Can the U.N. Deliver for Obama on Iran, Israel-Palestine Deals? Richard Gowan <http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/authors/541/richard-gowan>, March 23, 2015
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/15353/can-the-u-n-deliver-for-obama-on-iran-israel-palestine-deals U.S. President Barack Obama’s ability to influence the future of American foreign policy is inevitably shrinking as he approaches the end of his second term. But as president, he still has enormous leverage over the direction of United Nations diplomacy. In the next few weeks or months, Obama could dump two exceptionally sensitive tasks on the U.N.: finding a new way out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and monitoring an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. If the U.N. can successfully accomplish either of these things, the organization will receive a gigantic boost. If it fails on both, the long-term damage to its already degraded reputation could prove to be immense. American officials have been seething since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised not to recognize a Palestinian state <http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/on-final-day-of-campaign-netanyahu-says-no-palestinian-state-if-he-wins/2015/03/16/4f4468e8-cbdc-11e4-8730-4f473416e759_story.html> in an ultimately successful ploy to win national elections last week. After Netanyahu’s victory, the White House warned that the U.S. could endorse <http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/18/from-tel-aviv-to-turtle-bay-israel-palestinians-un-resolution>, or at least abstain on, a U.N. Security Council resolution setting out the negotiating parameters for an Israeli-Palestinian deal similar to a text Washington rejected in December. That proposal gave the two sides one year to negotiate an agreement and Israel three years to quit the Palestinian territories. Washington might still balk at formalizing such precise demands, but any shift in its stance at the U.N. would signal a significant break with Israel. The U.S. is also still striving to strike a bargain with Iran over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions by the end of this month. Talks in Switzerland sputtered out last Friday without reaching a final agreement. They will recommence this week, but it is still unclear whether a deal is feasible <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/23/iran-nuclear-talks-kerry-progress-deal-sanctions> . Yet it is clear that the U.S. wants a positive outcome. If a compromise proves possible, it will almost certainly go before the Security Council. The Iranian foreign minister has stipulated that this is necessary <http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-03-13/iran-wants-un-security-council-to-block-future-u-s-sanctions>. U.S. allies like France also deem it essential <http://www.france24.com/en/20150313-security-council-members-debate-ending-un-sanctions-iran-nuclear>. China and Russia, key players in the Iranian process, will want any deal to be affirmed in New York to maintain leverage over its implementation. The Security Council could end up haggling over important details of any agreement, such as how it will be monitored and precisely how existing U.N. sanctions on Tehran will be cut back. These debates may kick off in the final phase of the Obama presidency, but if Washington gets its way, any nuclear agreement with Tehran will last at least a decade. That means that if the current administration does sign off on high-profile resolutions on both Iran and Israel this year, it would force the next team in the White House to spend an awful lot of time focusing on U.N. diplomacy over their implementation in the years ahead. This prospect is already firing up partisan American political commentators. Idealistic Democrats hope that Obama can push deals through the U.N. that will outmaneuver the hard-line anti-Iran faction in Congress <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-laurenti/obamas-un-end-run-around_b_6869108.html>. Conservatives are naturally predicting that the president will do just that, betraying Israel <http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/236396-republicans-slam-obama-on-israel> . These sorts of arguments could prove poisonous as the U.S. enters election season. No Republican candidate will have anything nice to say about Obama and the U.N. teaming up on Iran, let alone any diplomatic action against Israel. Hillary Clinton, already considered the Democratic frontrunner for 2016, would almost certainly have to tack to the right on one or both issues, too. If Obama hopes to cut serious deals over the Middle East at the U.N., he must be aware that doing so will reduce the institution to being a political football in American domestic debates. But this may be a price worth paying, especially since the U.N. usually gets a brutal kicking in those debates anyway. A more serious dilemma is whether the Security Council is in fact well-positioned to resolve the Iranian nuclear standoff, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the Middle East’s broader conflicts. The omens are not exactly good. The U.N. could give its imprimatur to any deal with Iran, but history suggests that the permanent members of the Security Council will struggle to keep a common front on its implementation. The council split over Iraq’s disarmament program in the 1990s and 2000s, and there is a high chance that something similar could happen over Iran. The odds on the U.N. facilitating an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement are frankly minuscule. Netanyahu has never concealed his contempt for the U.N. But even if he were to be unexpectedly unseated as prime minister in the next few years, no Israeli government of any ideological stripe could acquiesce to a political agenda or timeline dictated from New York. It may suit the Obama administration to signal its support for such an agenda, but having failed to cut an Israeli-Palestinian deal through direct mediation last year, Washington cannot seriously imagine that a multilateral push will make much difference. The Security Council’s relevance in the broader Middle East is already in precipitous decline. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and the Gulf monarchies have circumvented the council to fight complex proxy wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen. U.N. mediators soldier on, trying to stabilize all three countries, but their efforts look like marginalia to the story of the region’s implosion <http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/03/libya-peace-talks-verge-collapse-150321231034000.html>. The irony of the crises in the Middle East is that the U.N.’s chances of sustaining deals with Iran and Israel, while admittedly low, compare quite favorably to its prospects of success elsewhere in the neighborhood. It is pretty easy to imagine a worst-case scenario for the U.N. in which the Obama administration keeps pushing the organization to help out with Iran, Israel, Syria and other crises across the region, and the organization flunks in every single case. That could do deep damage to the U.N.’s broader reputation. But perhaps we should not panic. The U.N. has struggled to find lasting solutions to crises in the Middle East ever since it first got involved in trying to mediate fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in the 1940s. Even the Security Council’s near-death experience over Iraq in 2003 proved less catastrophic than it seemed in the heat of the moment. The Obama administration may push the U.N. to take on unreasonable burdens in the Middle East over the next two years. But the institution will limp through the ensuing pain. *Richard Gowan is research director at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation and a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. 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