'Cause I Wanna Put it Up on the TV Screen

by Eric Martin

President Obama, in an unprecedented video message directed to the Iranian people as their Nowruz celebration (new year) got underway, offered an early indication of a possible new direction for US/Iranian relations.  Obama's words are being rightly praised for their respectful tone, and appeals to diplomacy.  The decision to reach out in such a manner, and the rhetoric employed, both represent a considerable improvement over the modus operandi of the prior administration.  Admittedly, that is a relatively low bar to hurdle.  Some excerpts: 

So in this season of new beginnings I would like to speak clearly to Iran's leaders. We have serious differences that have grown over time. My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community. This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.

You, too, have a choice. The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right -- but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization. And the measure of that greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create.

While the praise for the people, history and culture of Iran sets just the right tone, certain ideas expressed in the above excerpts give cause for concern.  For one, to have the US President lecturing Iranians on the need to abandon the use of arms as a means advance their interests is a bit rich considering the battlefields still smoldering directly to Iran's east and west.  Further, as Tim Fernholz points out, Obama's criticism of the use of "threats" is also a bit odd considering that Obama has given Dennis Ross a State Department brief that includes Iran.  Ross, by his own admission, prefers sticks (aka threats) to carrots in negotiating with Iran, and views such negotiations as a useful means to garner international support for harsher sanctions once those talks fail (as they, according to Ross, inevitably will).

But it's not just Dennis Ross who shows an unseemly faith in the usefulness of threats (and perhaps, if and when those fail, force).  Obama himself has been unwilling to rule out military strikes or regime change - each of which sound very much like threats (the latter being of the existential variety when viewed from the current Iranian regime's perspective).  If Obama is serious about pursuing a new direction, he will need to take his own advice with respect to threats and the predilection to use force.  And that's just the beginning. Stephen Walt is making sense in discussing the prospect for negotiated settlement to the nuclear Iran issue:

First and foremost, the United States has to take the threat of military force and regime change off the table. Why? Because that's the main reason why Iran might like a nuclear deterrent in the first place. From Tehran's perspective, they have three nuclear powers in their neighborhood (Pakistan, India, and Israel), and U.S. troops on two sides (in Iraq and Afghanistan). U.S. naval forces patrol the Iranian Sea and Persian Gulf, and it is the stated policy of the U.S. government -- the world's strongest military power -- to seek the removal of the current Iranian regime. Indeed, we are reportedly engaged in various covert operations there already. Iranians can see that Saddam Hussein is dead and buried but Kim Jong Il is not, and they know one of the reasons why. They also know that Muammar al-Qaddafi agreed to give up his own WMD programs only after the Bush administration agreed not to try to overthrow him. Under these circumstances, it would be surprising if Iran wasn't interested in its own deterrent.

This means that the Obama administration's likely approach ("bigger carrots and bigger sticks," as outlined by special envoy Dennis Ross) is wrong-headed. We may need to think up different inducements, but bigger sticks (e.g., stronger sanctions) sends the wrong message, and repeated statements that military force is still "on the table" only gives Tehran additional incentive to master the full fuel cycle and then proceed to weaponize. If we are serious about diplomacy (and not simply looking for a pretext to use force later), Step 1 has to be reducing Iran's perceived need for a deterrent capability of its own. And as a number of Iran experts have already argued, the best way to do that is to pursue a comprehensive settlement of the key security issues that presently divide us.

Obama's double standard with respect to using coercive threats and the use of forceis symptomatic of a larger exceptionalist myopia afflicting US leaders.  Daniel Larison (who would have been a better choice than Ross Douthat for the Times) discussed these issues by way of quoting Christian Brose's response to the Fareed Zakaria piece that I linked to last week.  Said Brose (via Larison):

The real sticking point is how a Syria or a Russia defines some of its “interests.” Damascus’s desire to dominate Lebanon is not an interest. Nor is Russia’s attempt to create a sphere of influence in its old imperial stomping grounds and prevent sovereign nations from making free choices about their own foreign policies. Such “interests” should be, in Zakaria’s words, “by definition unacceptable.”

