Kerry returns to a Senate more skeptical of nuclear deals than the one he left.washingtonpost.com

The last time a major nuclear arms deal came before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry was on the other side of the dais.
It was 2010, and then Sens. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), leaders of the Foreign Relations committee, were trying to steer a deal to reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, through a recalcitrant Senate during a pivotal midterm election year. They ultimately succeeded, assisted in no small part by their united front and their established gravitas as arms control experts.
 
After 18 days of intense and often fractious negotiation, diplomats declared that world powers and Iran had struck a landmark deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for billions of dollars in relief from international sanctions, an agreement designed to avert the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. (Joe Klamar/Pool Photo via AP)

But when now Secretary of State Kerry comes before the Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday to sell the nuclear deal with Iran, which is arguably more complex and historically pivotal than New START, he will face lawmakers who share little of the zeal for non-proliferation deals that united him and Lugar and was a trademark of the committee in years past.

Instead, he will face a row of skeptics in both parties in a sign of how much the attitude in Congress has changed toward attempts to limit the nuclear ambitions of foreign rivals through diplomacy.
“For arms control, the administration doesn’t have a Sam Nunn and a Dick Lugar in the Senate anymore,” said Steven Pifer, a former Ukraine ambassador and director of the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative at the Brookings Institution, in reference to Lugar and the former Democratic senator from Georgia with whom he co-authored a landmark 1991 arms control law. “When you look at both sides, Democrat and Republican, there’s no one like them.”
This lack of non-proliferation advocates in the Senate adds to the difficulties that Kerry and the rest of the administration will have in making sure there is enough support on Capitol Hill to prevent Congress from derailing the deal — especially in the face of an increasingly vocal chorus of opponents, declaring no deal is better than the one Kerry and his team just struck.