As the days wind down towards the March 24 self-imposed deadline for some sort of result from the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, one important truth seems to have gotten lost, or even one important bit of jargon: “P5+1.” That’s the term for the parties who are now negotiating with the Iranian government, and it stands for the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (so “P”: US, Russia, China, UK and France) plus 1: Germany. It’s funny: especially in the wake of the brouhaha set off by Israel PM Netanhayu’s recent visit to address the subject before the US Congress, you would have thought that the whole affair was simply US v. Iran, eye-to-eye, straight-up.

But it is not. Granted, rejection of any deal on the part of the US government would certainly kill it, at least in its formative stages. (After an agreement has been reached and has worked successfully over a number of years – that would be another matter.) But, again, this is a multilateral process, and one would hope that any such failure of the negotiations to bear fruit would reflect a consensus among all negotiating parties. Even more basically, one would hope that each of those parties would enjoy a firm sense of just who they were dealing with – not only across the table from the Iranians, but also from other governments which are supposed to be on the same side.

That is not the case, unfortunately, something we now see in graphic form from the recent open letter from 47 Republican Senators to the Iranian authorities warning them against reaching any agreement with their own government.

Naturally, such gestures do not go unnoticed.

“An attack on Obama – of the childish sort,” is the opinion of longtime German foreign correspondent Hubert Wetzel, writing in the well-respected Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Wetzel doesn’t pull any punches:

The US Senate was once a well-respected chamber of parliament, perhaps the most respected from all the world’s democracies. Reasonable people debated there and came to reasonable decisions. It was part of the Senate’s proud self-image to be far from as nervous, obstinate and partisan as their colleagues in the House of Representatives, but rather moderate and deliberate.

These times are now past, and hardly anything shows that as well as the letter that 47 Republican Senators have now written to the Iranian regime – led by a freshman from Arkansas [freshman Sen. Tom Cotton], a man who in the old days would have been told that he should first warm the backbenches for a few years before piping up.

Oh yes, Herr Wetzel doesn’t think much of the letter, whose tone he paints as being as dummdreist as its contents are banal. (He may have gone to the trouble to invent an adjective here, in dummdreist, to adequately convey his scorn; dreist is “bold,” but with dumm it’s in a stupid way: so “stupidly bold.”) Further, “Within the letter there is nothing that any Iranian diplomat could not look up in Wikipedia.”

Or which that diplomat might possibly know even without Wikipedia – consider this fact:

Of course the US Congress does have a certain role within US relations towards Iran – in the first place having to do with setting or lifting the economic boycott that has been imposed upon that country over the years as alarm over its nuclear program has grown. Otherwise, and by the US Constitution, foreign policy is largely left to the Executive Branch. This latest letter marks a disturbing violation of what used to be the norm against partisan sabotage of the President’s foreign policy – although it follows closely a more spectacular breach of that same norm embodied in Netanyahu’s invitation to speak before Congress with no notification to President Obama.

Still, the antics being employed to scupper any P5+1/Iran deal are becoming extreme and embarrassing. And we can be sure that the others within that P5+1 have noticed.

“The American people this evening flunked President Obama’s first two years as president,” runs the first paragraph of an analysis of the US midterm election results by the US-based correspondents for the Danish daily Politiken, Thomas Berndt and Jesper Vangkilde. Their headline even speaks of the president’s “big spanking.”

They summarize for Danish readers the fundamental numerical results: House lost for the Democrats, Senate retained (as Majority Leader Harry Reid “saves his political career”), and a Republican wave also taking over most state governors and legislatures. What this means for the future: “Over the slightly longer-term political chaos [awaits] in Washington, unless the parties can find a way to work together.” The authors also make mention of the “especially offensive” defiance directed at the president by “one of the election campaign’s absolute key figures,” Sarah Palin: (Translated back from the Danish) “We’re sending representatives to Washington to stop your fundamental transformation of America. Enough is enough.”

