by Ryan Costello
Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy delivered a visionary commencement speech at American University where he called on Americans to reexamine their assumptions about peace, including with our then-archrival, the Soviet Union. In so doing, Kennedy challenged a mindset that has shaped modern American foreign policy: [...]]]>
by Ryan Costello
Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy delivered a visionary commencement speech at American University where he called on Americans to reexamine their assumptions about peace, including with our then-archrival, the Soviet Union. In so doing, Kennedy challenged a mindset that has shaped modern American foreign policy: that diplomacy is appeasement and the only rational way to deal with rivals is through unyielding pressure and military force. Today, with President Barack Obama struggling to obtain a deal that ensures peace and prevents Iran’s increasingly authoritarian leaders from pursuing a nuclear weapon, Kennedy’s words resonate and offer guidance for a reinvigorated diplomatic approach to Iran.
As tensions with Iran rise, President Obama would be wise to heed Kennedy’s words “not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”
In 2008, when candidate Obama was drawing comparisons to President Kennedy for his idealism and soaring rhetoric, he openly challenged the anti-diplomacy mindset gripping U.S. policy. The young Senator’s willingness to engage face-to-face with the leaders of Iran and North Korea without preconditions was ridiculed by his opponents as a sign of his inexperience. But Obama stood firm and, upon entering the White House, his administration briefly attempted to reach out to Iran before altering course a year later in favor of escalating economic sanctions. While this reflected the Washington consensus that Iran will only respond to pressure, it has hardened Iran’s opposition to American interests.
Kennedy knew that a sole reliance on pressure and confrontation would be met in kind by the Soviet Union, increasing the likelihood of war. The same holds true for Iran today. As proponents of diplomacy warned, escalating pressure has strengthened Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s power, devastating reformists and limiting avenues for internal change. Iran is responding by continuing to advance its nuclear program and, as the State Department warned last month, surging its support for terror groups to levels not seen in two decades.
Now, with hawks from both parties calling for a cessation of the intermittent diplomatic talks and enhanced military pressure, the President is dangerously close to falling victim to a policy of brinksmanship that puts us on the path to war.
Months before his speech, Kennedy faced the very real possibility of nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy stymied the hawks within his administration who pushed for strikes on missile sites and an invasion of Cuba, which would have almost certainly triggered nuclear war. Through deft diplomacy, Kennedy offered Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviets an exit from the escalating tensions, allowing both sides to save face. Narrowly avoiding nuclear war had a profound impact on Kennedy, a “cold warrior”, and helped shape his stirring words delivered that summer at American University.
In an era where superpowers with rival ideologies clashed on the global stage, Kennedy challenged the “dangerous, defeatist,” the belief that peace is not possible, and that “war is inevitable.” Since the challenges of international politics are man-made, he argued, they will never be out of mankind’s capacity to solve. Kennedy explained that peace need not be the result of a “sudden revolution in human nature” called for by the naïve, and could be achievable through “a gradual evolution in human institutions — on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned.”
Despite the hostile rhetoric of Soviet propaganda, which described the United States as bloodthirsty imperialists eager to launch preventive war, Kennedy warned that “no government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.” Further, we must “persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us.”
We are fortunate that the Cold War did not end in conflict. But the final chapters of our cold war with Iran have not yet been written.
Today, many policymakers believe that the pursuit of peace with Iran is foolhardy and that preventive war must remain “on the table.” Iran’s leaders meanwhile echo the propaganda of the Soviet leadership. Our decades of mutual mistrust have seemingly created a wall in which only animosity and barbs can penetrate. If Kennedy were alive today, he might warn President Obama about these “dangerous, defeatist” beliefs. Continuing to allow those beliefs to bind us to a policy of isolation, military pressure and continually escalating sanctions will only further undermine the reformist movement, strengthen Khamenei’s power and increase the likelihood of a spark igniting the flames of war.
But Iran cannot forever remain a pariah, cut off from the international community, stifling the hopes and aspirations of its people. And the United States cannot afford another bloody, open-ended conflict in the Middle East. To achieve the deal, we will need to challenge our assumptions, break away from the cycle of mutual escalation and put our full weight behind diplomacy.
As Kennedy warned, “I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war — and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.” Let’s hope his warning still resonates today.
– Ryan Costello is a policy fellow with the National Iranian American Council and a graduate of American University’s School of International Service.
