WASHINGTON (Sputnik), Thomas Zimmer — US Republicans will make the Iran nuclear deal an issue in the 2016 elections, experts told Sputnik.
“It already is an election issue and will continue to be one in the months ahead, perhaps necessarily so,” Colgate University Associate Political Science Professor Nina Moore told Sputnik on Tuesday.
Moore said the 2016 election could focus on the Iran nuclear deal, because President Barack Obama is touting it as a historic and unique achievement.
Even before the agreement was reached between the P5+1 countries and Iran, Moore explained, Republican presidential candidates like Senator Marco Rubio had already run commercial ads to criticize the deal.
“We have already seen how merely setting out to try to develop a nuclear agreement with Iran became a center point of much of America's Middle East policy politics,” Moore noted.
Republicans who were already against the Iran nuclear deal will continue to criticize it but have not offered any alternatives, University of Kansas Political Science Department Chairperson Don Haider-Markel told Sputnik on Tuesday.
“Republicans in Congress and on the 2016 campaign trail have plenty to criticize without having to offer details on any type of alternative,” Haider-Markel said.
Haider-Markel stated he believed 16 Republican presidential nomination candidates would oppose the agreement without offering any alternative to it.
He suggested that Republican Senate and House of Representatives candidates would likely point to Iran’s continuing support for the Syrian government, for the Islamic resistance movement Hamas in Gaza as well as Iran’s intervention in Yemen.
However, Haider-Markel also predicted that the agreement would continue to be supported by the US public.
