Iranians storming U.S. embassy, Tehran, Nov. 4, 1979. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
July 21, 2013
In a century on the Iranian stage, the
United States has gone from stranger to friend to master to enemy. Beginning as
a minor player, it then became a friend of Iran’s struggling democratic
movement; then a political puppet master supporting an autocratic monarch; and
finally a sworn enemy determined to overthrow a defiant Islamic Republic. For
the last three decades, the United States and Iran have been caught in a
downward spiral of mutual hostility. The two sides have glared at each other
across an abyss trading insults, accusations, threats, and sometimes worse.
American officials talk about “mutual respect” yet call the Islamic Republic
“odious” and insist that it must “change its behavior.” Iranian officials, when
asked how relations might improve, have nothing to offer beyond reciting a list
of accumulated grievances going back sixty years.
Matters were not always
this dark. The United States was originally on the right side of Iranians’
century-long struggle for dignity, independence, and a government that treats
its people, including its women, with decency. Now, however, both sides have
become captive of bad assumptions, sterile slogans, mistrust, misreading, and
ingrained hostility. Both sides now risk sliding into a disastrous and unequal
armed conflict that neither country says it wants.
Escaping
the grip of all this suspicion, resentment, and accumulated grievance will take
more patience and forbearance than either side has so far demonstrated. The
path of U.S.-Iranian relations is littered with the wrecks of efforts to change
the rancor into something more productive in which the two sides can at least
talk to each other—if not as friends, then as two states with interests that
sometimes conflict and sometimes coincide. In the past three decades, when
efforts to change the relationship and establish dialogue based on mutual
respect and mutual interest have run into difficulties, both sides have
reverted to the dysfunctional patterns of the past, saying, in effect, “Well,
we are being reasonable, but how can we deal with them who are so (unreasonable, irrational, devious, stubborn,
bullying, etc.)?” One side paints the conflict as an encounter between rational
Westerners and unpredictable Orientals. The other side paints it as an
encounter between bully and victim (or, in Imam Khomeini’s words, “the wolf and
the sheep”).
Shahs and Great Games
The United States first encountered Iran
(then known in the West as Persia) in the second half of the nineteenth
century. It was an unfortunate time for Iran. Disastrous military defeats,
bloody religious conflicts, economic decline, poor education and health,
misrule, and corruption had brought Iran to one of the lowest points in its
long and often glorious history. The historian Ervand Abrahamian estimates that
during the 1900−06 period Iran’s
literacy rate was 5 percent and its citizen’s average life expectancy was
thirty years. There were no universities and only 2,000 students were enrolled
in state schools.
Iran remained nominally
independent thanks only to its position in the Great Game between Britain and
czarist Russia. That nominal independence, however, did not mean that Iranians
controlled their own affairs; both foreigners and Iranians under foreign
“protection,” enjoyed immunity from local law. The Qajar Dynasty ruler,
unrestrained by any constitutional system until 1906, pawned the country’s
economic resources (including its oil) in return for loans and quick cash to
finance his court and foreign trips. The country’s only effective military
force, the Persian Cossack Brigade, was led by Russian officers. The greatest
humiliation came in 1907 when Britain and Russia divided a weak Iran into
“spheres of influence,” an arrangement that gave Russia a free hand in the
economic and population centers of the north, while giving Britain a buffer
zone in the barren southeast to protect its vital interests in India.
In this unhappy
setting, in the early twentieth century, the small Iranian intelligentsia—both
clerical and secular—began a struggle to limit the arbitrary power of the ruler
and to make Iranians masters in their own house. Americans were mostly outside
this struggle, and their limited involvement was usually positive: missionaries
provided Iranians schools and hospitals; American advisors in 1910−11 worked with the new parliament to bring order to Iranian
finances; and a young missionary schoolteacher, Howard Baskerville, became “the
American martyr” in 1909 when he was killed fighting against royal forces
seeking to suppress the new constitution.
