Can This Man Sell the Iran Deal to Congress?

Hours after President Barack Obama strode to the Rose Garden to sell the Iran nuclear deal, one of Congress’ top foreign policy players picked up the phone to get more details.

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) didn’t dial the White House or the State Department. He wanted to talk to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.

Corker had heard plenty of the political arguments from the administration and its supporters, who had warned that he could scuttle the Iranian deal with legislation he’s pushing to give Congress a say over any nuclear agreement. But he needed technical information, and details of what was in the deal.

“I called him, he didn’t call me,” Corker said in an interview after his conversation with Moniz. “What he says to me matters more than what some of the politically-oriented folks in the administration say.”Now the White House is hoping that the Moniz, the former MIT physics professor with the very un-Washington coiffure, can play a critical role in its efforts to win over skeptics of the president’s signature foreign-policy initiative. While the president, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken make the political argument to lawmakers, Moniz offers a sounding board for nuts-and-bolts questions about uranium concentrations and research reactor designs.

Now the White House is hoping that the Moniz, the former MIT physics professor with the very un-Washington coiffure, can play a critical role in its efforts to win over skeptics of the president’s signature foreign-policy initiative. While the president, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken make the political argument to lawmakers, Moniz offers a sounding board for nuts-and-bolts questions about uranium concentrations and research reactor designs.

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And though Moniz is viewed as an expert on the technical aspects of the agreement, explaining the complexities of the Iranian regime’s economic and political future might be beyond his expertise.

“Can he explain: ‘Is the one-year breakout [the amount of time under the deal it would take for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon if it stopped complying] enough on the diplomatic side? Are we going to have sufficient economic leverage when the Iranians cheat incrementally?’” said Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank that is critical of the deal. “A physicist can’t answer those essential economic, political and diplomatic … questions.”

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