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Cameron Warns Against New Iran Sanctions

New sanctions legislation risks blowing up the talks with Iran.
David Cameron

David Cameron is visiting Washington this week, and had a message for Iran hawks in the Senate:

The British prime minister has called on two US senators from Washington, where he is visiting the president, to stress British opposition to such a move, which is also opposed by the White House. Mr Cameron spoke to John McCain and Bob Corker on Friday morning to try to persuade them to drop planned legislation for further sanctions.

Cameron made the same point that critics of new sanctions legislation have been making for more than a year, which is that passing new legislation “would really jeopardise the negotiations.” And Cameron is right pushing through new sanctions legislation would risk blowing up the talks and preventing a deal from being reached. But then that is what Iran hawks have been after from the start. Sometimes they will falsely portray the successful interim agreement as a sell-out of U.S. interests, and sometimes they will lie about Iranian compliance with the interim agreement, but they usually pretend that their desire is to reach a satisfactory final deal. Usually, but not always. Tom Cotton has been the most forthright about his desire to derail diplomacy with Iran, but it has been obvious for a long time that when hawks say that they want to “strengthen” the U.S. bargaining position they are really saying that they want to make demands of Iran that Iran can’t possibly accept.

By making maximalist demands and opposing further sanctions relief, Iran hawks hope to make a compromise impossible to reach. If these hawks genuinely wanted to strengthen the U.S. hand in these negotiations, they wouldn’t support moves that the other parties involved would perceive as sabotage, but sabotaging the talks has always been the real goal all along. So Cameron’s intervention is useful in reminding us that the backers of new sanctions legislation aren’t worried about jeopardizing the negotiations. Indeed, they hope to do much more than jeopardize them. They want to wreck them. Relatively sane members of the Senate shouldn’t let them get away with it.

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