A page and a half is no treaty — it is a promissory note

Foreign Affairs & Public Credit

The BBC reports that Vice President Vance describes the prospective US-Iran agreement as "about a page and a half" and "very general," with many details to be resolved afterward. I will take him at his word, and that word should alarm anyone who has thought seriously about what public commitments are for.

I spent the better part of my years in office arguing one proposition above all others: vagueness is the enemy of credit. When the United States funded its Revolutionary War debt in 1790, the argument was not merely about money. It was about whether the word of this republic meant anything at all. Creditors — foreign and domestic — needed to know exactly what they were owed, on what schedule, at what rate. A general promise to pay something, somehow, later, would have purchased nothing except contempt. The same logic applies to diplomatic instruments. A document that is deliberately skeletal does not create an agreement; it creates a disagreement deferred.

Now, I must be careful here. I have not read this draft — no one outside a small circle has. Everything I say about its specific provisions is inference, not recollection. But the vice president's own characterization — "very general" — is the characterization that troubles me. The strength of any compact, commercial or diplomatic, derives from the precision of its terms. When the terms are left open, each party reads into the silence whatever it finds convenient. That is not a foundation; that is a fuse.

There is a further concern that a mind attentive to executive energy must raise. The Constitution grants the Senate the power of advice and consent on treaties precisely because the framers understood that the executive, however vigorous and however well-intentioned, should not bind the nation alone on matters of the gravest consequence. A one-and-a-half-page framework, with the hard work deferred, is a vehicle ideally suited to bypassing that check — not necessarily by design, but by the logic of the thing. Once the headline agreement is announced, the pressure to ratify the subsequent details becomes enormous. The Senate finds itself endorsing fine print it never debated. I supported a strong executive — I argued for it in the Federalist Papers — but a strong executive that has been checked is a legitimate executive. One that races past the check by leaving the check nothing to examine is a different matter entirely.

President Trump's parallel statement, reported by CNBC, that the US will "go right back to dropping bombs" if he dislikes the deal, may be intended as leverage — and leverage has its uses in negotiation. But leverage and legal commitment are not the same instrument. One is a threat; the other is a bond. A nation that substitutes the first for the second eventually finds that neither is believed.

My recommendation is straightforward. Before this framework hardens into a political fait accompli, Congress should insist on seeing the terms in full — whatever follows from that page and a half — and the Senate should assert its constitutional role vigorously. Not to obstruct; obstruction for its own sake is no virtue. But to ensure that whatever the United States promises, it promises precisely, publicly, and with the full faith of its institutions behind it. The credit of the republic is not the president's alone to pledge. It belongs to all of us, and we should be jealous of it.