World
War II and its aftermath made America an important new factor in the Iranian
political arena. The United States became a leading player in a new form of the
Great Game, now called the Cold War (1945–91). In the original
nineteenth-century version, Britain and czarist Russia competed for influence
in Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran. In the updated version, the Soviet
Union replaced imperial Russia and the United States took over the role
formerly played by Britain. Iran, which had been just one piece of this game,
now became a major prize and Iranian oil, which had not been a factor in the
nineteenth century, now became part of the stakes. Communism—and
anti-communism—added an ideological component to the contest.
Whatever its
motivation, the United States held a generally positive position among Iranians
until the coup of August 1953, which was backed by the Central Intelligence
Agency. That action led to twenty-five years of close association between
Washington and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Although there had been considerable
American sympathy for the Iranian position in the dispute with Great Britain
and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company over control of Iranian oil, Prime Minister
Mohammad Mossadegh and his National Front in the end fell victim to Cold War
calculations and American domestic politics. Mossadegh never seemed to
appreciate the realities of the American political scene, while the British
skillfully played on the rampant fears of communism infecting American society
at the time.
Rule of the Mob
The United States initially hoped to salvage
something from the turmoil of the Islamic Revolution and the fall of the
Iranian monarchy in February 1979. Caught unaware by the fury and scope of many
Iranians’ hostility to the shah, the Carter administration continued to see
Iran in Cold War terms, as a piece in an updated Great Game between competing
superpowers. Since 1945, basic American policy had been consistent: keep the
Soviets away from Iranian territory, the Iranian government, and Iranian oil.
In doing so, Washington had chosen to back the shah and his government as the
linchpin of this strategy. If the shah’s system was brutal, inefficient,
repressive, and corrupt, so be it. After 1973, when Iran gained a huge windfall
from high oil prices, the country became an important customer of American
exports, both civilian and military. Before the revolution broke out, an
estimated fifty thousand Americans—many working on defense contracts—lived in
Iran, and at least an equal number of Iranians, including students and military
trainees, lived in the United States.
The United States, like
most of the world, was unprepared when the shah’s rule collapsed in 1979
following a year of protests and calls for Islamic government and an Islamic
Republic. The first American reaction was an attempt to build a relationship
with the new Iran—which retained the geography and the oil wealth of the old
one—on the basis of shared hostility to the Soviet Union and Iranian suspicions
of Iraq. The efforts foundered on the hostility of extremists of both right and
left in Tehran. The former suspected the Americans of using Iranians’
anti-Soviet sentiments to recover their earlier influence and eventually
destroy the revolution; the latter saw the Americans attempting to resurrect
the anti-Soviet alliance they had made with the shah.
The final break began
nine months after the revolutionaries’ victory. In November 1979, in response
to President Carter’s decision to admit the deposed shah to the United States
for medical treatment, a mob overran the American Embassy in Tehran. What had
begun as a 1970s-style student sit-in became a major international crisis when
the authorities in Tehran endorsed the mob action. The American staff became
hostages for fourteen months, diplomatic relations were formally broken, and
extremists used anti-American hysteria and “holy defense” against Iraq to take
total control of the Iranian state.
Conventional Washington
wisdom said that tempers would cool with the January 1981 release of the American
hostages and the passage of time, and that after a few years officials of the
United States and Islamic Republic would be talking—not necessarily as
friends—about issues that mattered to both countries, including Afghanistan,
Iraq, narcotics trafficking, navigation in the Persian Gulf, terrorism by Sunni
extremist groups, and (later) even Syria. However, those conversations have not
happened, except in the most limited form. Instead, sixty years after the 1953
coup and thirty-four years after the 1979 embassy seizure, the estrangement
persists and both Iran and the United States continue to nurture their
grievances. Wounds still fester and events of decades ago cast long shadows
over current relations.
