The Obama administration has undermined its own negotiating by claiming that the deal it is negotiating with Iran is “non-binding,” according an analysis published yesterday in The Daily Beast.

The Obama administration was so outraged with the Republican attempt to undercut the president’s foreign policy negotiations that it sent the vice president, the White House press secretary, and others to attack the letter rather seriously—instead of treating it as the “cheeky” reminder of Congress’s role that GOP senators intended.

In the process of engaging, the Obama administration highlighted that any deal with Iran would be, like many other past international security initiatives, a “non-binding” agreement. And by taking this bait, the administration undercut its own credibility in making longer-term assurances about American sanctions relief.

“A non-binding agreement with Iran is easier to make (because the President can clearly do it on his own) and easier to break (because there is no domestic or international legal obstacle to breaking it),” wrote Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general who now teaches law at Harvard, at Lawfare on Wednesday.

Armin Rosen of Business Insider, who had already pointed out last week that the administration viewed the deal as non-binding, observed:

The US wouldn’t have a firm legal obligation to uphold the agreement, so Iran would have a built-in reason to assume American bad faith and push the limits of a future deal. In other words, without a legal guarantee on the US side, compliance with an agreement is potentially diluted Tehran’s side as well — and remember, this is a regime that hid the existence of two secret nuclear facilities and operated 20,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges in defiance of repeated UN Security Council resolutions.

Earlier this week, Secretary of State John Kerry and other administration officials admitted that the nuclear deal currently being negotiated with Iran would be non-binding. This admission came in response to a letter signed by 47 Republican senators suggesting that any deal would be a treaty requiring legislative oversight and approval.

According to polls, Americans are in favor of Congressional oversight of any nuclear deal with Iran. There is also bipartisan support in legislative approval of any deal agreed to by the administration. The administration’s resorting to calling any deal “non-binding” is an effort to avoid that oversight.

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