The Iran deal — technically an executive agreement between the United States of America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and Iran to contai...

The Iran deal — technically an executive agreement between the United States of America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and Iran to contain Iran’s potential to develop nuclear weapons — has now met the test of opposition in the U.S. Senate.

The agreement was not a treaty requiring, under the U.S. Constitution, a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate for ratification, but President Obama found it prudent to invite Senate debate on so “historic” a step in diplomacy. The Republicans might have passed a resolution to reject it by simple majority, but the president promised a veto, which meant, to override, a two-thirds majority would be needed. In the end he found 42 Democrats to support the agreement, so that, under evolving Senate rules, the Republicans did not have the 60 votes necessary to break a Democratic filibuster to stop any resolution.

So the whole matter was settled without a vote, nor a veto, nor a prolonged battle in the Senate. The agreement was concluded on a highly partisan basis, and those on the losing side, including Israel and her defenders, remain profoundly unassured. They plan further resistance. President Obama called the assent “a victory for diplomacy, for American national security, and for the safety and security of the world.”

The next steps are to proceed very deliberately to the agreed stages of Iranian compliance and reduction of U.N., U.S., and allied sanctions. The U.N. Security Council has already voted (15–0) to begin the process. “Implementation Day” will not be set for six to nine months, when Iran completes its initial nuclear steps. Iran must reduce by 98% its stockpile of low enriched uranium (to 300 kg), disassemble and store most of its centrifuges (leaving 5,060 spinning for its peaceful nuclear power), convert the Fordo underground enrichment site to a R&D lab, disable the core of its heavy water reactor at Arak, and make arrangements with the IAEA for inspections and monitoring, including answering questions about past military weapons projects (said to have been terminated in 2003).

Fears of an Iranian “breakout” after ten or fifteen years of the plan were the last concerns of the opponents. Against such fears were hopes for a “transformation of relations” over the fifteen years as relief for the Iranian people allows moderate elements in Shia Muslim society to wear away extremes of the Republican Guards and the ayatollah. If all unravels and the alternative of war finally comes, we will have to say as a historical matter that the “Iran deal” was a deception. If Iran returns to normality and the Middle East concludes its wars of religion, we will look back on the deal as the work of the most creative statecraft.

Is there reason to hope? Historically, the United States and its European allies have before taken great risks to transform relationships. The whole containment policy was designed to gain time for peoples to lose enchantment with Communism. At the end of the Cold War, the West seized the opportunities opened up by Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika and the consequential breach of the Berlin Wall to safely allow Germany to reunite. Later in 1996 we allowed Russia and some 40 other states around the globe to associate with NATO as “partner countries.” The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (1975, 1994) now contains 57 states, including the U.S.A., Britain, France, Germany and all the former republics of the Soviet Union, including Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. The OSCE too, if managed adroitly as in past Western diplomacy, could provide a wider, regional working collective security system and reduce the pressures of NATO expansion, which plainly alarms Russia. The People’s Republic of China has been universally recognized and now is a vital partner in the Group of Six to contain North Korea.

The success of the Iran deal will depend on greater progress in abolishing all nuclear weapons. Iran is surrounded by nuclear weapons states: Russia, China, Pakistan, India, the U.S. in the Sixth Fleet, and Israel. Until their threat is eliminated, it is unrealistic to suppose that in ten or fifteen years Iran will not be tempted for its supreme security interest to build a bomb. The nuclear weapons states in the Non-Proliferation Treaty must make more rapid reductions in accordance with Article 6 to cease the nuclear arms race. (The professed goal is “general and complete disarmament under effective international control.”) The three holdouts from the Comprehensive Test Ban must sign, and eight more who have signed must ratify, in order that all 44 potential nuclear weapons states renounce the race.

A post-Westphalian act would recognize the sovereignty of the people in place of the sovereignty of states, the inauguration of at least a limited democratic regional or world government ruling by law. By that standard, the Iran deal is part of the old order of things. If a global parliament as a popularly representative second chamber of the United Nations General Assembly, as proposed by Andrew Strauss and Richard Falk, is established, that would be a post-Westphalian innovation. Making the European Parliament directly electable by the people in 1979, giving it democratic legitimacy, was such an act. It led to Spinelli’s Draft Treaty Establishing the European Union of 1984, which, although set aside, led to the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, transforming the Community into the European Union. In recent days, Germany’s warm welcome of daring refugees from the Middle East and Africa on the basis of their fundamental humanity, rather than their statehood, seems similar in principle.

Many things are steps to a post-Westphalian world. Consider all the "impossible" things that have recently happened: the acceptance of the norm of nonaggression (U.N. Charter, Arts. 2[4] and 2[3]), the acceptance of two-thirds majority rule in the United Nations (where the Big Five veto is the last relic of absolute national sovereignty), the end of the Cold War (thanks to a Communist general secretary), the liberation of eastern Europe (starting in Poland), the reunification of democratic Germany (when Nazism was a thing of the past), the civil rights movement for black-white racial equality in America (thanks to Martin Luther King), the collapse of apartheid in South Africa (led by a black prisoner of conscience), and the election of a black president of the United States. Everybody in the world is a person of "color." We are all various shades of tan. We are one people.

As William Faulkner said on receiving the Nobel Prize in 1950, “I believe that man will not mere endure: he will prevail.”