“Goodwill Begets Goodwill”
The United States and the
Islamic Republic have found themselves stuck for over thirty years on a road to
nowhere. When officials—from either side—do seek to leave that road and change
the relationship into something more productive for both sides, they are met
with profound mistrust, misreading, misunderstanding, bad assumptions, bad
timing, and sometimes just bad luck. Most administrations in Washington would
have preferred to ignore Iran after seeing how the embassy hostage crisis of
1979−81 cost Jimmy Carter his presidency and how revelations of
secret arms sales to Iran in 1986 shook Ronald Reagan’s administration:
apparently nothing good could come from dealing with Iran. Despite these
disastrous precedents, in his January 1989 inaugural address, President George
H.W. Bush made his “goodwill begets goodwill” pledge to Iran, but by time he
ran for re-election in 1992 he had decided the political price was too high.
In 2008, Barack Obama,
then a U.S. senator running for president, said he was ready to engage the
Islamic Republic on matters of mutual interest. After his inauguration in early
2009, he launched an effort to begin a dialogue, demonstrating some important
symbolic shifts in American policy. He sent Nowruz (Iranian New Year) greetings
to both the Iranian people and, pointedly, to “the leaders of the Islamic
Republic”—a major change of language. He quoted Persian poetry, implicitly
recognizing the historical greatness of Iranian civilization. He spoke of
engagement without preconditions on matters of mutual interest and based on
mutual respect. The last point, in particular, was something that the Iranians
had always insisted was vital to any discussions.
Obama has had little to
show for these efforts. Since he assumed office, there has been only one
acknowledged high-level meeting between Iranian and American officials—when
Iranian National Security Council chief and nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili met
his American counterpart, the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs William
J. Burns in Geneva in October 2009. The two apparently reached an agreement
about supplying enriched nuclear fuel rods for the Tehran Research
Reactor; but the deal subsequently fell victim to Iranian mistrust and domestic
politics, and to ill-considered remarks in Washington. Since that time, the
Iranian side has denied there ever was such an agreement, and Jalili himself
has avoided any bilateral discussions with his American counterparts at
subsequent meetings between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (the five United
Nations Security Council permanent members plus Germany) to discuss Iran’s
nuclear program.
Bad Luck, Bad Timing
Why has Iranian-American hostility persisted
for so long? Why are the two sides unable even to talk about their differences?
In a reasonable world, officials from Tehran and Washington—recognizing a
shared interest in avoiding armed conflict—would be meeting discreetly and
searching for the common ground on issues such as Afghanistan, where at least
some interests coincide. These contacts might not lead to the reopening of
formal diplomatic relations, but their absence need not prevent such meetings.
Both sides could recognize areas where agreement is not possible and avoid
sermonizing and asking for the impossible. American officials, for example,
know that the Islamic Republic is not going to establish relations with Israel
in order to please Washington; Iranian officials, for their part, know the
United States is not going to endanger its relations with the Gulf Cooperation
Council countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, for the sake of better relations
with Tehran.
Bad
luck and bad timing have played their parts in the stalemate. In May of 2010,
for example, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva negotiated a nuclear fuel
arrangement in Tehran (the so-called “tripartite agreement”) that would have
delivered about 85 to 90 percent of what had been agreed to in Geneva eight
months earlier. In this deal, Iran agreed to give up about half of its supply
of 3.5 percent low-enriched uranium (LEU) in return for 20 percent enriched
fuel rods for the Tehran Research Reactor, which manufactures
isotopes for cancer treatments. While the details of the Tehran and Geneva
agreements were different, they were close enough for negotiators to work out
the differences.
Rather than react to
the agreement with standard temporizing of diplomatic language about “the need
for further study and clarification” however, Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton rejected it immediately saying that the newly drafted UN Security
Council sanction resolution was the best response. The issue became personal
for me when, as a Department of State official, I had to explain her response
(without guidance) to the Persian-language service of German radio. I could
only guess that the problem was timing. As I sometimes do when I have no good
answer, I took refuge in Persian poetry, a famous line from Ostad Shahriyar:
O, love of my life, you finally came to me. But why now?
What was possible in October 2009 was no
longer possible eight months later. The political ground, both domestic and
international, had shifted, and the U.S. government had invested too much into
building international and congressional support for a UN sanctions resolution
that required agreement from all five permanent members and at least four
non-permanent members of the UN Security Council.