]]>Sanctions Are Holding Back Our Talks with Iran
by Usha Sahay and Laicie Heeley
There is a consensus in Washington that more sanctions will help convince Iran to halt its nuclear development. On June 3, President Obama issued an executive order — his sixth in two years —
Sanctions Are Holding Back Our Talks with Iran
by Usha Sahay and Laicie Heeley
There is a consensus in Washington that more sanctions will help convince Iran to halt its nuclear development. On June 3, President Obama issued an executive order — his sixth in two years — announcing new sanctions targeting Iran’s currency and its auto industry. Meanwhile, a number of separate sanctions bills are being circulated in Congress, with additional penalties expected to be passed later this summer. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez recently remarked, “The sanctions are working – but they aren’t enough, and they aren’t working fast enough.”
The logic of both the White House and Congress seems to be that we need more sanctions to compel Iran to negotiate and freeze its controversial nuclear program. But our research suggests the opposite: repeated intensifications of economic pressure are not bringing Iran to the negotiating table. In fact, sanctions now appear to be pushing the long-sought-after nuclear agreement further away.
A report released this week by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation concluded that sanctions are not “working” the way they should be. Yes, they’ve hit Iran’s economy hard — but that doesn’t mean the policy is succeeding. Crucially, sanctions haven’t persuaded Iran’s leadership to come to an agreement with the West and may have begun to strengthen the Iranian regime and cement its determination to continue defying the international community.
How is it that sanctions are doing the opposite of what they were supposed to? This wasn’t always the case. Particularly in the early years of the Obama administration, when the President exerted considerable political muscle to get international allies on board with tough penalties on Iran, sanctions helped signal to Tehran that the international community was serious about the nuclear issue. Moreover, by focusing on sanctions instead of taking the drastic step toward military action, the President showed a preference for resolving the impasse through diplomacy rather than war.
Since then, however, a curious thing has happened. Thanks to the sheer number of sanctions that have been put in place, the American commitment to a diplomatic solution appears increasingly hollow. Theoretically, Iran should be interested in talking to the West in order to negotiate for sanctions relief. But the actual process of lifting sanctions is far more complicated than it appears — a number of legal and political hurdles have prevented the U.S. and its European allies from credibly committing to significant sanctions relief during negotiations with Iran.
For instance, sanctions passed by Congress require another act of Congress before they can be repealed and U.S. lawmakers would be loath to pass such legislation for fear of appearing weak on Iran. Another problem is that many sanctions are written with built-in conditions that need to be met before they can be terminated. Some of these conditions are so out of reach that Iran may no longer see a point in even showing up for the negotiations.
Due to all the strings attached to sanctions legislation, Iranians perceive the U.S. as being more interested in sanctions than in coming to an agreement.
Even as these legal and bureaucratic difficulties stall the diplomatic process, the impact of sanctions within Iran is also hurting U.S. interests. Rather than weakening the defiant regime, sanctions have actually given the Iranian government the ability to manage the economy and consolidate its power. Through patronage, currency manipulation, and other methods, Iran’s leaders have taken advantage of the sanctions by forcing people in dire economic straits to rely on special government favors.
Meanwhile, younger Iranians and political moderates — who, somewhere down the line, could be useful allies for the U.S. — are seeing their economic and political power diminished. They’re also starting to blame the West for their woes.
In the long term, then, sanctions are eroding American influence in Iran. And in the short term, sanctions aren’t giving the U.S. and its allies the leverage they need in nuclear negotiations. More sanctions, according to our research, will not solve this problem. In fact, more sanctions will make the problem harder to solve. As veteran Middle East diplomat Ryan Crocker recently warned, “…it seems to me that the more you press this regime, the more they dig in.”
On June 3, while unveiling the new executive branch sanctions, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney noted, “Even as we intensify our pressure on the Iranian government, we hold the door open to a diplomatic solution.” Carney’s comments obscured a troubling reality: sanctions no longer go hand in hand with the diplomatic process. Rather, sanctions are hindering efforts to negotiate with the Iranians and to resolve the problem peacefully.
Economic sanctions could have served as a useful element of a sophisticated, multi-faceted effort to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. Now, however, sanctions are fast becoming the entirety of our policy — and a policy of pressure alone has little chance of succeeding. To make genuine progress on the Iranian nuclear issue, the Obama administration and Congress must shift their focus toward sanctions relief and compromise, rather than sticking with the pressure-only approach that’s proving increasingly counterproductive.
