Watch the entire interview Sunday on “Fareed Zakaria GPS” at 10aET.
President Barack Obama says he will not meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March because his trip to Washington comes too close to Israel’s upcoming elections.
“I’m declining to meet with him simply because our general policy is, we don’t meet with any world leader two weeks before their election,” Obama said in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. “I think that’s inappropriate, and that’s true with some of our closest allies.”
House Speaker John Boehner invited Netanyahu to deliver a speech in front of Congress in March. He’s expected to use that speech to lobby for tough new sanctions against Iran – putting him at odds with Obama, who has threatened to veto additional sanctions as he tries to hash out a deal to halt Iran’s nuclear program.
READ: Democratic senators to hold back on Iran sanctions
The President said the United States and Britain had to quickly to put together a trip to Washington for Prime Minister David Cameron this month for the same reason Obama wasn’t meeting with Netanyahu. Cameron didn’t want to make it closer to his country’s May elections.
“He insisted that if he wants to come – and it was a very important meeting – he needs to be far away enough from the election that it doesn’t look like in some ways we’re meddling or putting our thumbs on the scale,” Obama said.
Obama downplayed differences with Israel over his approach to Iran, saying he hasn’t heard “a persuasive rebuttal of my argument that we crafted very effective sanctions against Iran specifically to bring them to the negotiations table.”
Israeli intelligence has confirmed that Iran has rolled back its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, Obama said.
The President said imposing new sanctions now would give Iran a way out of the talks, an outcome no one wants.
“For us to undermine diplomacy at this critical time for no good reason is a mistake and that what we need to do is to finish up this round of negotiations, put the pressure on Iran to say yes to what the international community is calling for,” he said.
SEE: Why the Iran sanctions fight is a big deal
Obama said he’s confident he can successfully lobby Congress to approve a deal once it’s struck.
“I’ve said before that we will take no deal over a bad deal,” Obama said. “But if I can prove that the deal we’ve put in place assures us through indisputable verification mechanisms that Iran cannot achieve breakout capacity, if I’ve got a bunch of scientists and nuclear experts saying this assures us that Iran is not on the brink of being a nuclear weapons power, then that’s a public debate we should have.”
“And I will then ask every member of Congress to ask why would we reject that deal and prefer a potential military option that would be less effective in constraining Iran’s nuclear program and would have extraordinarily ramifications at a time when we’ve already got too many conflicts in the Middle East,” he said. “And I’m pretty confident I can win that argument.”
