Europeans: 'Obama administration put more pressure on its friends in the negotiations than on the Iranians'
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Europeans - particularly France - are having some
buyer's remorse about the sellout to a nuclear Iran.
French President François Hollande ran into a
difficult question late last month about war and Iran. It’s time now to pay
attention to his answer.
Invited to dinner by members of the French
Presidential Press Association on July 27, the president was asked if he went
along with the contention of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, later voiced by President Barack Obama,
that war would inevitably follow rejection by the U.S. Congress of the nuclear
deal between the great powers and Iran.
Mr. Hollande, whose full-page photo on a French
magazine cover this week is headlined The Anesthetist, doesn’t do
alarmisme. He didn’t assert, as Mr. Obama so often has, that war is the
single alternative to the Iran nuclear agreement. No way.
My recollection of Mr. Hollande’s
response—jibing with that of the journalists seated to my left and right that
evening—is that he said disapproval by Congress meant new “uncertainty,” and
uncertainty in the Middle East could sometimes mean war.
A month later, this much is clear about the
approach of the other European parties to the deal: Neither German Chancellor
Angela Merkel nor
U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron
have made an explicit link between Congress’s possible September vote against
the agreement and anything resembling the Obama administration’s notions of
instant cataclysm.
After initially nodding “yes” to the deal, the
French have partially reverted to form reflecting their traditional hard-nosed
antinuclear proliferation position. It’s OK in Paris to acknowledge that the
accord is an oversold mediocrity, and its character nonhistoric. Mr. Obama’s
notions of co-opting a suddenly tranquilized Iran to embrace the Forces of Good
in the Middle East can get characterized as naive. American sanctions experts
say big French banks have informed them they are in no rush to return to
Iran.
Citing the profound weaknesses of an agreement
that allows controls over Iran to end after 15 years and the mullahs to keep an
absurdly high number of centrifuges, a French official told me he graded the
accord as C-plus. He expressed concern about America’s willingness over time to
continue paying the enormous expense of its vast Iranian surveillance
operations. And he also said that the deal’s concessions to Tehran made a
pressing reality of Saudi Arabia’s quest for an atomic weapon.
One of the toughest of the country’s hard-nosed
security experts, Bruno Tertrais, wrote last month in the Canadian newspaper Le
Devoir that “with pressure from the Obama administration” European negotiators’
original intent deteriorated from a rollback of Iran’s nuclear ambitions to
their containment.
Camille Grand, director of the Foundation for
Strategic Research—a think tank with a reputation for telling truths the French
government might prefer to avoid—told me how this slippage had come about. “From
2013 on,” he said, “the Americans gave the impression they wanted the deal more
than Iran did. The administration put more pressure on its friends in the
negotiations than on the Iranians.”
...
For now, even if there are French critics, there
is no political or governmental force actively fighting the deal. It creates the
impression of a French security establishment that will shoot from the cover of
the sidelines, yet isn’t mobilized to urge that the agreement be
renegotiated.
But shooting from the sidelines can still have
an effect. Consider the recent ado about reports that Jacques Audibert, Mr.
Hollande’s national security adviser, told a U.S. congressional delegation to
Paris in July that France, while supporting the deal overall, would view a move
by Congress to block the deal as manageable without causing a break between the
U.S. and Europe. Rep. Loretta Sanchez, a Democrat, described the conversation
later. Although the French denied her account, her colleagues on the delegation
affirmed it—and why would she concoct a story so inconvenient to a president of
her party anyway?
So how come didn’t France lie across the tracks
to block the accord? My explanation:
Because an economically nonperforming President
Hollande couldn’t say “no” to French industry wanting a shot at new Iranian
contracts. Because France no longer musters the international political levers
to shoulder splendid isolation. And because it would not assume the cost of
being regarded as Benjamin Netanyahu’s single objective ally.
And now, French buyer’s remorse? In theory, a
bit. But not enough to try holding off on its own what France knows is a lousy
Iran nuclear deal.
Is anyone in Congress listening?
