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Arab Center weekly finds Washington choosing pressure over diplomacy on Iran
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Washington has settled on economic pressure rather than diplomacy in its Iran file, the Arab Center Washington DC concludes in this week's edition of its Washington Policy Weekly. The center is the capital's Arab-perspective research institute, and its Monday monitor is the systematic record of what official Washington did, not what it said it would do.
The weekly's frame matches what this paper has reported from other angles all day: President Trump's line that the United States is only "semi-negotiating" with Tehran, and his choice to let mounting economic pressure work rather than return to military action.
The week's congressional docket#
The monitor's value is the docket beneath the headlines. Senators Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, and James Lankford, a Republican, introduced S.5356 — sanctions on anyone who facilitates Iran's financing of Hezbollah or obstructs Lebanese disarmament efforts, plus 200 million dollars a year in security assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces and Internal Security Forces.
For Palestinian readers that bill is a marker: Washington is legislating the Lebanese disarmament sequence it is simultaneously negotiating in Rome — the same disarmament-first architecture the Gaza roadmap dispute turns on.
The weekly also logs the letter this paper covered on Sunday — Senators Warren and Van Hollen with nineteen colleagues, pressing Secretary Rubio on settler violence in the occupied West Bank — and a new bill, endorsed by the Anti-Defamation League, drafted in response to protests at New York synagogues that hosted Israeli real-estate events selling land in the occupied territories.
That last entry cuts the other way: the protests targeted the sale of occupied Palestinian land inside American houses of worship, and the legislative answer addresses the protesters, not the land sales.
The center publishes the monitor every Monday. Its reading of this one: a capital managing its wars' files on its election calendar, with the diplomacy tracks — Hormuz, Lebanon, Gaza — all waiting on November.
