In the past week, two disconcerting forays into foreign policy have actually been largely about domestic politics in the US. In saying that, these represent both the final two years of Barack Obama’s embattled second term – and the mud wrestling that is almost certainly about to become an all-encompassing preoccupation in the lead-up to the next presidential election.

And here, of course, we are talking about the so-called open letter to Iran that was signed by forty-seven out of fifty-four Republican senators, and the arm waving about the disclosure former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set up her very own private email system for all her direct correspondence, avoiding use of all the messaging systems already available from the State Department. Only one of these may be dangerous to the republic, however.

In his speech at the beginning of March to a joint sitting of the House of Representatives and Senate, Israeli Prime Minister had thundered that the potential agreement between the Five + One side that includes the US on the one hand and Iran on the other would allow Iran to develop and deploy nuclear weapons without significant restraints (thereby threatening Israeli, other Middle Eastern nations, and even American security). In an apparent bloom of testosterone that came in the wake of Netanyahu’s speech, all but seven Republican senators came together to issue a sanctimonious, finger-wagging sort of letter that was ostensibly aimed at Iran – but whose real target was the power of the incumbent president to carry out foreign policy.

It what can only be described as a distinctly smarmy, condescending tone, this letter attempts to school presumably ignorant Iranian readers on the US constitutional system and the relationship between the Congress and a president. The letter also includes a blunt warning any agreement signed by a president as part of international negotiations (and put into effect for the US via an executive order) could simply be torn up by a successor (and presumably Republican) president, come 20 January 2017. The rather clear implication here is that Iranians need to be really, really careful about any thinking that they could pull the proverbial wool over Barack Obama about their nuclear program. This would be especially so since the 2016 election is going to bring a much tougher man into office – and then he will sort out those Iranians good and proper so that all those expensive gas centrifuges working away on uranium across Iran end up being mothballed for eternity.

Or, as the senators’ letter stated, “What these two constitutional provisions mean is that we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei. The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time. We hope this letter enriches your knowledge of our constitutional system and promotes mutual understanding and clarity as nuclear negotiations progress.”

But the real object of this little assegai of a letter is actually the incumbent president, more than anywhere else. It is unlikely Iran’s nuclear negotiating team really needed all that much tutoring on the US constitutional arrangements – or the point there is a US presidential election in less than two years. In effect, Republican senators are, instead, reinforcing and underscoring their view that Barack Obama’s presidency is toast, at least in foreign policy terms, to the best of their abilities to make it so, and that they, not he, are now setting the terms of the agenda and the rules of engagement with the country’s international enemies.

Of course the letter had drawn some severe criticism – as well as Republican interventions on the Iran negotiations more generally, along with their embrace of Binyamin Netanyahu – and some have been harshly critical of this letter (and the thoughts behind it). Some have defined it as a bald-faced, extra-constitutional power grab over the conduct of foreign policy, in repudiation of some two centuries of history. Responding to the letter, for example, Hillary Clinton took it up a notch further. Her tweeted her rejoinder read: “GOP letter to Iranian clerics undermines American leadership. No one considering running for commander-in-chief should be signing on”. This was an obvious swipe at signatories like Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz who have all but declared their respective candidacies for their party’s nomination. There was much other criticism. One newspaper, the usually reliably right-wing New York Daily News went so far as to put the “T” word in their front page headline on the letter: as in “T” for traitor. Ouch.

Meanwhile, as for that other little speed bump, former Secretary of State (and seemingly prohibitive favourite for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016) Hillary Clinton is now entangled in a mess largely of her own making. A few days back, The New York Times broke the story – originating out of the Benghazi special investigating committee of Congress – that Clinton, when she first became secretary of state, had set up a private email address under a private domain name for her entire period in office for her personal official email – as well as her private, personal communications. As The Economist described it, “As scandals involving people called ‘Clinton’ go, it seems a bit tame. On March 2nd the New York Times revealed that when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, she used a personal e-mail account rather than a government one for all her official business. This stumble reveals a more general problem with Mrs Clinton’s undeclared presidential campaign.”

At a press conference on 10 March, Clinton tried to put the fire out by admitting that in retrospect she should probably have kept two separate smartphones or whatever – one for a regular State Department email address, and one for those private messages through that server running in her private home. Simultaneously, she announced that she was turning over a mountain of emails to the State Department for proper storage and inventorying but had destroyed copies of her private emails – presumably on things like the table settings and flower arrangements for her daughter’s wedding. The challenge to Clinton’s explanation is that official emails should have been kept on a government server for proper archiving, experts have explained, although there was some confusion as to when firm regulations to that effect came into force and how soon all of her messages should have been turned over once she left office.

Now, no one, so far at least, has alleged that buried in all those thousands of emails there are ticking time bombs of dreadful, compromising secret communications – suspicious missives by Hillary to Angela Merkel, Hillary to Nicholas Sarkozy, Hillary to Shinzo Abe, or even Hillary to Vladimir Putin – whose contents would shake the foundations of national security. Nevertheless, Republicans will now undoubtedly demand efforts to winnow out any emails that might somehow relate to the Benghazi deaths, all as a part of their on-going crusade to prove some sort of complicity or failure to act appropriately in connection with those fatalities. Media organisations like the AP are also approaching the courts to gain access to all those messages as well via Freedom of Information suits. Of course, a larger consequence of Clinton’s stumble is that it now gives Republicans (as well as some others) a new club to batten the putative Clinton candidacy on a continuing basis, thereby becoming a way to stall its momentum, even before it launches.

