Warnings by Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid that
there is a crisis between Israel and the Americans may well be true.
He’s alarmed at the
refusal
of the top tier of the Obama foreign policy team to receive Defense
Minister Moshe Ya’alon. But there’s a much bigger crisis brewing for the
administration over Middle East policy. It’s the rift — wider than I
can recall it — between the White House and the Congress. It involves
not only Israel but also Iran.
It’s a crisis that, to judge by the latest polling on the congressional
election, could shortly get worse. This is because of the possibility —
not a certainty — that Americans will give Republicans, the more
pro-Israel party, control of the Senate. No wonder President Obama has
decided that if he can get a deal with the mullahs, he will, as
reported by David Sanger of The New York Times, “do everything in his power to avoid letting Congress vote on it.”
That is astonishing enough, given that the Constitution grants Congress
fundamental powers on foreign affairs, including that treaties must be
ratified by two-thirds of the Senate. Administrations make all sorts of
agreements that fall short of being treaties and on which Congress
doesn’t vote. They rarely do so with an eye to unraveling the work of
the Congress. What President Obama appears to be working toward is
gutting sanctions that Congress enacted — by an overwhelming margin.
“Congress will not permit the president to unilaterally unravel Iran
sanctions that passed the Senate in a 99 to 0 vote,” is how the Times
quotes Senator Mark Kirk, the leading Republican backer of the
sanctions, as putting the point. The chairman of the Foreign Relations
Committee, Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat of New Jersey, is quoted
as stating any pact “cannot allow Iran to be a threshold nuclear state.”
The Times also quotes the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad
Zarif, as mocking the administration by saying it will have a “harder
job” convincing Congress than selling any deal in Iran. That was
underscored last year by the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act. The measure
would have required that were Iran to default on any agreement,
sanctions would be restored and even tightened.
As it turned out, the Democratic leadership — and the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee — flinched putting the Nuclear Weapons Free
Iran Act to a vote. But what’s going to happen if the Republicans gain
control of the Senate? By my quick count, two thirds of Menendez-Kirk’s
60 or so co-sponsors — a few short of a veto-proof majority — were
Republicans. Theirs is the party that has emerged as the more supportive
of a hard line in the Middle East.
It’s less likely that Congress would flinch if the Republicans gain
control of the Senate. On the contrary, the Senate will be more likely
to assert itself in foreign affairs. So welcome to the constitutional
no-man’s land between the White House and the Congress. The action there
could make Moshe Ya’alon’s feud with the Obama administration look like
Tiddly-Winks.
Trouble between the president and Congress, after all, normally erupts
when both the Senate and the House are controlled by one party and the
presidency by another. Think Richard Nixon, a Republican who was forced
to resign the presidency by a Democratic Congress. Or Ronald Reagan, the
nadir of whose presidency came in its final quarter when the Senate was
recaptured by the Democrats and issued its report condemning him for
the so-called Iran Contra Affair.
It’s not my purpose here to suggest that Ya’alon or anyone else should
take lightly a deterioration in relations between Israel and the White
House. It is my aim to suggest that what has changed is neither Israel
nor the Congress but the Democratic Party, which at its last convention
booed a proposal to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and
which handed up, in President Obama, America’s most left-wing president.
Not that the Republicans are immune from ideological struggles, and a
big one is being brought to a head by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. He
was one of the few Republicans who declined to co-sponsor the Nuclear
Weapons Free Iran Act. He was just on the cover of Time as the “most
interesting man in politics.” He is a long, long way from the presidency
he’s seeking. But he would be, in the best sense, a stickler on the
Constitution — and hew to a more libertarian line on foreign affairs.
He’d be less likely to send our GIs into battle without a war
declaration. He’s more likely to let other countries, including Israel,
run their own affairs — thus less likely to give allied war ministers,
like Moshe Ya’alon, cause for complaint
PROVIDENCE, RI – The last time Barack Obama stumped on this Rhode
Island College campus, several thousand spectators had waited in a cold
drizzle to catch a glimpse of him, then a presidential candidate on an
11-state winning streak.