For the record, France
opposed the 24-day wait period for inspections.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, France, Francois Hollande, Iran Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, Jacques Audibert, John Kerry, Laurent Fabius, Loretta Sanchez
French diplomat pressured to retract statement on Iran, but Representatives back original story
The US Embassy to France and the French Embassy to the United States have been running a full-court press claiming that French diplomat Jacques Audibert never said it would be
helpful if Congress rejected the Iran nuclear sellout. But Representatives who were present at the meeting insist that
Audibert said what was originally reported.
Reps. Paul Cook (R., Calif.) and Tom Marino (R., Pa.) released a
joint statement on Friday confirming Audibert’s comments as described by
Sanchez.
“We participated in the meeting and can confirm that Congresswoman
Sanchez’s account of the meeting is accurate. We disagree with recent
claims that seek to refute her account,” the lawmakers said in a
statement provided to the Free Beacon.
The French Embassy continues to deny the report and worked furiously
in conjunction with White House officials Thursday to downplay
Audibert’s comments, sources said.
...
The French Embassy’s Twitter account issued a statement by Audibert, who also distanced himself from the report.
“During the meeting with the members of the US Congress on the 17th
of July, I never said or suggested that a no vote from the Congress on
the JCPOA might be helpful or lead to a better deal,” Audibert said in
the statement. “I insisted repeatedly on the fact that the deal itself
was the best possible.”
...
However, Audibert walked back his initial rejection of the report on Friday in an interview with French-language press.
When asked by European officials what would happen if Congress were
to reject the deal, Audibert “told them that in my opinion, no European
company would take the risk of going to do business in Iran, since it
risks being subjected to US sanctions, as was recently the case of a
large French bank. It’s obvious,” French press reported.
Audibert’s apparent support for a congressional no vote on the deal
is said to have swayed some lawmakers to oppose the agreement.
You don't think the White House and the State Department would lie and pressure another country's diplomat to get the deal passed, do you?
Labels: Iran Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, Jacques Audibert, John Kerry, Loretta Sanchez, Mike Turner, P 5+1, US House of Representatives
French National Security official: 'Congressional 'no' vote might be helpful'
A French national security official has contradicted the Obama-Kerry line that rejection of the Iranian nuclear sellout would bring about an apocalypse. Josh Rogin reports that the official, Jacques Audibert, says that a Congressional 'no' vote
might be helpful.
The French official, Jacques Audibert, is now the senior diplomatic
adviser to President Francois Hollande. Before that, as the director
general for political affairs in the Foreign Ministry from 2009 to 2014,
he led the French diplomatic team in the discussions with Iran and the
P5+1 group. Earlier this month, he met with Democrat Loretta Sanchez and
Republican Mike Turner, both top members of the House Armed Services
Committee, to discuss the Iran deal. The U.S. ambassador to France, Jane
Hartley, was also in the room.
According to both lawmakers,
Audibert expressed support for the deal overall, but also directly
disputed Kerry’s claim that a Congressional rejection of the Iran deal
would result in the worst of all worlds, the collapse of sanctions and
Iran racing to the bomb without restrictions.
“He basically said,
if Congress votes this down, there will be some saber-rattling and some
chaos for a year or two, but in the end nothing will change and Iran
will come back to the table to negotiate again that would be to our
advantage,” Sanchez told me in an interview. “He thought if the Congress
voted it down, that we could get a better deal.”
Audibert is also not anxious to see US sanctions on Iran lifted.
Audibert disagrees with that analysis, too, according to the two
lawmakers. He told them that if U.S. sanctions were kept in place, it
would effectively prevent the West from doing extensive business in
Iran. “I asked him specifically what the Europeans would do, and his
comment was that the way the U.S. sanctions are set in, he didn’t see an
entity or a country going against them, that the risk was too high,”
Sanchez said.
And Audibert has some objections to the deal.
Audibert also wasn’t happy with some of the terms of the deal itself,
according to Sanchez and Turner. He said he though it should have been
negotiated to last forever, not start to expire in as few as 10 years.
He also said he didn’t understand why Iran needed more than 5,000
centrifuges for a peaceful nuclear program. He also expressed concerns
about the robustness of the inspections and verification regime under
the deal, according to the lawmakers.
Ya think?
Kerry was asked about Audibert in a classified House briefing with more than 300 members on July 22. He apparently didn't have any answers.
Hmmm.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Iran Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, Jacques Audibert, John Kerry, Loretta Sanchez, Mike Turner, P 5+1, US House of Representatives
