REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
"We've been clear from the beginning we're not negotiating a legally binding plan," Kerry told the committee, according to ABC News. "We're negotiating a plan that will have a capacity for enforcement."
This wasn't the only instance this week in which a State Department official restated the administration's position on the sides' technical obligations under a potential nuclear accord. On March 10, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters: "Historically, under many administrations, the United States has pursued important
Politico noted that Psaki "did not elaborate on the implications" of signing a "nonbinding" agreement. But the "nonbinding" modifier has a specific meaning here: As 47 Republican senators pointed out in a controversial open letter to Iran's leadership, any agreement not put to a Congressional vote is considered an "executive agreement" under the US's constitutional system.
In an October 2014 blog post, Harvard
"Any deal struck by President Obama with Iran will probably appear to the Iranians to be, at best, short-term and tenuous," Goldsmith wrote. "And so we can probably expect, at best, only a short-term and tenuous commitment from Iran in return."
REUTERS/Rick Wilking
The US wouldn't have a firm legal obligation to uphold the agreement, so Iran would have a built-in reason to assume American bad faith and push the limits of a future deal. In other words, without a legal guarantee on the US side, compliance with an agreement is potentially diluted Tehran's side as well - and remember, this is a regime that hid the existence of two secret nuclear facilities and operated 20,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges in defiance of repeated UN Security Council resolutions.
Nevertheless, neither Iran nor the Obama administration believes that legal guarantees are necessary to resolve the nuclear issue, or else they wouldn't be negotiating in the first place.
The acceptance of this negotiating premise might actually be a sign of growing mutual trust between two countries that haven't had diplomatic relations for over 30 years. Confidence between the two might be so implicit by now that neither believes legality is that significant an obstacle to resolving the nuclear standoff.
It could also be that Iran believes that agreement commitments from the US's 5 negotiating partners - the other 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany - would obligate the US to adhere to an agreement even it didn't have any binding legal status in the US.
REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger
"The UN nature of it adds a level of legality that makes it different from just an agreement between the United States and Iran," Mark Fitzpatrick of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies told The New York Times. "A Security Council resolution will give it standing that makes it even more concrete and harder for a successor to simply undo."
And it could be that even the Iranians believe that the word of the President of the United States is a credible enough guarantee on its own.
The Obama administration's tradeoff might just as easily be aimed at preventing a Republican Congress from scuttling a deal.
The Republicans understand that they have no current ability to veto an agreement - something that formed a crucial subtext to the Senate letter. But in exchange for this advantage, the Obama administration is settling for an agreement without a legal backstop.