The Purity of Indignation
By early 2010, President Obama had found
himself in the same situation with Iran as his predecessors—on a road littered
with the wrecks of failed attempts to deal with the Islamic Republic.
Successive American administrations, unable to ignore Iran, had attempted to
bribe it, coerce it, isolate it, overthrow it, or make peace with it. A
combination of mistrust, ineptitude, impatience, and bad luck on both sides had
ensured that nothing would work.
Ten years previously,
in late 2001 and early 2002, Iranian and American diplomats had worked together
closely and effectively to create arrangements for a new government in
post-Taliban Afghanistan. The American representative at those negotiations,
Ambassador James Dobbins, has described how his Iranian counterpart played a
vital role in convincing Afghan factions to cooperate and how the counterpart
proposed that the Iranian and American militaries work together in training a
new Afghan military. Those efforts collapsed, however, with President George W.
Bush’s “axis of evil” speech of January 2002 and his administration’s hostility
to anything that suggested common interest or cooperation with the Islamic
Republic.
In Barack Obama, the
Islamic Republic encountered its worst nightmare: an American president it
could not portray as an enemy. The oligarchs of Tehran found themselves facing
something much more dangerous than an enemy. They now had to deal with someone
who quoted Persian poetry, sent them New Year’s greetings, and spoke of “mutual
respect.” They were caught off guard. Reacting to George W. Bush and his axis
of evil rhetoric had been easy. Reacting to the new reality, which discredited
Tehran’s traditional anti-American slogans, was much more difficult than the
old practice of trading insults and threats.
It
appears, however, that the Obama administration never appreciated the power of
its new approach. Nor could the administration follow a promising but
unfamiliar path. Rather than persist in a policy that was disarming a defiant
Islamic Republic, Washington refused to face the uncertainties that came with
this change of direction. At the first hurdle, the Obama administration seemed
to give up and respond, “Well, we tried being reasonable, but how can you deal
with anyone as irrational as them?” There was neither the patience nor the political will to pursue a
different path with Iran. Nor was there the clarity of purpose for the
administration to absorb setbacks and initial rejections. What did the United
States want from its Iran policy? What was the goal? Was it a relationship that
allowed the two sides to talk, even if they were not friends? Or was the goal a
moderate Islamic Republic that acted more in accordance with American aims?
Whatever the goal, the administration gave up quickly and reverted from the
unfamiliar path of building a new relationship to the familiar and
dysfunctional patter of denunciation and punishment.
By late 2009, the
optimism of the earlier months had faded, and the Obama administration faced
frustration. The flawed Iranian presidential elections in June had, from
Washington’s point of view, chosen the wrong person. Tehran authorities met
protests from the defeated candidates’ partisans of the “Green Movement” with
brutal suppression by militias and revolutionary guard units. President Obama’s
second message to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sent before the
elections and purportedly proposing dialogue and engagement, remained
unanswered. The October 2009 agreement on fueling the Tehran Research Reactor had fallen apart, although (or perhaps because) President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed it was a good deal for Iran.
President Obama
nonetheless continued to make gestures toward Iran. In a clear reference to
Iran in his December 2009 speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, he
stated:
Let me also say this:
the promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone. At times, it
must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with
repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know
that sanctions without outreach—and condemnation without discussion—can carry
forward a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path
unless it has the choice of an open door.
The administration,
however, proved unable to follow the path its leader had laid out. Faced with
frustration and a disappointing response from Tehran, Washington—while
proclaiming its commitment to diplomacy and engagement—retreated into the
policies it knew well, and that had failed to change anything in thirty years.
It proclaimed a “two track” policy with Iran that would combine offers of engagement
with increased pressure; the latter in the form of new economic sanctions, both
unilateral and international.
All
of this sounded reasonable when explained by official spokespersons, who talked
about “helping Iran to change its calculus.” They claimed pressure was not the
preferred method, and explained, “It’s not about sanctions first, it’s about
negotiations first.”
