Gabriel Noronha has some ideas about how Congress might be able to bollix up the nightmarish Iran deal in the making. So long as Nancy Pelosi rules the Democrats control Congress, it’s not going to happen. However, he adds, “it would only take Republican control of one chamber of Congress to dismantle a fledgling deal next year—which is precisely what top Republicans are planning to do.”
Noronha is a former State Department official who continues to dig around in the details of what comes next. We previously drew attention to his March 7 Tablet column on the concessions in process. He adds to that today in the Tablet column headlined “How Congress Can Nix Biden’s Iran Deal.”
Noronha’s current Tablet column is of interest to me in its description of the “inherent guarantees” Iran seeks in lieu of an unachievable treaty commitment:
Because the U.S. negotiators are unable to provide such a guarantee [i.e., “that any economic contracts exempted from sanctions under the deal would remain immune under a subsequent administration”], the Iranians are said to be seeking some form of economic compensation to be held in trust by a third party that would be paid to Iran in the event that U.S. sanctions are reimposed. In other words, the United States would pay into a giant trust fund to protect the regime from future sanctions presumably triggered by Iran’s own malignant behavior. One U.S. government official close to the negotiations told me they doubted the demand would ever be accepted or could even be fashioned in the first place in any way that wouldn’t cause even more Democrats to jump ship and oppose the deal.
Noronha has much more of interest. Don’t miss his section on “Putin’s $10 billion nuclear deal.” To borrow the name of an old St. Paul toy store, it is the essence of nonsense.
I urge interested readers to take in Noronha’s column(s) along with the brilliant Michael Doran’s Tablet column “Biden Koshers Iranian Terror.” Subhead: “The administration and its press poodles are trying to normalize Iranian plots to kill Americans on U.S. soil in the pursuit of a nuclear deal that has long outlived any plausible arguments for its usefulness.”
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