4 Ways President Obama Is Trying to Sell the Iran Deal

— -- President Obama is making several arguments for why members of Congress, and the general public, should back the nuclear deal with Iran. The White House’s goal is to have at least one of these pitches resonate with anyone who has an opinion on the deal.

Here’s a look at the main ideas he’s been pushing as he tries to rally support:

1. Danger

The president has warned, most pointedly during a Wednesday speech at American University, that opponents of the deal are pushing the international community toward a war with Iran. “The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy or some form of war -- maybe not tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon.”

But skeptics like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said that characterization is unfair and inaccurate. “I think the president ought to treat this like a serious national security debate rather than a political campaign and tone down the rhetoric and talk about the facts,” McConnell said Friday.

2. Logic

Another point the president has made is that his foes over the nuclear debate have not presented a reasonable alternative to the plan reached by the members of the P5+1 international negotiating team. “They will put forward arguments that, you know, after a few minutes, can be shown as illogical or based on the wrong facts, and then you ask them, ‘All right, what's your alternative?’ and there's a deafening silence,” he told NPR in an interview that will air Tuesday.

But many Republicans will say they have suggested alternatives; chief among them, keeping pressure on Iran via international sanctions until they give up more concessions than they are now.

3. Science

Once the deal was solidified, the White House dispatched Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist, to help sell the deal from a scientific perspective. And it’s a point that the president has continued to hit in public appearances.

“The overwhelming majority of experts — nuclear scientists, people who are expert[s] on Iran — support this deal because they understand that by making sure Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon, we won't have to worry about a lot of other countries in the region trying to keep up and get their own nuclear weapon,” he said in an interview with the website Mic.com.

The White House also played up a letter composed by 29 leading U.S. scientists, many of them Nobel laureates and experts in nuclear weapons and arms control, sent to the president over the weekend. They called the deal “technically sound, stringent and innovative … that will provide the necessary assurance in the coming decade and more that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons.”

4. Peer Pressure

In his public appearances since the final deal was announced, the president repeatedly stresses that the deal has the backing of the United States’ major partners in the western world: China, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Russia – the other countries that were involved in the negotiations. “That's the deal. It has the full backing of the international community,” he said as he announced the agreement July 14.

He also warned in his American University speech that Congress’ failure to approve the deal, which it can do by giving a veto-proof majority to a resolution of disapproval in September, will lead to the United States’ fall from dominance on the international stage. “If Congress kills this deal, we will lose more than just constraints on Iran’s nuclear program, or the sanctions we have painstakingly built. We will have lost something more precious: America’s credibility as a leader of diplomacy; America’s credibility as the anchor of the international system.”