In reality, however,
there was only one track, and that was pressure. Administration officials found
themselves spending most of their time and energy pursuing sanctions, and
spending almost no time looking at possible engagement. It was not easy for the
administration to create an international consensus—both within and without the
United Nations—in favor of a new sanctions regime. Officials devoted much of
their time to visits and phone calls with Russian, Chinese, European Union,
NATO, and other counterparts. Internal meetings supposedly about Iran were 95
percent sanctions. Iran was irrelevant to the discussions.
Although creating new
sanctions and negotiating with the parties involved was difficult and
time-consuming, it was at least terrain familiar to American officials.
Negotiating sanctions and punishing the Islamic Republic for its misdeeds was
something they had been doing since 1979, and by 2009 they were good at it.
American officials had built their careers on bashing Iran, albeit with no
discernible positive results. But, after three decades of punishment, the
Islamic Republic survived. It still pumped and sold oil at high world prices.
It remained hostile to the United States and its friends. It showed no sign of
modifying those policies on human rights, its nuclear program, and Middle East
politics that the United States found objectionable. Although American
officials could do what they knew, they were at a loss about how to undertake
the “painstaking diplomacy” the president had called for in Oslo or how to give
Iranians the “choice of an open door.” Basically, what they did not know how to
do was change thirty years of futility and frustration into a more productive
relationship that would serve American national interests.
Iran Without a Map
In June 2010, the UN
Security Council approved Resolution 1929 imposing new economic sanctions on
Iran. Individual countries and international coalitions then went beyond UN
measures in hindering the Iranian banking system, reducing or ending Iran’s
sales of crude oil, limiting investment in the Iranian oil and gas industry,
and restricting sales of refined petroleum products to Iran. The U.S. Congress
for its part has repeatedly passed new sanctions legislation against the
Iranian government and individuals, and has mandated penalties against foreign
companies that do business with Iran.
But, as Lewis Carroll
put it in Alice in Wonderland, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you
there, and all these measures lack any defined purpose. Without such a purpose,
it has been impossible to define their success. If we do not know our goal,
then how are we to know if we are achieving it or not? There are roughly three
views about the purpose of sanctions, and each one has its own criteria for
success. Depending on one’s chosen set of goals, one can—with perfect
justification—claim failure or success for the sanctions.
—The sanctions are
meant to persuade Iran to negotiate seriously with the international community
about the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. As stated in May 2013 to the BBC
by U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, “As long
as Iran is not willing to really answer the concerns of the international
community… about its nuclear program then it will continue to face isolation
and sanctions.”
—The sanctions are meant to bring so much
hardship to Iran that it will eventually give in to the demands of the
international community in order to save the Islamic Republic from total
collapse. This view replays the events of July and August 1988, when Imam
Khomeini was forced (in his own words) to “drink the cup of poison” and accept
a ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq war.
—The sanctions are meant to bring so much
hardship to Iran that eventually a suffering population—perhaps helped by
outsiders—will rebel against their oppressors and bring down the entire system.
This view replays, in a modified version, the events of 1951−53 when an international embargo against Iranian oil exports
severely weakened Mossadegh’s Nationalist government.
By most accounts, Iran is facing economic
difficulties from inflation, shortages of imported goods, closed factories, a
falling currency (the rial), reduced crude oil exports, and an inability to
access the international financial system. What defies analysis, however, is
which of the country’s difficulties arise from the sanctions and which from
mismanagement and corruption—long-running problems for an economy that should
have prospered from high world oil prices. Those currently in office in Tehran
have blamed their predecessors for mismanaging the economy, for using the
sanctions to excuse incompetence, and for the inept diplomacy that has made so
many needless enemies for the Islamic Republic.
Obligations and Rights
Although the U.S. and
Iran have numerous grievances against each other, in recent years the question
of Iran’s nuclear program has become central to their exchanges. The issues are
complex, but Iran, on its side, insists that its nuclear program is entirely
peaceful, that it is in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT), and that it has the right to enrich uranium under that treaty. It also
claims that it is ideologically and politically opposed to nuclear weapons. The
United States, supported by its Western allies, insists that Iran has not met
its obligations under the NPT, is hiding parts of its program, has not allowed
international inspectors to visit key facilities, and is enriching uranium to a
level beyond what is needed for nuclear energy production.
