On the Iran memo and the weight of unratified words

The BBC reports that a fourteen-paragraph memorandum has been exchanged between the United States and Iran, containing three principal elements: an end to active hostilities, a commitment by Iran never to acquire a nuclear weapon, and a $300 billion redevelopment package. I will take those facts as given and mark everything beyond them as inference, not recollection.

Let me begin with what I know about written instruments between nations. A memo exchanged by diplomats and a treaty ratified by the Senate are not the same creature. The first records an intention; the second creates an obligation enforceable — at least in principle — under the law of nations. I negotiated the Treaty of Paris and watched the Jay Treaty survive a bitter Senate fight precisely because both instruments were subjected to deliberation before they became law. That deliberation was not obstruction; it was the mechanism by which a free republic assumes a binding commitment with full public faith behind it.

The commitment that Iran will never possess a nuclear weapon is, if genuine, the most consequential clause in the document. But its worth depends entirely on the precision of its language and the verification regime attached to it. A promise without a method of confirmation is, in diplomatic terms, merely a statement of current preference. The parties' negotiators — whoever they are, for I do not know the names of the present administration's envoys — should understand that the word "never" in a treaty is only as durable as the inspection and enforcement architecture built around it. Vague language in a consequential instrument is not modesty; it is a deferred quarrel.

The $300 billion redevelopment figure draws my attention as well. Large sums written into an agreement create their own political gravity: domestic constituencies in both countries will form around the expectation of those funds, and that expectation can become a kind of informal bond even before ratification. I regard this as a reasonable feature of diplomacy — parties who profit from an agreement have reason to preserve it — but only if the conditions attached to the money are as clearly specified as the money itself. Consideration without conditions is not a bargain; it is a gift, and gifts do not sustain alliances.

I am, by disposition, an optimist about the capacity of written compacts to reduce the occasions of war. The Strait of Hormuz, which the BBC's lead implies was a point of contention, is precisely the kind of contested waterway whose freedom of navigation I would defend by law rather than by force of arms alone. But I am also a realist about the Senate's role. Whatever the present executive has put his name to, it must come before that body — or its legal equivalent under current procedure — before the Republic can honestly say it has committed itself. A president's signature is the beginning of a treaty process, not its conclusion. The public faith of the United States is not one man's to pledge alone.

What should be done is this: the text of the memorandum should be published in full; the Senate should examine it with the same scrutiny it would apply to any binding instrument; and the verification provisions — particularly those touching the nuclear commitment — should be made explicit before any redevelopment funds are disbursed. A diplomat's task is to leave a quarrel less inflamed than he found it. The task of a republic is to ensure that the peace its diplomats negotiate is the peace its institutions can actually keep.