Or as The Economist went on to say, “For Republicans, the finding is politically convenient. The investigation into Benghazi had all but died for lack of anything interesting to say. The idea that Mrs Clinton may have kept back e-mails could help to revive the allegations. Trey Gowdy, the chairman of the investigative committee, quickly called for all Mrs Clinton’s communications to be made available for his committee to scrutinise; on March 4th a subpoena was duly issued.” In the meantime, Clinton has been arranging to turn over thousands of emails to the State Department to integrate them into government records and ultimately to release many of them to the public. She has, however, said that other messages – those that were personal in nature – had been deleted.

This whole turn of events could feed into that long-time narrative held by some that Hillary Clinton – and her husband – have a history of shady dealings, with the consequent mutterings that reach back to the various missteps and alleged flaws of Bill Clinton’s administration, and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in some of them such as the debacle over the Clinton health care reform efforts. Now, of course, the speculation by her critics is that there may also be a treasure of emails pointing to a tangle of conflicts of interest between her role as secretary of state and the activities of the Clinton Foundation, that charity controlled by Hillary Clinton and her husband, that has accepted donations from various foreign governments, including some as she was at the State Department.

The Economist concluded, “Few think that such murkiness will be cleared up by better control of e-mails, however. Politicians who want to conceal shady dealings have plenty of other ways to communicate. They can meet in person or use intermediaries. Some might simply use more private electronic systems. A Snapchat message disappears after a few seconds. Does the Freedom of Information Act cover that?” Indeed it cannot.

To the larger point about government email, perhaps, there is a misleading assumption that somehow the Secretary of State conducts major elements of foreign policy on the fly from her handheld device while waiting in an airplane. That image becomes one of Hillary Clinton, sitting on an idling official jet before it flies off from somewhere to somewhere else, typing out a secret agreement on her Blackberry via her private server, thereby fatally compromising national security. But such a vision is almost certainly deeply flawed.

In fact, most government employees dealing with foreign policy work with at least three email accounts already. They have access to a classified system within the State Department, an unclassified system email address – and most probably a Gmail or Yahoo account or two as well for tapping out personal business while they are at work. They might use that to order a book for work that they will claim reimbursement for later, or to communicate with non-government individuals around the world such as journalists, academics, private sector researchers, business figures – and even those cousins in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, when it is their turn to plan that family reunion. (Interestingly, sources now say secret email systems in the State Department have been compromised sufficiently that they will require major reconstruction so as to ensure the integrity of their classified communications.)

Moreover, in Clinton’s case, as secretary of state, she was almost certainly accompanied at all times by a veritable cloud of aides and other officials. Those are the people who would have been communicating the actual substance of any situation reporting, any draft agreement language texts, all those reports on on-going negotiations, the talking points for future briefings, and much more, via their government classified email addresses. All of this communication would go back to State’s Foggy Bottom headquarters building, to the White House and other US Government agencies, to US embassies – as well as foreign diplomatic interlocutors all around the world.

Of the two situations, it is the Iran letter (in tandem with the obdurate attitude on the part of Republican senators and their embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu) that has the possibility of destabilising the Iranian negotiations now presumably reaching their climax. Of course, if the Iranians (or others) end up blaming the failure to achieve lift-off with the nuclear agreement on the Iran letter and Netanyahu’s complaints, Democrats might just be able to finger the Republicans as the culprits from their unsatisfactory meddling in the practice of diplomacy over a particularly tricky issue. This would, however, come as the diplomatic solution with Iran remains widely mistrusted by many in America.

As far as Hillary Clinton’s email debacle goes, while no one will – presumably – find anything approaching a smoking gun of a problem in her emails, beyond a technical violation over when and how the emails should have been turned over to the appropriate office, this mess will, nevertheless, likely drain some significant energy out of her still-to-emerge presidential campaign, and it may well be a continuing distraction to a campaign. As a result, it may become something like a mosquito buzzing about in the dark, a constant irritation that reminds people about those things they didn’t like about Hillary Clinton back when she first burst onto the national political scene. DM

Photo: Former US Secretary of State and Senator from New York Hillary Clinton attends a campaign rally for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and running mate Kathy Hochul in New York, New York, USA, 23 October 2014. The US will be holding midterm election on 04 November 2014. EPA/ANDREW GOMBERT

Read more:

• Report raises questions about Hillary’s email defence at Politico.com
• Hillary Clinton rips GOP rivals on Iran letter at Politico.com
• Letter From Senate Republicans to the Leaders of Iran at the New York Times
• State Says it Needs to Rebuild Classified Computer Networks after Hack at Nextgov.com
• Hillary Clinton girds for the long game – The email scandal won’t be going away anytime soon
• Nothing to hide? At the Economist
• AP sues State Department, seeking access to Clinton records at the AP