January 25th, 2010 by Josh

The foreign policy community is abuzz about a Newsweek column written by Richard Haass, president of the well-respected and influential Council on Foreign Relations. Haass, an admitted “card-carrying realist” who believes that “ousting regimes and replacing them with something better is easier said than done,” concedes a degree of frustration with the realist approach toward Iran and declares that he has “changed [his] mind” about how to best produce positive results. Instead of relying upon the virtues of diplomacy to build international support for robust sanctions, Haass believes we should be “focusing on another fact: Iran may be closer to profound political change than at any time since the revolution that ousted the shah 30 years ago.” He calls upon western governments to formulate and sufficiently resource new Iran policies that simultaneously support the opposition and weaken the pillars of the regime.

Passport’s Blake Hounshell reacts by writing, “As regime change policies go, I’d rather have Haass’s than, say, John Bolton’s.” But he remains skeptical about the prospects for an Iranian political overhaul, pointing to an incisive Hooman Majd article that paints the green movement as primarily concerned with civil rights, not revolution. “In short,” Hounshell says, “betting on regime change is a hope, not a plan.”

However, one conceivable way for this “hope” to manifest is through severe economic turmoil, and Andrew Sullivan senses ominous “economic rumblings” from the newly-imposed limits on cash withdrawals which then triggered a mild run on two Iranian banks. This comes on the heels of a report that Iran will “knock three zeros from its national currency” in an effort to recover some of its lost value.

UPDATE: Over at his blog on Foreign Policy, Stephen Walt offers a rejoinder to Haass, writing that his “foolish” proposal will only help inflate America’s sense of self-righteousness. “No one in the United States can be confident that Iran is close to ‘profound political change,’” Walt retorts, “we simply don’t have enough information to know what is happening in Tehran.” He further attacks the notion that regime change will spur a top-down moderation toward the nuclear issue, pointing out that key members of the opposition maintain strong support for Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Posted in Democracy Promotion, Diplomacy, Freedom, Human Rights, Iran, Protests, Reform, US foreign policy |