States rather than Iran was in the weaker negotiating position. Yet as Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment, wrote during the negotiations: “Iran is the one hemorrhaging hundreds of billions of dollars due to sanctions, tens of billions because of fallen oil prices and billions sustaining the Assad regime in Syria…And it’s Ali Khamenei [Iran’s Supreme Leader], not [U.S. Secretary of State] John Kerry, who presides over a population desperate to see sanctions relief.”35 With the Iranian currency plunging, inflation skyrocketing and the economy shrinking under the pressure of international sanctions, and with a bipartisan Congress pushing to further tighten the sanctions to increase the pressure on Iran in early 2015, Mr. Obama loosened the sanctions and injected billions of dollars into the Iranian economy while conceding in advance Iran’s right to enrich uranium.
Then, as the June 30, 2015, deadline approached (and passed), Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry dismissed as “rhetoric” repeated incendiary statements by Mr. Khamenei and a vote by the Iranian Parliament rejecting demands that any agreement provide for inspections of Iran’s military facilities and immediate sanctions relief. In other words, while Iran was publicly stating that it had no intention of complying with any agreement (interspersed with calls of “Death to America” and for the destruction of Israel), Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry continued to negotiate in good faith. Two weeks later, when a final agreement was reached, it allowed Iran to produce as much nuclear fuel as it wishes after 15 years, to limit inspections of its military facilities, to retain a significant number of its centrifuges, and to inspect its own Parchin nuclear site through a secret side deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency that was not disclosed to Congress (in violation of the law).
The agreement did not prevent Iran from entering new weapons deals with Russia, which it did before the ink was even dry on the agreement, or stop supporting terrorism. Iran was granted roughly $150 billion of sanctions relief that even the Obama administration admitted would be used in part to support Iran’s proxies Hamas and Hezbollah in their attacks against Israel. Reports indicated that Hezbollah had 120,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israel at the time the Iran deal was going to be signed by Mr. Obama, but that was apparently an insufficient threat to dissuade the president from moving forward from funding a group sworn to wipe America’s ally and the only democracy in the Middle East off the face of the earth.
The Iran deal was opposed by large majorities of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. While the Obama administration blocked any formal vote in the Senate (an act of epic moral and political cowardice), only 42 of 100 senators supported the deal. On September 11, 2015, the House of Representatives held a formal vote to approve the deal that was defeated by an overwhelming 269–162 majority. Numerous public opinion polls showed that an overwhelming majority of the American people objected to the deal. Nonetheless, Mr. Obama decided he knew better and moved ahead. It is impossible to recall another time in American history when a president so openly flouted the opinions of a majority of Congress, the country’s citizens, and its closest allies to appease a sworn enemy.
As Congress was registering its disapproval of the deal, Iran’s Supreme Leader was telling the world that Israel would not exist in 25 years, another in a series of inflammatory speeches repudiating any claims by the Obama administration that the nuclear deal would create a rapprochement between Iran and the West. Mr. Obama, of course, claimed that he was too sophisticated to believe such threats. The world also learned the same week that Congress rejected the deal that Russia had been secretly mounting a major military build-up in Syria to back the Iranian puppet regime of Bashar al-Assad, leaving the Obama administration scrambling to explain away another foreign policy debacle of its own making. And when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued its final report on Iran’s nuclear program as part of the deal in late 2015, it reported that Iran had not cooperated and had withheld key information required by the agreement. It is clear that Mr. Obama signed an agreement that only one party intends to honor, and that party is not Iran.
In entering the Iran nuclear deal, the Obama administration violated two clauses of the Constitution. It did so because it knew it could not enter the agreement by lawful means. First, it breached the Treaty Clause, which requires the president to submit major foreign policy agreements that constitute treaties to the Senate for two-thirds approval. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution states that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.” Knowing it lacked the requisite 67 votes to approve this agreement, Mr. Obama deemed the agreement to be an “executive agreement” that would only bind Mr. Obama and not subsequent presidents. In fact, only 42 members of the Senate supported the deal, 25 votes short of what would be necessary for a treaty. Of course, even if a subsequent president repudiates this unlawful agreement, the sanctions relief cannot be reversed.
The Obama administration also violated the Take Care Clause of the Constitution. Article II, Section III holds that the president must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” In May 2015, both houses of Congress passed by overwhelming majorities, and the president signed into law, H.R. 1191, the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 (the “Review Act” also known as the “Corker-Cardin Bill”) that provided for congressional oversight of the nuclear deal. The Review Act required the president to submit to Congress the text of the deal as well as all “annexes, appendices, codicils, side agreements, implementing materials, documents and guidance, technical or other understandings, and any related agreements, whether entered into or implemented prior to the agreement or to be entered into or implemented in the future.” The administration violated this language by failing to provide to Congress the side agreements between Iran and the IAEA that provided, among other things, that Iran would be permitted to inspect its own Parchin nuclear site (the agreement Iran breached in late 2015). So in addition to violating the Constitution, Mr. Obama broke his word to Congress by failing to provide these side agreements.
In a further end-run around Congress and the American people, the Obama administration allowed the deal to be brought to the United Nations Security Council for approval before even bringing it to Congress, giving Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping the first word on the agreement.
President Obama’s deal with Iran ignored the legitimate concerns of Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and led these traditional American allies to seek new alliances and, in the case of the latter two, their own nuclear weapons capability. While the Israeli Prime Minister tried to explain to Mr. Obama that “the enemy of my enemy is my enemy,” the Middle East will now be governed by the adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Such arrangements are fragile and unstable. Obama’s dismissive treatment during his administration of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East and a steadfast ally, has been a national and moral disgrace as well as a profound strategic blunder that weakens the influence and interests of the U.S. not only in the Middle East but throughout the world. This treatment most likely emboldened several