Progressives Are Losing Patience with Biden’s Iran Policy
March 9, 2021, Posted by David Klion
https://jewishcurrents.org/progressives-are-losing-patience-with-bidens-iran-policy/?campaign_
IN EARLY FEBRUARY, Politico reported that Matt Duss, who serves as a foreign
policy advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, was expected to depart Capitol Hill for
a role in the Biden administration’s State Department. Although it had not been
finalized at the time, the news was generally welcomed by the progressive foreign policy
community as a sign that the Biden team is serious about its pledge to welcome
input from the left into the foreign policy process. Duss—long an outspoken
critic of
US military interventions in the Middle East, and of Israel’s occupation of the
Palestinian territories—has in recent years become one of the most prominent
such voices on Capitol Hill. But last week, Jewish Insider reported that Duss will not in fact be joining
the administration.
Duss says he made a conscious decision to
withdraw his name, contrary to reports from Jewish Insider, which quoted anonymous speculation that
Duss’s outspokenness on Twitter may have prevented his serious consideration
for an administration role. (Duss says Jewish Insider never contacted him for comment. The
State Department declined my request for comment on Duss’s talks with the
administration.) “The Biden team and I had been talking for several months
about a State Department role, but I decided that the best place to keep working
to support a progressive agenda is with Senator Sanders,” Duss told me in an
interview.
Duss’s choice to remain independent from the
administration reflects the concerns of a vocal faction of dovish foreign
policy thinkers, who are increasingly signaling their dissatisfaction with
Biden’s initial moves in the Middle East. On issues ranging from re-entering Iran deal with re-evaluating Washington’s relationship with regional allies
like Israel and Saudi Arabia, many on the left now believe that Biden’s team
risks falling short of expectations set during and after last year’s
presidential election. After a brief
honeymoon period, it is rapidly becoming clear to this cohort that its efforts are
better spent pressuring Biden from the outside rather than working in lockstep
with the White House on foreign policy.
Much of the frustration with the Biden
administration’s progress to date stems from its failure to swiftly rejoin the
Iran nuclear deal (officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,
or JCPOA), which for the past six years has functioned as a proxy for wider
debates over US foreign policy. The 2015 JCPOA, one of Barack Obama’s signature
international achievements, divided congressional Democrats as well as leading Jewish
institutions. For progressives like Duss, it was a galvanizing cause and represented
a major victory against Washington’s so-called foreign policy “Blob,” which
maintains a uniquely aggressive
posture toward
Iran. In a measure of the deal’s success, both on its own terms and in shifting
the Democratic Party leftward on the Middle East, even Democrats who had
initially opposed the agreement objected when the Trump administration
unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018. (One key Democrat who made this
shift was Sen. Chuck Schumer, now the Majority Leader.) Last summer’s Democratic platform raised progressive hopes for a swift
and unambiguous denunciation of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the deal: The
product of negotiations between the Biden and Sanders
campaigns, it described “returning to mutual compliance with the agreement” as
an “urgent” priority.
But instead of following the advice of
progressives and resuming compliance with the deal as quickly as possible,
Biden’s team has dawdled, insisting that Tehran take the first steps toward
complying with the agreement even though the US withdrew when Iran was
cooperating. In the meantime, the administration has created new obstacles to
diplomacy. On February 26th, Biden took the first military action of his
presidency by ordering airstrikes against an Iranian-backed militia in
Syria that had killed a Filipino contractor with the US military in Iraq; two
days later, Iran rejected an offer to resume direct negotiations with the
US over rejoining the JCPOA.
“The Syria strikes were disheartening, to say
the least,” said Erica Fein, the advocacy director for the nonprofit Win
Without War, which supports reentering the nuclear deal. “Syria is not a place
that should be used to send messages back and forth between Iranian-backed
proxies and the United States. You can’t bomb your way to peace.”
Trita Parsi—a co-founder of the Quincy
Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an anti-interventionist think tank, and a
leading figure among Iranian American supporters of the JCPOA—agrees. While
acknowledging that “there’s not any particularly good reason to doubt the
intent of the administration to get back into the JCPOA”—both Secretary of
State Antony Blinken and Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan,
played important roles in negotiating the JCPOA under Obama—Parsi said there
are “legitimate questions about this strategy they have chosen.” He noted, for
example, the administration’s decision not to lift any of the sanctions that
Trump imposed on Iran before re-entry into the deal. While doing so would have
risked a political fight with the deal’s opponents in Washington, it would also
have sent a conciliatory message that could have paved the way for diplomacy.
“They want to get it done, but they don’t want to spend political capital on
it,” Parsi said, speculating that Iran is a low priority for Biden, who is
primarily concerned with his domestic agenda of pandemic relief and economic
stimulus.
Joe Cirincione, the former president of the
Ploughshares Fund, a distinguished fellow at the Quincy Institute, and a major
figure in the campaign to support the Iran nuclear deal said the failure to
immediately reverse Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA has created a conundrum
for the new administration. A number of senior administration officials “seem
to have bought the argument that the Trump sanctions give us to leverage that we
can use to get concessions from the Iranians,” he said. But by getting into a
military back and forth with Iran’s proxies, he argues, the US risks falling
into a “commitment trap” in which threats must be backed up, retaliatory force
must be matched, and reentering negotiations becomes more politically difficult
for both sides.