Over at the opinion newspaper Information, their long-time American affairs commentator Martin Burcharth takes a more philosophical tone (Varied outlook for cross-political cooperation). All things will pass, he assures the reader; sudden shifts in American political fortunes are really “quite common,” citing history back to Jimmy Carter (hero in 1976; goat in 1980) to prove his point. This latest heavy midterms defeat for the Democrats and President Obama need not be regarded as any real sort of tragedy.

Rather, anything is still possible for the 2012 elections, and Burcharth offers the president two possible strategies for success. He can tack to the political center (as former Clinton political advisor Paul Begala recommends) and push a new program of extensive public works, pushed as a “jobs plan,” which Republicans would not dare to oppose. Or he can stay on the left (the advice of Robert Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor) and launch a crusade against the Big Industry and Big Finance that got America into the economic mess it is in. That will also mean cutting taxes on the poor and middle-class, but not for the rich: the latter should be required to pay for their misdeeds!

Whichever he chooses, Burcharth recognizes that prospects for real cooperation between the president and the Republicans in Congress will probably last only until around the end of next year, when politicking for the 2012 elections begins in earnest. In fact, he offers the rather cynical recommendation that Democrats make full use of the “lame duck” period still open to them – i.e. when they still have majorities in both Houses, before the newly-elected representatives and Senators come to take their seats – to enact major legislation such as immigration reform and even new climate/energy legislation (always a leading Danish concern). No cooperation with political opponents even required!

It’s ingenious, in a way – except that Burcharth forgets that, even today, the Democrats’ Senate majority is only 59, which causes certain complications of its own in passing legislation, and in any event exploiting the “lame duck” session that way somewhat contravenes American ideas of political legitimacy.

UPDATE: What do you know, the Rude Pundit also sees great merit in that “use the lame duck session to pass some serious legislation” argument of Martin Burcharth’s, and develops it further. But beware: he’s rude! (Sample language: “No, you need to blow us, Boehner and McConnell.” Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Never heard of him? No, I don’t mean Dr. Demento. “Dr. Doom” is the monniker borne (probably proudly) by NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini, famous for foreseeing – among other things – the gigantic collapse in the US housing market beginning in 2007 that kicked off this worldwide Great Recession. Back then Roubini kept adding to his fame by forecasting further disastrous developments in one aspect of national or international economic performance after another; people would never believe him that things could get that bad, yet most times events proved him to be spot-on.

Now he has further comments which he contributed to the Financial Times. Unfortunately, that paper has a rather restrictive readership policy – i.e. it likes to force you to pay – but luckily we can resort to Denmark’s business newspaper Børsen instead. There it’s a brief piece, and Roubini’s message is clear, simple, and expressed in the title: The catastrophe commences on Tuesday.

Tuesday? That’s election day in the USA, of course, and according to Roubini that will unleash a new economic crisis because the Republicans are expected to make significant gains, recapturing control of the House of Representatives and maybe the US Senate as well. This will inaugurate paralysis in Congress as Democrats and Republicans block everything the other side tries to do, even as the US economic situation remains dire and in need of fiscal initiatives of one sort or another.

True, this insight is hardly blindingly original, and it has also certainly been advanced recently by other commentators, and then even rather more eloquently. (“In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.”)

Then again, everyone knows that Paul Krugman is a liberal (Nobel Prize-bearing) attack-dog. But this is the FT, Børsen – Dr. Doom, no less!

(This blogpost has been slightly revised from the form in which it first appeared in response to a useful suggestion e-mailed in from a reader.)

Let’s say you’re a big European polluter, content with the status quo you’ve been used to for decades that allows you to pump out as much CO2 into the atmosphere as you like at virtually no cost to your bottom-line. In 2010, though, it’s easy to see how this sort of laissez-faire is not long for a world ever-more aware and convinced of the detrimental effects of such emissions on the global climate. And while local/national measures to make you pay for your pollution are always unwelcome, the authorities who impose them will always be constrained by the fact that hampering companies under their jurisdiction this way raises their costs and so cuts down on their international competitiveness as long as other countries refrain from doing anything similar. No, the real threat to pollution-as-usual is any global anti-climate change accord.

