Tom Cotton strikes me as the most interesting Senate freshman for any number of reasons, not least of which is his uncanny ability to draw attention to himself, most notably when he convinced 46 of his Republican colleagues to sign an open letter to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. In the letter, Cotton, the extremely junior senator from Arkansas—he’s the youngest member of the Senate, at 37—and his co-signers warned Khamenei that Congress might use its power to overturn or, at the very least, modify whatever agreement the Iranian regime eventually chooses to sign with President Obama and his great-power allies.
The letter made Cotton a hero among those who believe, as he told me in an interview last week, that Obama’s deal is not a deal at all, but instead simply a “list of concessions.” To his critics, Cotton’s decision to argue publicly to a longstanding American adversary that the U.S. president’s word is not binding was semi-mutinous or, at a minimum, despicable.
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Cotton: Well, there’s no deal within the framework, in my opinion. There’s a long list of concessions that Iran’s leaders continue to dispute they actually made. This framework, as you’ve written, is only a success within the specific reality they’ve created. And they created a very narrow and risky reality in which they were focused on getting any kind of deal they could. Now we’re to the point where it is considered unrealistic to expect the United States to demand that Iran not engage in terrorism while we’re granting them nuclear concessions. I thought that [Israeli Minister of Intelligence and Strategic Affairs] Yuval Steinitz had a good list of proposed changes to the president’s proposal, and I don’t think you can argue those changes are unrealistic, because all he did was take all the statements that President Obama and John Kerry and [chief U.S. negotiator] Wendy Sherman made at the very outset of these negotiations about stockpiles of enriched uranium, about the past military dimensions of this program, about inspections and so forth. The positions he lists are positions that our government previously held.
