DAILY BEAST
by Tim Mak
March 11, 2015

Beyond the theatrics of the open letter that 47 Republican senators sent to Iran, it features a core of truth: the Obama administration is negotiating a deal that cannot be guaranteed beyond the president’s current term. The Obama administration was so outraged with the Republican attempt to undercut the president’s foreign policy negotiations that it sent the vice president, the White House press secretary, and others to attack the letter rather seriously—instead of treating it as the “cheeky” reminder of Congress’s role that GOP senators intended. In the process of engaging, the Obama administration highlighted that any deal with Iran would be, like many other past international security initiatives, a “non-binding” agreement. And by taking this bait, the administration undercut its own credibility in making longer-term assurances about American sanctions relief. “A non-binding agreement with Iran is easier to make (because the President can clearly do it on his own) and easier to break (because there is no domestic or international legal obstacle to breaking it),” wrote Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general who now teaches law at Harvard, at Lawfare on Wednesday. READ MORE