Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.
By Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times (TNS)
International talks over Iran’s disputed nuclear program moved into wearying overtime Wednesday, with their future unclear and a shrinking corps of top diplomats taking part.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry and other negotiators, who are seeking a preliminary deal to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for easing sanctions, failed to meet a self-imposed deadline at midnight Tuesday but kept going in search of a breakthrough.
Diplomats insist the closed-door talks are making progress, and could produce an acceptable outcome at any time that would kick the negotiations into their final phase.
Yet major conflicts remain and much work is needed, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond told reporters.
Fabius, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi have already left Lausanne, leaving aides to negotiate for them.
One possibility is the talks will break up in the next day or so with only a general press statement, then resume after a few days to try to work out a detailed agreement that can help the Obama administration convince skeptics in Congress that it is making progress.
But a halt without a deal would be a setback for the White House, which is concerned that Congress will impose new sanctions that could wreck the talks when it returns April 13.
The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — the United States, France, Britain, Russia, and China — plus Germany have spent the last 18 months in intense talks with Iran in an effort to curb its nuclear program. Talks began more than a decade ago.
The diplomats missed two deadlines last year, and President Obama told them he wanted a definitive decision by Tuesday on whether an agreement with Iran was possible.
But the talks hit an impasse on several key issues, including the lifting of U.N. sanctions on Iran, and restraints on Iran’s research and development that could help it modernize its ability to enrich uranium. Iran denies it is seeking to build nuclear weapons.
The talks have careened from optimism to pessimism and back over the last week. Diplomats said Tuesday morning that a deal was in sight, and the delegations had prepared large meeting halls to announce a deal, and some in the U.S. party had packed their bags to go home.
But the discussions seemed to run aground Tuesday afternoon. “The mood changed hour to hour,” said one diplomat.
A senior U.S. official said in a statement before six p.m that American negotiators were “evaluating the best path forward.”
“It’s time for Iran to make the serious commitments that they know the international community is expecting them to make,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said in Washington.
Without those pledges from Iran, the U.S. and its five negotiating partners will have to consider “other alternatives,” Earnest said.
Obama and his top aides held a late night secure video conference call with Kerry and his negotiating team and “thanked the team for their continuing efforts,” the White House announced.
Photo: U.S. Embassy Vienna via Flickr
By Sangwon Yoon, Bloomberg News (TNS)
UNITED NATIONS — While the world remains fixated on the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, the Obama administration is facing another foreign policy showdown in the United Nations Security Council.
The administration has signaled that it might abandon the decades-long U.S. policy of protecting Israel at the U.N. and back a Security Council resolution laying out terms for a two-state solution to the almost 67-year-old dispute between the Jewish state and the Palestinians.
Robert Malley, the Middle East director for President Barack Obama’s National Security Council, told at least one European nation two weeks ago that the administration is more willing than it has ever been to work on a Security Council resolution defining the parameters for a Mideast peace agreement, according to a report on the conversation to superiors by a Washington-based European diplomat. A copy of the report was viewed by Bloomberg News.
The reported comments by Malley are “completely false,” Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said in an email. “Rob has not had any conversation on this topic with any European diplomats then or since.”
Obama, though, has left no doubt that he’s considering whether to bend the U.S. policy of vetoing U.N. resolutions that Israel opposes and, in the process, punish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for pledging that he will ensure that no Palestinian state is created anytime soon. Netanyahu also opposes the talks with Iran, warning Tuesday that the deal the U.S. seeks would “pave the way” for the Islamic Republic to develop nuclear weapons.
“We have to do an evaluation of where we are” on Mideast peace efforts, Obama said at a news conference on March 24.
Past U.S. Security Council vetoes were “predicated on this idea that the two-state solution is the best outcome,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest has said. “Now our ally in these talks has said that they are no longer committed to that solution. That means we need to reevaluate our position.”
Obama said he’ll wait for Netanyahu to form his new coalition government by the preliminary April 22 deadline before announcing the conclusions of his Mideast peace policy reassessment.
While Palestinians and Europeans are excited by the prospect of U.S. support for a two-state solution, they remain wary of how much political and diplomatic latitude Obama has to follow through.
Republican lawmakers are promising to fight back if Obama qualifies U.S. support for Israel at the U.N. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), has warned of a “violent backlash by the Congress, bipartisan in nature,” if Obama lets a Security Council resolution defining the terms of a peace agreement go forward without first getting both sides to agree.
“The last thing I want is to be put in a box where I have to take the U.N. on,” Graham told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on March 23, reminding the audience that as chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations, he has the power to suspend America’s $654 million annual contribution to the world body.
U.N. diplomats and Obama’s former Mideast peace negotiators say the president has two realistic options.
First, the U.S. could back a French plan to draft a Security Council resolution that would set a binding timeframe in which to define the parameters of a two-state solution based on Israel’s 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as their shared capital, said two knowledgeable Security Council diplomats.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on March 27 that in the “coming weeks” France will restart discussions on such a text, which ended in December due to U.S. objections.
Robert Serry, the U.N.’s departing Mideast peace envoy, urged the Security Council last week to update its 1967 Resolution 242, which has been a cornerstone of almost 50 years of diplomatic efforts. It was adopted after Israel captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and Gaza from its Arab enemies in the Six-Day War that year. Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt after the two countries signed a peace treaty in 1979.
Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt, said “a carefully crafted resolution on parameters” is the most realistic option for the U.S. to take, “provided that it is balanced and doesn’t go into so much detail as to prejudge negotiations.”
The biggest challenges will be whether to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, which the Palestinians and the French oppose, and what security arrangements should be included to ensure that a new Palestinian state couldn’t be a launching pad for attacks against Israel, said the two diplomats.
The second U.S. option is to introduce a new draft Security Council resolution that outlines no parameters. It would call on both parties to make progress toward resuming negotiations and condemn activities such as Israel’s settlement building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank for obstructing the path to peace, said an Arab diplomat at the U.N. who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
While such a resolution is unlikely to be adopted, a draft would pressure Israel and Netanyahu to at least freeze settlement construction, said three Security Council diplomats who asked not to be named commenting on sensitive matters.
Such actions also might help deter the Palestinians, at least for a time, from seeking full statehood recognition from the Security Council and membership in international treaties, or from pursuing its request that the International Criminal Court probe alleged Israeli war crimes, said the three diplomats.
Aaron David Miller, a vice president at the Wilson Center in Washington who served as a Middle East negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations, said Obama first must determine his goals for the remainder of his term before exploring the U.S. options at the Security Council.
“The real question is, what is the best option for the administration to pursue in the next two months?” Miller said.
Adopting a U.N. resolution before any agreement is reached between the two parties would be useless unless the administration is ready to try to force Israel to accept a two-state solution by cutting U.S. aid to Israel, recognizing Palestine, or pushing the Europeans to sanction Israel and reduce trade, Miller said.
“But I see no indication whatsoever that this administration is ready to do that,” he said.
Photo: Zack Lee via Flickr
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