Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Wednesday morning!
Ed. note: The next edition of the Daily Kickoff will arrive on Tuesday morning. Enjoy the Labor Day weekend!
Nearly 30 House Democrats have signed onto a draft letter expressing fresh concerns about the Iran nuclear deal, which appears to be moving toward a conclusion following months of stalled negotiations, Jewish Insider has learned.
The letter is being circulated by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), who previously marshaled the support of 18 House Democrats to publicly express varying degrees of concern about the negotiations. Twenty House Democrats have publicly expressed concerns about the looming agreement, with others who opposed the original 2015 deal staying silent pending the finalized text.
The most recent letter, addressed to President Joe Biden, has picked up more than 40 signatories, a majority of them Democrats, an individual familiar with the letter told JI. The letter began circulating on Sunday and will close for signatures on Wednesday, the individual said.
JI has learned that the letter expresses concerns about specific alleged provisions of the proposed agreement text that have been publicly reported. The lawmakers are set to argue that, given recent Iranian attempts to attack U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, any reduction or loosening of U.S. sanctions would be inappropriate. Without any sanctions relief — a key element of the 2015 nuclear deal — Iran would be unlikely to agree to a new deal.
The letter voices specific objections to reported provisions modifying U.S. sanctions targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and lifting sanctions on Iran’s central bank, national development fund and national oil company.
The lawmakers further contend that Russia should not be allowed to serve as the repository of Iran’s enriched nuclear material, nor be allowed to engage in any nuclear projects with Iran — including a $10 billion civilian nuclear project for which the administration has reportedly agreed to waive sanctions.
The letter requests that the administration not sign any deal before releasing the complete agreement to Congress, briefing lawmakers and seeking input from other stakeholders.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR, died in Moscow yesterday at age 91. The reforms that the Soviet leader ushered into his country ultimately pushed it to collapse, effectively ending the Cold War and ushering in a new global era.
In Clyde Haberman’s 1992 New York Times write-up of Gorbachev’s visit to Israel — with the headline “Israel Welcomes Gorbachev as a Hero” — he noted the influx of hundreds of thousands of Russians to Israel in the previous three years and quipped, “so one more Russian arrival should probably not cause heads to turn.” At the time, Haberman reported, the Israeli daily Maariv referred to Gorbachev as “the most important person who ever visited the land of Israel,” citing his efforts to loosen emigration laws, enabling the exodus of Russian Jews to Israel and the West.
message shift
Why the Biden administration stopped talking about a ‘longer and stronger’ nuclear deal with Iran

Secretary of State Tony Blinken speaks during a meeting with Philippine President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. at Malacanang Palace on August 6, 2022, in Manila, Philippines.
Not long after Joe Biden clinched the Democratic nomination in 2020, he and his team of foreign policy advisors began to use a new phrase to describe their vision for a renewed nuclear deal with Iran. “I’ll work with our allies to make it longer and stronger,” Biden said at a 2020 fundraiser, one of dozens of public instances in which top administration officials — on the campaign trail and then in the White House — would call for a “longer and stronger” deal to last longer the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and curb not just Iran’s nuclear program but also its malign regional activities. Now, as Washington awaits a response from Iran on America’s comments on a draft nuclear agreement negotiated by the European Union, top U.S. officials are no longer calling for a “longer and stronger” deal, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports.
Official outlook: In the early months of the Biden administration, everyone from the president to Secretary of State Tony Blinken to Jen Psaki, the former White House press secretary, had used the phrase. And for a presidential administration that strictly sticks to fine-tuned, top-down language on controversial policy issues, it was clear that “longer and stronger” was administration policy for a time. When those same officials ceased using the term, it suggested something had shifted.
What changed: A review of statements from the White House and the State Department shows that Biden administration officials stopped using the phrase in June 2021, amid an Iranian election campaign that would result in the election of a president whose foreign minister said in September that the country would not sign onto a “longer and stronger” agreement. But the Biden administration never explained publicly what changed for them. JI did not receive a response to an inquiry sent to the State Department seeking an explanation about the policy change.
Messy reality: “Campaigning is about telling people what they want to hear. Governing is usually a much messier process, determining what exactly you’re going to get,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has served in Democratic and Republican administrations and who supports reentering the JCPOA. “I think that when ‘longer and stronger’ was enunciated, I think there wasn’t much conviction that in fact it could be achieved.”