The article is a badly organized stream-of-consciousness collage written from an ossified Washingtonian narrative that offers very little, if any, fresh input on actual policy. It is really far more emblematic of the collapse of U.S. regional strategy as opposed to being a new course. And although Stephen Walt has already done a masterful job at debunking the faulty logic of the article in Foreign Policy, it is also useful to consider a few points concerning the overall U.S.-Iran relationship, for they are often either taken for granted from both critics and advocates of current U.S. policy towards Iran, or confused altogether – hence why U.S. policy towards Iran has never really succeeded.
…containment [sanctions and military posturing] and the use of military force are not opposing perspectives but two faces of the same policy, viewpoints that both lie along a continuum principally rooted in hostility. Since 1979, American policy toward Iran has oscillated between these two points, usually landing somewhere in the ambiguous middle. During the later stages of the Iran-Iraq War, the United States actually intervened militarily against Iran. In the war’s aftermath, the Clinton administration employed a dual containment approach, imposing stringent trade and financial sanctions on both Iran and Iraq. Yet whatever its varying strategy — “pure” containment, the use of military force, or the ambiguous middle — American actions have failed to deter Iran from pursuing what it has deemed to be its justifiable policies, including its nuclear program.
In other words, from imposing sanctions, threatening the use of force, or actually using force, the U.S. has utilized all of these policy tools against Iran and none succeeded. Again, these are not individual separate policies, but tactical subsidiaries that comprise one overall strategy, characterized by hostility towards the said country. After 32 years of the same policy of sanctions/threats of war/intervention, one would think that the mainstream U.S. punditry would have fresh approaches, but if Pollack and Takeyh are in any way representative, the poverty of ideas is what currently reigns.
Moreover, democracy, as the adage goes, is not only a messy process, but also a long-drown out evolution, filled with uncertainty and always susceptible to regression. Most importantly, it is ultimately an affair between two actors: the state and its civil society. In Iran’s case, the most salient example of this was in the 1990s. While the U.S. still kept the sanctions regimen upon Iran and even stopped all Iran-U.S. trade, there was a lessening of tension between both countries (i.e. an end to the talk of regime change and virtually no interference in Iranian domestic affairs) which slowly helped the reformists to attain power in 1997. And while the tenure of the reformists was riddled with inaction and tepidness, in many aspects, the press laws, social constrictions, and the overall political space became relatively relaxed. It was only until the invasion of Afghanistan, the axis of evil premise, the Iraq imbroglio, and most consequently, the collapse of the nescient post 9/11 Iran-U.S. regional cooperation that gave way to the rise of the Iranian neo-conservatives.
The [Obama] administration started out, properly, by offering to repair relations through a process of engagement. When Tehran rebuffed these overtures, Washington switched over to the path of pressure…
Yet, in the next paragraph they admit that there was very little authentic engagement that differed from the Bush years:
In truth, Obama’s approach to Iran was another variant of the basic strategy embraced by the George W. Bush administration – a carrot-and-stick policy designed to create a combination of incentives and disincentives which would convince the Iranian leadership to give up its nuclear program (and hopefully its support for terrorism and other anti-status quo gambits).
This last statement by Pollack and Takeyh is accurate, but why then construct a supposed ‘new’ Obama “outreach” when essentially the Bush approach never changed?
Equally disingenuous is Pollack and Takeyh’s next assertion that, “… Iran…, refus[es] to consider any limits on its nuclear program.” However, with his recent trip to the U.S., Iranian President Ahmadinejad explicitly said that given a deal with the U.S., Iran would halt enrichment at 20%. This was buttressed by the proposal of Fereydoon Abbasi, the head of Iran’s atomic energy agency, that Iran would allow international inspectors full supervision over the country’s nuclear activities for the next five years – a major concession of sovereignty.
There is much more to consider regarding the contours of this complex interaction between the U.S. and Iran and equally charged critiques do exist on the Iranian side. And unfortunately, most of the much-needed nuance gets subsumed under a simplistic wrong vs. right or good vs. evil narrative that exists in both capitals. Yet, when one sums up both the failed policies that the U.S. and its punditry has pushed on Iran, along with diminishing American influence in the region, a troubled economy at home, economic and strategic challenges on the Iranian side, and the ostensive merging of key areas of interests with Iran and the U.S., one wonders how long the narrative fostered by Pollack and Takeyh will hold.
]]>Second, Pollock and Takeyh present a one-sided narrative of U.S. policy toward Iran that exaggerates the carrots we’ve supposedly offered and overstates Iranian recalcitrance. They argue that the Obama administration started out with a “passionate determination to emphasize carrots,” and claim that “the United States and the international community have offered Iran a path toward a responsible civilian nuclear program … should it conform to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations.” This formulation is at best misleading and at worst simply wrong. Obama & Co. were hardly “passionate” about emphasizing carrots; in reality, the United States made a couple of purely symbolic gestures but quickly reverted to mostly sticks when the symbolism didn’t produce immediate Iranian concessions. Moreover, the United States and its allies have never made Iran a concrete offer; the supposed “path” to a deal was merely a list of topics Washington said it was willing to discuss as soon as Iran agreed to give us what we wanted (i.e., an end to nuclear enrichment).
Read more here.
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