In the absence of clear direction from Biden
himself, the question of how to approach Iran has become a subject of heated
debate within the president’s national security team. Multiple people I spoke
with outlined a rough divide between a more dovish faction that prioritizes
rejoining the deal—exemplified by Robert Malley, Biden’s special envoy to Iran,
who has already faced significant attacks from the right—and a more hawkish
faction, exemplified by Brett McGurk, a member of the National Security Council
who previously served in the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations
and was an architect of the military “surge” in Iraq. The Trump administration
left the State Department badly underfunded, a legacy that will take time for Biden to
undo; thus, diplomats like Malley are at a disadvantage in terms of staffing
and influence compared to the Pentagon and the National Security Council. The
result, according to Cirincione, is “a bureaucratic imbalance that tends to
favor military options.” But defaulting to military solutions, he said, risks
escalating tensions that could “compromise the broader strategic objective of
getting back into negotiations with Iran.”
Besides the executive branch, the Senate also
presents obstacles for advocates of a less militarized foreign policy. “The
administration is setting the tone, and with a few exceptions—Bernie Sanders,
Ed Markey, Chris Murphy—Democratic senators are loath to be seen as far afield
from where the administration might be,” said Fein. While a handful of Senate
Democrats may criticize the administration’s slow-walking of the Iran deal,
most are unlikely to choose this particular issue when picking their battles
with the new president.
Progressives also have to contend with Robert
Menendez, the new Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, who opposed the original Iran deal, and who wields significant
leverage over
foreign policy in the evenly divided Senate. Cirincione suggested that the
administration may be feeling the need “to tread lightly on Middle East issues
while they’re trying to get their nominees through a committee headed by a
conservative, hawkish Democratic senator who’s closer to AIPAC than J Street.”
This may partly account for the reticence of Wendy
Sherman, Biden’s
nominee for deputy secretary of state, to defend her own role in helping the
Obama administration to negotiate the JCPOA during questioning from Republicans
on the Foreign Relations Committee last week. “Robert Menendez could completely
screw up the State Department appointments,” Cirincione said. “It doesn’t
matter that the majority of the Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee wants to move forward with diplomacy with Iran. If Menendez doesn’t
want to, he can stop it.”
No one I spoke with seemed ready to write off
the administration’s openness to the progressive priorities set last year, when
the Biden team pledged to listen to Sanders and his allies on a range of
domestic and foreign policy issues. There have already been a number of
positive developments for the left on the foreign policy front. Hours after
Biden took office, the US rejoined the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, from
which Trump withdrew in 2017. In early February, the administration announced it would end US support for Saudi
Arabia’s brutal military campaign in Yemen, which started under Obama and
escalated under Trump. And last week, Biden called for repealing and
replacing the
post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which has
functioned as a blank check for the past four administrations to wage
open-ended war throughout the Muslim world. All of these steps were included in
last year’s Democratic platform thanks to the efforts of progressive activists,
and all of them suggest that Blinken, Sullivan, and other senior administration
officials are sincere in trying to move US foreign policy beyond the 9/11
era.
But Iran presents a more difficult political
challenge, owing to its role in supporting militias that have directly clashed
with US forces in Iraq, and due to pressure from close US allies—such as Saudi
Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel—who regard Iran as their major
regional antagonist. Parsi traced the recent strikes in Syria to the
administration’s efforts to manage those alliances. Biden wanted to show “that
just because he wants to [negotiate] with Iran, he’s not going to be a
pushover,” he said. “The only audience that would need to hear that would be
the Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Israelis.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, in particular, has consistently and vehemently opposed the JCPOA
from the beginning and cheered Trump’s withdrawal from the deal. His position
has set the tone for much of the domestic resistance to re-entering the
agreement; Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, told an Israeli
newspaper in
January that he opposes reentering the deal because it would pose a security
threat to Israel.
Parsi also expressed concern that the efforts
last year by a coalition of organizations—including Ploughshares, the Quincy
Institute, Win Without War, MoveOn, J Street, and others—to commit nearly all
the Democratic presidential candidates to reentering the JCPOA and to secure
the JCPOA a place in the Democratic platform were now being squandered. “All of
this was done so that Biden would have an easier time getting this done
quickly,” Parsi said. “Instead, it was wasted in these last two months.” Given
that Iran is holding its presidential elections in June—which may usher in a
more hardline government—the window for Biden to reenter the JCPOA without
potentially facing additional obstacles is narrowing.
“There’s been a desire to give the Biden team
a chance to get settled and to staff up,” said Fein, referring to the general
mood among foreign policy progressives in recent weeks. “And I think people are
maybe losing patience with that approach”—a sentiment echoed by others who spoke with The Daily Beast’s Spencer Ackerman earlier this week. It’s
in this context that Duss’s decision to stay with Sanders is significant. Just
in the past week, Duss has publicly taken multiple positions at odds with the
Biden administration on Twitter: on Israel’s failure to distribute Covid-19
vaccines in the West Bank, on holding Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman
accountable for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and on calling for a
more conciliatory US approach to Iran. It is unlikely he would have felt free
to voice such positions while working at the State Department; by remaining in
his current position, he retains a platform with which to dissent from the
administration. “Matt’s decision reflects the concerns that many have about the
orientation of this administration, and whether they are ready to truly
reimagine US national security,” said Cirincione.
Many progressives are now realizing that they
may have to assume a more critical posture with regard to the administration in
order to advance their priorities. “Ultimately our goal is to end the failed
status quo foreign policy,” said Fein, “and we’re going to continue to pressure
Biden and his team where we think they’re falling short.”
David
Klion is the newsletter editor for Jewish
Currents.
