Washington: No one knows if the Obama administration will manage in the next five weeks to strike what many in the White House consider the most important foreign policy deal of his presidency: an accord with Iran that would forestall its ability to make a nuclear weapon. But the White House has made one significant decision: If agreement is reached, President Barack Obama will do everything in his power to avoid letting Congress vote on it.

Even while negotiators argue over the number of centrifuges Iran would be allowed to spin and where inspectors could roam, the Iranians have signalled that they would accept, at least temporarily, a “suspension” of the stringent sanctions that have dramatically cut their oil revenues and terminated their banking relationships with the West, according to American and Iranian officials. The US Treasury Department, in a detailed study it declined to make public, has concluded Obama has the authority to suspend the vast majority of those sanctions without seeking a vote by Congress, officials say.

But Obama cannot permanently terminate those sanctions. Only Congress can take that step. And even if Democrats held on to the Senate next month, Obama’s advisers have concluded they would probably lose such a vote.

“We wouldn’t seek congressional legislation in any comprehensive agreement for years,” one senior official said.

White House officials say Congress should not be surprised by this plan. They point to testimony earlier this year when top negotiators argued that the best way to assure that Iran complies with its obligations is a step-by-step suspension of sanctions — with the implicit understanding that the president could turn them back on as fast as he turned them off.

‘Confident’

“We have been clear that initially there would be suspension of any of the US and international sanctions regime, and that the lifting of sanctions will only come when the IAEA verifies that Iran has met serious and substantive benchmarks,” Bernadette Meehan, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency. “We must be confident that Iran’s compliance is real and sustainable over a period of time.”

But many members of Congress see the plan as an effort by the administration to freeze them out, a view shared by some Israeli officials who see a congressional vote as the best way to constrain the kind of deal that Obama might strike.

Meehan says there “is a role for Congress in our Iran policy,” but members of Congress want a role larger than consultation and advice. An agreement between Iran and the countries it is negotiating with — the US, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China — would not be a formal treaty, and thus would not require a two-thirds vote of the US Senate.

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Robert Menendez said over the weekend that, “If a potential deal does not substantially and effectively dismantle Iran’s illicit nuclear weapons programme, I expect Congress will respond. An agreement cannot allow Iran to be a threshold nuclear state.” He has sponsored legislation to tighten sanctions if no agreement is reached by November 24.

A leading Republican critic of the negotiations, Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois, added, “Congress will not permit the president to unilaterally unravel Iran sanctions that passed the Senate in a 99-to-0 vote,” a reference to the vote in 2010 that imposed what have become the toughest set of sanctions.

Such declarations have the Obama administration concerned. And they are a reminder that for a deal to be struck with Iran, Obama must navigate not one negotiation, but three.

The first is between Obama’s negotiators and the team led by Mohammad Javad Zarif, the savvy Iranian foreign minister. The second is between Zarif and forces in Tehran, Iran, that see no advantage in striking a deal, led by many in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and many of the mullahs. The critical player in that effort is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has reissued specific benchmarks for an accord, including Iran’s eventual expansion of its uranium enrichment programme by nearly tenfold.

And the third is between Obama and Congress.

Zarif, in an interview last summer, said that Obama “has a harder job” convincing Congress than Zarif will have selling a deal in Tehran. That may be bluster, but it may not be entirely wrong.