Isolation at the U.N.

Link to original article at The Weekly Standard In defending the Iran nuclear deal to Congress, President Obama and his staff argued repeatedly that rejection would leave America in dire isolation at the United Nations. Obama can now relax. Having used slash-and-burn executive tactics to roll right over a dissenting majority in Congress and a disapproving American public, he can look forward to celebrating this deal with those more likely to applaud it, when he speaks September 28 at the 70th annual General Assembly in New York.

For the rest of us, Obama’s horror of isolation at the U.N. should be cause not for comfort, but for growing alarm. We are seeing here an inversion of America’s most vital role in global diplomacy, which in healthier times has been not to please and appease the despot-ridden and morally myopic U.N., but to provide it a functional compass and guide. There is a more accurate phrase for this “isolation” that Obama so fears. It used to be called “leadership of the free world.” Under President Obama, America has offered precious little in the way of such leadership. In Libya, in 2011, the United States led from behind via the U.N., and then abandoned the project, leaving Libya to collapse into terror-wracked chaos. In Syria, in 2013, Obama erased his red line in deference to Russia, which went on to annex Crimea the following year and is still chewing away at the rest of Ukraine, with an eye on the Baltics. Since Obama took office, the United States has borne passive witness to Iran’s brutal crushing of massive protests in 2009 and done nothing of sufficient substance to deter North Korea’s burgeoning nuclear weapons program—its three nuclear tests, two of which happened on Obama’s watch, may soon be followed by a fourth. About the only thing on which Obama has led has been the Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. This deal is a disaster, negotiated with Iran by six world powers, the five veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council (the United States, France, Britain, Russia, China) plus Germany. Two of America’s negotiating partners—Russia and China—have themselves served as major conduits of expertise and materiel to Iran’s nuclear program and are run by nuclear-armed regimes so ruthless that they are likely the last countries Iran would dare threaten. The resulting JCPOA ignores Iran’s state-sponsored terrorism, human rights abuses, and messianic ambitions to obliterate Israel and bring “Death to America.” This deal comes laden with so many U.S.-led concessions—from hundreds of billions’ worth of sanctions relief to secret side deals to sunset clauses—it effectively clears the way for Iran, sooner or later, to become a nuclear-armed state.

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That’s what’s been troubling Congress. And as member states of the strategically rudderless U.N. began lining up to do business with oil-rich Iran, the Obama administration busied itself telling lawmakers not to spoil the fun. On August 5, Obama admonished that if Congress killed the deal, America would lose its credibility as “a leader of diplomacy” and “the anchor of the international system.” U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power elaborated on this theme in an August 26 piece for Politico, warning that if Congress were to spike the Iran deal, “we would instantly isolate ourselves from the countries that spent nearly two years working with American negotiators to hammer out its toughest provisions.” Power added that congressional rejection would “project globally an America that is internally divided, unreliable and dismissive of the views of those with whom we built Iran’s sanctions architecture in the first place.” She wrote that America would lose leverage at the U.N., unable to muster coalitions on other fronts, perhaps even incapable of persuading the Security Council to notch up U.N. sanctions on North Korea following its next nuclear test. This was beyond disingenuous. If U.N. players saw the Iran agreement as a done deal, the culprit was the Obama administration itself. It was the administration that tried to outflank Congress by rushing the deal to the Security Council less than a week after it was announced in Vienna, and just 1 day into the 60-day review period guaranteed to Congress by law. It was Ambassador Power herself who, without waiting for Congress, cast 1 of the 15 votes with which the Security Council on July 20 unanimously approved a resolution enshrining the deal at the U.N. It was the State Department’s chief negotiator with Iran, undersecretary Wendy Sherman, who justified these tactics, even before the Security Council vote, in her comment to the press that it would have been “difficult” for America to tell its negotiating partners eager to go to the U.N., “Well, excuse me, the world, you should wait for the United States Congress.” Except that is exactly what a free and democratic superpower should have told “the world.” If other Security Council members were really that desperate to rush the deal straight to the U.N., Obama could have slowed them down with a threat to veto any resolution introduced before Congress had finished its review. Instead of threatening the U.N. with a veto, he threatened Congress. And, as the congressional review went forward, we were treated to the bizarre scene of America’s ambassador to the U.N. denouncing the U.S. process of democratic debate as an unruly insult to the Security Council and “countless” other U.N. members that had already endorsed the deal. Not least, this augurs poorly for U.N. oversight of Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA. Any allegations of cheating will be handled by a Joint Commission, operating in secrecy, and consisting of the original negotiating parties to the deal, including Iran. Under the “snapback” provisions of the JCPOA, any officially recognized case of cheating could trigger the collapse of the entire deal. This setup creates plenty of incentive for a conspiracy of silence, should Iran cheat. As is standard practice even in lesser matters at the U.N., the burden—or, if you will, the isolation—of imposing any real oversight will almost certainly fall to America. Or to no one. The U.N. has no power itself to enforce sanctions; that is left to individual member states. It’s not just military might that gives the United States the most influence here. Because the dollar is a reserve currency, people doing business in dollars have to run transactions through the United States. When Obama speaks at the U.N. later this month, in all his vaunted nonisolation, he will share that day’s lineup with such despots—and partners in the Iran deal—as the presidents of Russia, China, and Iran itself. He will be addressing a General Assembly whose second-largest voting bloc, the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement, has been chaired since 2012 by none other than Iran. That throng of thugs and their craven cohorts embodies a basic failing of the U.N., which despite its founding promises of peace and freedom is rarely devoted in practice to any of its charter ideals. The U.N. is not a guardian of the free world. It is a collective of the governments of 193 member states, the majority ranked by Washington-based Freedom House as either not free or only partly free. Nor is the trend encouraging. This January, Freedom House reported that 2014 had marked the ninth straight year of “a disturbing decline in global freedom.” Ambassador Power wrote that if the United States were to walk away from the deal, “We would go from a situation in which Iran is isolated to one in which the United States is isolated.” Maybe in the diplomatic lounges of the U.N. that sounds clever. But there are worse things than isolation at the U.N. Among them are nuclear bombs in the wrong hands, which is where this popularity contest is going.