If
the matters in dispute were entirely technical, there would be an obvious
solution in which Iran would receive significant relief from economic sanctions
and would be allowed to enrich uranium to 3.5 percent, the level needed to fuel
power plants. In return, Iran would submit to rigorous international
inspections and end any enrichment levels higher than 3.5 percent. Iran would also
receive a guaranteed fuel supply for the Tehran Research Reactor
under some variation of previous, aborted agreements.
The nuclear issue,
however, goes beyond the technical. It has become so central and symbolic for
both sides, that neither Washington nor Tehran is capable of making the
concessions the other side says it needs. Ahmadinejad’s provocative anti-Israel
rhetoric and Holocaust denials have made the problem worse by placing the
nuclear issue center stage and playing into the hands of politicians in Israel
and the United States who present Iran and its nuclear program as an
existential threat. In Tehran, people reportedly joke that Ahmadinejad was an
agent of the Mossad.
The two sides have been
talking past each other in repeated rounds of negotiations under the auspices
of the P5+1. Yukiya Amano, the director general of the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA), noted in early June 2013 that after twelve rounds of
negotiations between his organization and Iran—beginning in January 2012—the
talks are “going around in circles.” In reality the two sides are negotiating
about different things. For the United States and its allies, the issues are
Iran’s “obligations” and legal matters such as levels of enrichment, Article
3.1, and the Additional Protocol of the NPT. For Iran, however, the issue is
not its “obligations” but its “rights.” Behind those rights lie questions of
sovereignty, national status, and Iran’s place in the world. “Why,” Iranians
ask, “should we be penalized for doing what Switzerland and Finland are allowed
to do?” To use Ahmadinejad’s phraseology, although Iran has no plan to build
nuclear weapons, only Iranians have the right to make that decision. In his
speeches he insists that no outside power or group—not the United States, not
the United Nations, not the IAEA—has the right to tell Iran what to do.
Behind
these unproductive, “asymmetric” negotiations lie ghosts of history and two
hundred years of Iranian grievance against foreign powers, particularly
Britain, Russia, and the United States. From the early nineteenth century,
those powers imposed and deposed Iran’s rulers, stole its resources, occupied
and seized its territory, and violated its sovereignty at will. In response to
this story of victimization, the Iranians have often encountered oblivious
foreigners who cannot understand these pent-up grievances, real or imagined,
and who answer Iranians’ insistence on gaining their “rights” with
incomprehension and insistence that Iran must fulfill its obligations.
No Iranian politician
can be seen as weak on what Iran insists are its rights in the nuclear issue;
and no American politician can afford to meet Iran’s maximalist demands. As
long as the nuclear issue occupies center stage, there will be little progress or
change in the long cycle of hostility. Compounding the problem is the fact that
the other issues, where there is possible common ground, have become hostage to
the blocked nuclear talks. The result has been an unbreakable stalemate in
which the two sides engage in repeated and futile meetings then blame each
other for the resulting impasse. Stuck in repeated failures on the nuclear
issue, the sides cannot explore areas where agreement might be possible and
where they might discover that, if they say yes, the sky will not fall.
In Search of a Small Gate
This paralysis has kept
the parties on a road to nowhere and reinforced existing and negative
stereotypes that Iranians are unreasonable dissemblers and that Americans are
bullies who want only to break the will of a defiant Islamic Republic. Is there
a way off this road? Is there a way for the United States and Iran to stop
exchanging threats and insults and begin talking about their differences in a
way that lowers the risk of armed conflict? Is there a way to achieve, in the
words of an April 2013 Iran Project Study, “a pragmatic relationship that
manages tensions and facilitates collaboration on issues of common concern?” In
a more rational world there would be, but so far neither side has shown the
patience, forbearance, and political will to act in its own long-term interest.