Greg Scoblete replies:

I think this only serves to confirm Zakaria’s point. According to Brose, the U.S. is the arbiter of which interests are legitimate, and which are not. And the standard is not exactly uniform. The Russians can’t exercise a “veto” over nations directly on their border, but when the U.S. decides it wants to travel halfway around the world and depose Saddam Hussein on the grounds that he’s an intolerable threat to our interests, that’s acceptable. The Russians can’t have a sphere of influence immediately adjacent their national border, but the U.S. can claim the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the Western Hemisphere as arenas of its primacy and veto the foreign policy decisions of governments therein. The Russians can’t corner the Central Asian energy market through cozy relationships with dictators and related thugs, but the U.S.-Saudi alliance is another matter - one born of a mutual and abiding respect for pluralism and human rights. Or something.

Most striking is Brose’s lack of any sense of irony when he complains that Russia “prevent[s] sovereign nations from making free choices about their own foreign policies” as part of his argument against Zakaria. A considerable part of U.S. policy overseas is to try to “prevent sovereign nations from making free choices about their own foreign policies” and to get them to do what Washington wants instead. More than a little of U.S. policy is dedicated to preventing sovereign nations from making free choices about their own domestic policies, and indeed we routinely discuss the alternatives means available for coercing other governments into making concessions to our demands regarding matters that are often entirely internal to those states. For Brose, this is all just diplomacy properly understood: “are we aligning our tools of engagement and coercion to get our desired result?” It goes without saying that our desired result is always legitimate.

If I read Brose right, other states do not get to have any tools of coercion, because their use of such tools is automatically unacceptable, and naturally this is all part of his “serious discussion” of diplomacy. These tools of coercion are apparently reserved only for us and those we deem fit to possess them. Our desire to have secure access to the Gulf and its oil is apparently a real interest, but we can’t let anyone else have spheres of influence, because we have increasingly defined the exercise of significant influence by other states to be something akin to aggression, whereas our actual wars of aggression are seriously considered either wars of self-defense or the fulfillment of some high-minded international obligations.

Similarly, real progress in terms of negotiations with Iran will require the United States government to acknowledge that, yes, other nations (including Iran) have legitimate interests - even if there are viable moral objections to how those interests manifest (as there are, alas, with respect to our own foreign policy actions).  We don't always get to be the sole arbiter, and considering our history vis-a-vis Iran, some circumspection might be called for.  Today's videotaped message was a promising beginning.  While the right rhetoric can facilitate progress in subsequent negotiations, conciliatory words alone won't convince Iran to submit to our interests while abandoning their own at our direction.  For that, we'll need a real give and take initiated from a realistic framework.

Comments

[Gary Farber]

"Similarly, real progress in terms of negotiations with Iran will require the United States government to acknowledge that, yes, other nations (including Iran) have legitimate interests - even if there are viable moral objections to how those interests manifest (as there are, alas, with respect to our own foreign policy actions)."

Just to throw some fighting words into the discussion, this, and the general thrust of your remarks, bring to mind two words: Henry Kissinger.

:-)

[Ara]

Eric,

I like this post a lot. I think you've come up with a new way of framing the way people tend to now think of American exceptionalism, namely as an attitude towards the permissibility of coercion. As far as Iran goes, I think this message only really works if you think of it as presupposing a disavowal of the American position on Iraq and preemptory war. Of course, Iranians are free to make up their own minds as to whether Obama differs from Bush, but you can, with just a little squinting, imagine Obama delivering the same address to the United States itself.

[Dave Trowbridge]

Obama's address to Iran was grossly hypocritical. He said:

"The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right -- but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization. And the measure of that greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create." (my emphasis)

This from the president of a country that has invaded more countries in the past 30 years than Iran has in the past 300! As Ara points out, it's easy enough to aim the same statement at the U.S., with much greater justification.

And don't forget that less than two weeks ago, Obama continued the "National Emergency with Respect to Iran".

This kind of double-tongued nonsense is just more evidence that any "change" we get from Obama will be cosmetic. The Empire rolls on, and he won't stop killing foreigners in defense of the American way of life, for which, remember, he said we will not apologize.