What to do? Launching an appeal to your national or EU-level representatives – “Hey, could you slow it down a bit with the climate change stuff?” – isn’t going to work, since their job-description is the furthering of common interests over the parochial, and you and your CO2-emitting technology are definitely on the wrong side of History. But maybe there are some more imaginative measures available . . .

Consider today’s report from the French press-agency AFP (discussed among other places on the Swiss news website 24heures), on some innovative lobbying efforts being undertaken on the part of a consortium of leading European industrial firms – within the US federal government! Specifically, the article details how representatives in their employ have approached four US Senators famous for being global warming deniers to contribute money to their political funds, totalling $306,000 this year, to support their anti-climate change efforts – in the first instance their fight against any sort of “cap-and-trade” pollution-control regime. And then, in a nice cynical twist, these companies have then turned around to argue to European authorities that it makes no sense to push for any global climate-change measures now, because it is by no means certain that the US government will come on board!

Naturally, these firms – among which the largest monetary contributions come from the German companies Bayer and BASF – wanted to do this all secretly, but their dastardly deeds have now been exposed by the Climate Action Network (CAN), a international umbrella-organization encompassing around 500 climate/ecology NGOs, whose researchers took the trouble simply to read the mid-October report from the US Federal Election Commission that details which candidates got how much money from whom, and then to do a little arithmetic. The CAN report even pins the blame for the failure of the COP15 climate summit last December in Copenhagen on a reluctance for any accord on the part of President Obama and his administration that supposedly had been cultivated by these underhanded lobbying efforts.

That last assertion, of course, is rather doubtful; I’ll need much further proof than that before I’ll start believing that Obama was, in effect, on the take at that Copenhagen summit. Beyond that, though, these CAN charges as publicized by the AFP ultimately fall rather flat under any sort of closer examination. For starters, that alleged amount of $306,000 in combined campaign contributions to four Senators in 2010 (an average of $76,500 per Senator) is rather low on the Washington political-contribution scale. It’s highly doubtful that they really got much in exchange for that amount, besides maybe a brief visit to the lawmaker’s Capitol Hill office, a post-on-your-wall photo shaking hands with the politico, and maybe a set of state-seal-embossed ink-pens. (Admittedly, there’s no mention in the article of the amounts they may have paid in previous years.)

Secondly, it’s clear that the lobbyists in the employ of these European companies are behind the times, that they have not kept up with the new political rules resulting from last January’s Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case that declared corporations equivalent to private persons when it comes to political speech, and thereby enabled unlimited and anonymous contributions to political campaigns – if not directly to candidates, then to “independent” political advocacy organizations ready to spend money and advertise on specific candidates’ behalf. The European companies could have given as much as they wanted to their favorite US senators, albeit indirectly, and would never have had to worry about anyone from the general public (European or American) hearing about it, if they only had been better-advised. For heavens’ sake, gentlemen, call Karl Rove!

The impact these CAN revelations should ultimately have is therefore much like watching a youngster steal from the Church collection-plate: it’s a trivial offense in itself, but does indicate in the perpetrator the sort of crooked disposition and intent that definitely bear further monitoring.

UPDATE: Look, Europolluters, let me help you out – or rather let former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson do so (in Foreign Money, National Security, and the Midterm Elections). He’s writing here about the Citizens United decision, of course; here are some extracts to give you a flavor:

We have effectively enfranchised foreigners in US elections. This is clearly and absolutely not what the drafters of the Constitutions [sic] had in mind. . . . And however you prefer to define our legitimate national security interests, how are they consistent with letting foreign citizens influence or even determine the outcome of our elections?