©AFP

President Barack Obama faces a defining test of his presidency as he tries to sell his “historic” framework nuclear agreement with Iran to a Congress full of Iran-sceptics from both parties.

The political framework unveiled on Thursday leaves Mr Obama within touching distance of a final deal with Iran that could become his signature diplomatic achievement in office — a foreign policy bookend to stand alongside his first term healthcare reform.

At a time when his White House is being buffeted by crises around the world, a nuclear agreement in the coming months would be a personal vindication for a president who has made diplomacy with Iran a priority since he was a candidate — at the time earning him the derision of both Republicans and Hillary Clinton.

It is a measure of the high stakes involved that if Congress intervenes in a way that derails the negotiations, it would represent the most humbling rebuke of a president’s foreign policy since the Senate blocked Woodrow Wilson’s push to join the League of Nations.

In his Rose Garden speech on Thursday outlining what he called a “historic understanding” with Iran, Mr Obama said that if Congress “kills this deal” without providing an alternative, international unity behind sanctions would collapse and military conflict would become more likely.

“When you hear the inevitable critics of the deal sound off, ask them a simple question,” Mr Obama said in a refrain he is likely to repeat in the weeks ahead. “Do you really think that this verifiable deal . . . is a worse option than the risk of another war in the Middle East?”

Within minutes of Mr Obama’s address, Bob Corker, the Republican chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, said that the panel would start voting on April 14 after the Easter recess on his bill allowing Congress to approve or reject a final Iran deal — legislation that the White House believes could scupper the talks.

Bill Galston, a congressional expert at the Brookings Institution, said that the Corker bill currently had around 65 supporters in the Senate — near to the 67 votes needed to override the promised presidential veto. Republicans immediately lined up to criticise the agreement.

House Speaker John Boehner said it “represents an alarming departure from the White House’s initial goals”. Ed Royce, chair of the House foreign relations committee, said: “I am very concerned by the extent of sanctions relief that the deal appears to offer Iran.”

In the sharpest reaction, Illinois senator Mark Kirk told Roll Call that “Neville Chamberlain got a better deal from Hitler”. He later told reporters the agreement was a “total cave”.

With Iran likely to be an important issue in the 2016 election, Republican presidential hopefuls also attacked the announcement. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush said he would not stand behind “such a flawed agreement”. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has said in interviews this week that he would cancel an agreement with Iran along these lines on his first day in office.

The key for the White House, however, will be the group of centrist Democrats who could secure approval of Iran legislation the administration opposes. The initial reaction from that group was far more favourable.

“The deal looks better to me than I expected,” said Angus King, the Maine independent who usually votes with the Democrats and who is one of the cosponsors of the Corker bill.

Mr King said he was watching to see if Republicans treated the issue as a political football. “If I see them slipping towards partisanship and trying to embarrass the president, then I am off this bill,” he said.

Mrs Clinton, the overwhelming frontrunner to be the Democratic nominee, also gave the agreement a cautious welcome, saying that “for now diplomacy deserves a chance to succeed”.

In a fascinating subplot to the Democratic debate on Iran, Robert Menendez, the New Jersey senator who has been the party’s leading critic of the administration’s diplomacy with Tehran, was appearing in a federal court to plead not guilty to eight corruption charges at the very moment the agreement was announced.

Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran specialist at the Carnegie Endowment, said it was unlikely that there would be enough Democratic votes in Congress to block a deal, particularly after congressional critics had placed such emphasis on the potential objections of the French.

“It will be very difficult for Congress to scuttle this, especially if the French are saying this is good for us,” he said.

The biggest political problem for the administration might not be the agreement itself, but the broader instability in the region.

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Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who has been the most vocal critic of the deal, immediately made that connection, saying on Thursday that any final agreement had to “stop its [Iran’s] terrorism and aggression”. Republican critics of the Iran deal will probably point to any new evidence about Iranian proxies in Syria, Iraq or Yemen.

Even some strong supporters of nuclear diplomacy with Iran worry that a deal will release billions of dollars in funds to Tehran at the exact moment Iran is expanding its influence around a chaotic region, often at the US’ expense.

Mr Obama tried to anticipate this line of criticism, promising that there was “no daylight” between the US and Israel over “Iran’s destabilising policies”.

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