April 09, 2015
The
consummation of a full, multi-decade agreement between Iran and the P5+1
powers, based on last week’s agreed parameters of a Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear program, is likely to have monumental
consequences—mostly for the better—across the entire Middle East. I base this
expectation on one important historical analogy, and on several possible—I
believe, likely— developments related to domestic, Gulf-wide, Mideast regional
and international dynamics.
The
historical analogy is that an agreement that sparks normal economic and
political relations between Iran and major international powers would
neutralize and then reverse the damage that was done to Iran’s relations with
many countries after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Post-1979 revolutionary Iran
was a pivot around which many regional developments and controversial
relationships revolved (Syria, Hezbollah, Iraq and others). Some of these
elicited anti-Iranian Arab pushback, all of which contributed to the violent, turbulent
situation today that many analysts and politicians describe as either, a) a
regional cold war between camps headed by Iran and Saudi Arabia, or, b) a broad
Sunni-Shiite ideological battle that often includes localized military clashes.
A full agreement on Iran’s nuclear facilities and sanctions would be the
historical bookend that starts to reverse the negative regional consequences of
the 1979 revolution.
The
successful international diplomatic re-engagement of Iran by leading world
powers shatters the recent failed American-led strategy of sanctioning and
threatening Iran. Instead, it opens the way to resolving future disagreements
through credible negotiations that address the needs of all sides equitably and
respectfully. This key international dimension of current events will have
lasting impacts, because it makes diplomacy as attractive as warfare.
The
three other dimensions I mentioned stem from the core domestic expectation:
that systematically removing economic sanctions on Iran will result in a
robustly expanding economy with enhanced commercial trade with regional and
global partners. Iran’s 80 million able people and its recent decades of
semi-isolation mean that hundreds of billions of dollars in commercial activity
await to be transacted. In turn—as happened with Turkey in recent decades—a
steadily expanding productive economy with a large domestic base should open
the door to more people-to-people regional contacts in tourism, education and
other fields, more relaxed political relations, and—most importantly—greater
common interest among regional states to maintain a stable status quo that
benefits everyone.
This
trend ideally would trigger the last two developments I expect in the Gulf and
also across the wider Middle East. In the Gulf, rational thinking would replace
the exaggerated hysteria in many Arab countries that now sees Iran as a
predatory threat and a Shiite menace. An Iran that is trusted by, and keeps its
nuclear agreements with, the world’s powers will be seen as a party with whom
one can negotiate and coexist. I would expect a gradual softening in
Saudi-Iranian-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) public recriminations, alongside
symbolic exchanges of senior officials’ visits, followed by a serious
exploration of how to minimize antagonisms or threats across the GCC-Iran-Iraq
region for the well-being of all concerned—and acting on the genuine concerns
of all, as is happening in the nuclear talks.
I
expect this to happen because I do not see how Iran and Saudi Arabia actually
threaten each other in practical ways, as opposed to their ideological
differences. As they resume normal economic and political contacts in the years
ahead, and continue to suffer the frightening expansion of ISIS and Al-Qaeda
across fragmenting, war-torn Arab states, I would urge and hope that one more
major development would occur: that the Arab-Islamic powers of the Middle East,
with the support of global powers, would explore the establishment of a
Helsinki-type agreement that allows ideologically different states to coexist
without militarily threatening, undermining or attacking each other. The 1975
Helsinki Accords saw the Soviet- and American-led blocs agree on the status quo
in post-WWII Europe while agreeing on fundamental aspects of human rights,
freedoms, and cultural, scientific, humanitarian and economic relations.
The
Helsinki Accords indirectly contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet
Empire, which resulted in improved conditions across most of the regions
involved. Such a new security architecture for the Middle East agreed by Arab
states, Iran and Turkey, with big power support (Israel would have to await the
resolution of its conflict with Arab states to join), would allow domestic
political and economic conditions to evolve more positively, as they have
across Eastern Europe, for example. Arabs and Iranians would all benefit from
such evolution that would follow, as their economies developed, they interacted
with one another more routinely, and they all realized that their different
ideological worldviews were not existential threats.
Iranian-GCC
entente is a critical requirement for any such development, and this is now
made possible by the nuclear/sanctions agreement that took such a momentous
first step last week.
Rami G. Khouri is
published twice weekly in the Daily Star.
He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares
Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American
University of Beirut. On Twitter: @ramikhouri.
Copyright ©2015 Rami G.
Khouri—distributed by Agence Global