On the American side,
officials need to put reality behind their oft-stated preference for
negotiation over pressure. The so-called “two track” policy combining
negotiations and pressure has been a farce. There is only one track, and
pressure (mostly by way of sanctions) has been Washington’s single means of
persuading the Iranians, although the aim of that persuasion remains unclear.
Americans have a poor
record of reading the motives and actions of the Islamic Republic, which has
its own politics and dynamics. Previous attempts to do so have led to fiascos
such as Reagan’s covert arms sales to Iran and George H. W. Bush’s “goodwill
begets goodwill” promise. The fact is that leaders in Tehran will make
decisions based on their own logic and their own views—right or wrong—of
national interest and national survival. Like almost all states in the region,
the Islamic Republic feels threatened, and, even when evidence of threat is
missing, can interpret events such as domestic criticism as proof that
outsiders are bent on its overthrow.
In
such a negative atmosphere, it will be very difficult for any American
administration to convince Tehran that it does not seek to destroy the Islamic
Republic. For Washington, however, there are some first steps that can be taken
toward breaking the impasse:
—Have
Goals. Make a list, as Richard Nixon did when he
went to China in 1972, of “what we want” and “what they want.”
—The
President Must Lead. If the American goal
is a different relationship with Iran, the president has to lead the process
and lead the administration in pursuing that goal. He cannot leave Iran policy
in the hands of officials who are victims of “oldthink” and know only how to
impose sanctions and punishment.
—Control Rhetoric. Phrases such as “change their behavior” and
“odious regime” have no place in diplomacy and only invite more futile
exchanges. The June 2013 White House and State Department statements on the
Iranian presidential elections, for example, are full of ungracious phraseology
that feeds the Islamic Republic’s anti-American propaganda machine. Such
rhetoric also contradicts statements that the United States intends to engage
Iran on the basis of mutual respect.
—Have
Patience and Forbearance. With all of the
residual hostility and suspicion, an open American hand will not be shaken the
first (or second) time it is offered. There will be setbacks, but we should not
give up at the first disappointment.
—Look
For Areas of Agreement. The nuclear
problem, because of mistrust and the high stakes involved for both sides, may
be too hard to solve directly. The entire relationship should not be held
hostage to a nuclear agreement. Instead, to break the wall of suspicion, the
two sides should find other areas beyond the nuclear issue where agreement is
possible.
These suggestions are not a magic formula
for ending America’s lengthy and unproductive downward spiral of hostility with
the Islamic Republic. We may apply all of the above and still fail. What is
certain is that what the United States has done for over thirty years has brought
no result beyond, in President Obama’s words, “the satisfying purity of
indignation.” The hostility and suspicion remains, and Tehran and Washington
are still unable even to talk about their differences.
With Iran, it is clear
for the moment that the large gate to a general settlement and a new
relationship is closed. Each side has too many stored grievances and has made
too many assumptions about the malign intentions of the other. What is needed
is what the Hungarians call the kiskapu, the small gate, the loophole, where suspicions, negative
preconceptions, bad assumptions, and political agendas will not block some
narrow passage to progress.
Changes at this narrow
gate may be small and symbolic: an agreement to meet, a prisoner quietly
released, a handshake, a change in tone of public statements, or even something
left unsaid. All these small things, applied with patience—plus an American
presidential decision that the United States is determined to find a different
relationship with the Islamic Republic—may enable us to step back from the
brink of an armed conflict that will do irreparable damage to both sides.
John Limbert is the Class of 1955 Professor of Middle
Eastern Studies at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
During a thirty-four-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service, he served as
deputy assistant secretary of state for Iran from 2009 to 2010, and as
ambassador to Mauritania between 2000 and 2003. From 1979 to 1981, Limbert was
among fifty-two Americans held hostage after the seizure of the U.S embassy in
Tehran. He is the author of Iran: At War with History,
Shiraz in the Age of Hafez,
and Negotiating with Iran:
Wrestling the Ghosts of History.