[publius]

do you think he's not making such a sharp break b/c he can't risk excessive capital in light of domestic battles to come? i get the sense that they're putting some of these more major changes on hold temporarily -- though obviously the symbolism of this is still a very welcome change

[Debra]

When I visited an aide in my Senator's office this summer for private reasons, I told him, that as far as I was concerned, the ONLY thing I was expecting from Barack Obama at this point was the capacity to exercize a good deal of subtlety in negotiating the INEVITABLE and already begun DECLINE of American empire in the world.
That the U.S., so used to its heady exceptionalism, would throw around its weight like a hippopotamus in a teeny tiny cage in the face of the already well emerged new political scene in the world.
I still hope that Obama can pull off U.S. decline gracefully...
And that he KNOWS somehow that this is his mission...

[woody]

You, too, have a choice. The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right -- but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization. And the measure of that greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create.

The picture of the President of arguably the most violent, bloodiest, most destructive, most aggressive, best armed, most war-like nation on the planet lecturing the peoiple of Iran--far more sinned against than sinning in any political calculus--on the necessity of 'responsibility' is fucking laughable...

[Eric Martin]

publius: good question. But appointing Ross wasn't necessary to conserve political capital. I get that argument more with respect to letting Chas Freeman get sacked, but he could have not appointed Ross and suffered very little for it - if at all.

Just to throw some fighting words into the discussion, this, and the general thrust of your remarks, bring to mind two words: Henry Kissinger.

But we're already cutting deals ala Kissinger - look at all the despots in the the Middle East (and abroad) that we support.

But I'm calling for a more humble, less intrusive foreign policy than Kissinger. There's a big difference.

[spockamok]

I posted this as a poll on another site, curious about reactions here.

What's the appropriate way for the U.S. to deal w/ Iran?

Poll Options

a) Say "Oh Iran, you were right all along" to resolve disagreements

b) Laissez-faire, interact w/ Iran as if they were Switzerland

c) Bargain w/ Iran, but begin w/ many substantive conciliatory moves

d) Bargain w/ Iran, but hold tangible conciliatory steps in reserve

e) Refuse to engage Iran, and continue to vocally disapprove of the regime and all its policies

f) Seek the overthrow of the Iranian government.

[Eric Martin]

I'd vote somewhere between (c) and (d).

[spockamok]

Options c) and d), a bargain, imply that the U.S. is asking for some form of behavior change from Tehran, in return for adjustments in our own policies.

What should Washington be asking for from Tehran? What seems to bother it now, that it could reasonably expect to see changed, for the right price?

And can such things be discussed without most commenters focusing on the lack of U.S. standing to make such requests in the first place?

---If the U.S. lacks "standing" to request any changes from Iran, then we are not talking about a bargain, we are talking about a) or b), reconciliation on Tehran's terms only, or a laissez-faire policy, neither of which really require any negotiation.

[Eric Martin]

We should ask Iran to abstain from weaponizing nukes, and to cease funding armed proxies or at least seek to rein in their behavior.

We should offer in return security guarantees, economic incentives in terms of inclusion in certain pacts, and a real, honest effort to resolve the Israel/Palestine mess.

[spockamok]

Now that's an endgame I can get behind. Would a good analogy be that an Iran that shifts in the desired direction, even if it remains an illiberal theocratic state, can have cooperation with the US on the level that say, China does?

Then we get to the issue of how we get there. I'd be pretty comfortable starting off with some unilateral upfront guarantees like "we do not plan to overthrow your regime, support armed insurgent groups that fight you, or otherwise sneak about to pick winners and losers in your politics". I'd also pretty much be up for diplomatic meetings at pretty much any level (though generally higher meetings would be more useful once progress is being made on some bilateral bargaining).

I'd also be into spelling out, a whole array of positive proposals to be delivered at the backend of negotiations (things like WTO membership, a Gulf process like the European CFE and CSCE----meaning that we can make the frequency and intensity of military deployments and port visits a negotiable item).

But I don't think I'd be into lifting economic sanctionson the front-end. I don't know if the sanctions are layered enough that you can lift "half" of them and have the other "half" remaining as enough incentive for Iran to move its positions at all.