U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told Republicans who control Congress Wednesday they would not be able to modify any nuclear agreement struck between the United States and Iran.
Separately, Iran’s top general, Mohammad Ali Jaafari, said his country has reached “a new chapter” toward its declared aim of exporting revolution, in reference to Tehran’s growing regional influence.
Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry said he responded with “utter disbelief” to an open letter to Iran Monday signed only by Republican senators that said any deal would only last as long as U.S. President Barack Obama, a Democrat, remains in office.
“When it says that Congress could actually modify the terms of an agreement at any time [it] is flat wrong,” Kerry, who has been negotiating a deal to rein in Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for easing sanctions, told the committee. “You don’t have the right to modify an agreement reached executive to executive between leaders of a country.”
But Senator Rand Paul, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2016, told Kerry that any deal would need approval by Congress if it affected U.S. sanctions against Iran. Paul accused the Obama administration of trying to bypass Congress.
Kerry also said the letter threatened global trust in America.
“This risks undermining the confidence that foreign governments in thousands of important agreements commit to,” Kerry told lawmakers.
The White House has described the letter as “reckless” and “irresponsible,” saying it interfered with efforts by six major powers to negotiate with Iran and prevent it from building a bomb.
The negotiations, resuming in Lausanne, Switzerland, next week, are at a critical juncture as the sides try to meet an end of March interim deal target, with a final deal in June.
“We have been clear from the beginning, we are not negotiating, a quote, legally binding plan, we are negotiating a plan that will have in it capacity for enforcement,” Kerry said. “The letter erroneously asserts this is a legally binding plan. It is not. We don’t even have diplomatic relations with Iran.”
While formal treaties require the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate, the “vast majority of international arrangements and agreements do not,” Kerry said.
“This letter ignores more than two centuries of precedent in the conduct of American foreign policy,” he stressed.
The letter was an unusual intervention by Republican lawmakers into foreign policy, which is typically the responsibility of the president’s own administration.
Meanwhile, the comments made by Jaafari, the Iranian commander of the nation’s powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps, come amid concern among Iran’s neighbors about Tehran’s regional influence.
“The Islamic revolution is advancing with good speed, its example being the ever-increasing export of the revolution,” he said, according to the ISNA news agency.
“Today, not only Palestine and Lebanon acknowledge the influential role of the Islamic republic but so do the people of Iraq and Syria.”
He made references to military action against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, where the Guards have deployed military advisers.
“The phase of the export of the revolution has entered a new chapter,” he added, referring to an aim of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.
In his speech to the Assembly of Experts, Iran’s top religious body, Jafaari also mentioned Hezbollah.
“Hezbollah and its resistance against one of the armies in the world [Israel] ... is one of the Islamic revolution’s miracles,” he said.
“It [shows] the powerful influence of the Islamic system as the helmsman in the region.”