]]>Many who offer opinions on policy toward Iran, and particularly on how to handle negotiations over its nuclear program, implicitly claim an unusual ability to read the minds of Iranian decision-makers. Assertions are made with apparent confidence about what the Iranians want, fear [...]]]>
Many who offer opinions on policy toward Iran, and particularly on how to handle negotiations over its nuclear program, implicitly claim an unusual ability to read the minds of Iranian decision-makers. Assertions are made with apparent confidence about what the Iranians want, fear or believe, even without any particular evidence in support. Several possible explanations can account for the misplaced confidence.
One is that we are seeing common psychological mechanisms in action. A well-established human tendency is, for example, to interpret cooperative behavior on another person’s part as a response to one’s own behavior, while ascribing uncooperative conduct to innate orneriness on the part of the other person. Thus there is a failure to understand how firmness in Iran’s negotiating position is a response to firmness on the Western side, and there is an accompanying tendency to interpret a lack of Iranian concessions as indicating an Iranian desire to stall and drag out negotiations.
Another explanation is that a particular frame of mind is imputed to the Iranians because it implies a U.S. policy that is politically popular for other reasons. Loading ever more onerous sanctions on Iran is a popular political sport, especially on Capitol Hill, to show toughness or love for Israel. The politicians who play that sport therefore favor a view of the Iranian mindset according to which the Iranians are simply not hurting enough and need to hurt some more, after which they will cry uncle.
A third explanation is that the supposed interpretation of Iranian thinking is a cover for another policy agenda held by the person offering the interpretation. This is especially the case with some of those arguing for more vehement threats of military attack against Iran. Some of those proponents have made no secret of the fact that they believe (for whatever strange reason) that war with Iran would be a good thing. Saber-rattling gives them a better chance of reaching that goal, because if an agreement is not reached with Iran then the advocates of saber-rattling would be among the first to cry that U.S. credibility would be damaged if the military threats were not carried out.
These possibilities come to mind in reading an op ed by Dennis Ross and David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In particular, they are brought to mind by Ross and Makovsky’s statement, in explaining lack of progress in the negotiations, that “Iranian leaders seem not to believe that we will use force if diplomatic efforts fail.” What is their basis for that observation? Have the Iranian leaders themselves said anything like that? No, they haven’t. Ross and Makovsky seem to be basing such an observation solely on the Iranian negotiating position itself, and in so doing they are implying only a single cause for that position. Whatever Iran does in the way of making or not making concessions is all supposedly a matter of whether the Iranians see the possibility of U.S. military force being employed. Every other carrot, stick, belief or perception evidently does not matter at all.
Actually, those other things matter a lot. There is the little business of sanctions, for example. Ross and Makovsky are to be complimented for stating that if Iran is prepared to make the kind of concessions we are looking for, then “we should be prepared to lift the harsh economic sanctions.” But they do not mention that the United States and its negotiating partners have given the Iranians little or no reason to believe that we are so prepared. Instead, the only sanctions relief that has been incorporated in the Western proposals is stingy in comparison with the panoply of sanctions that Congress keeps piling on. We do not need any magical insight into secret Iranian thoughts to realize how important this dimension is in shaping Iran’s negotiating behavior. We only have to look at the demands and proposals that Iran has advanced at the negotiating table, as well as the actual economic damage that the sanctions have inflicted.
Ross and Makovsky get something else right, but for the wrong reason. Their piece is partly an argument in favor of making a comprehensive proposal rather than taking a step-by-step approach; they pooh-pooh the idea of confidence-building that is associated with step-by-step. A comprehensive proposal is a good idea, but precisely because a lack of confidence—which is glaring on both sides—is a major part of the problem. The Iranians lack confidence that the United States and its P5+1 partners ever want to get to an end state in which they fully and formally accept a peaceful nuclear program, with uranium enrichment, in the hands of the Islamic Republic of Iran, rather than indefinitely stringing out negotiations while the sanctions continue to inflict their damage. Again, we do not need to be mind-readers to realize this; the Iranians have been quite explicit in stating that they require a clearer idea of where the negotiations are heading.
So a “going big” comprehensive proposal is a good idea—but not as Ross and Makovsky pitch it, as some kind of ultimatum with a threat of military force functioning as an “or else” clause of the proposal. That kind of clause only stokes Iranian doubts about the West’s ultimate intentions and feeds Iranian interest in a possible nuclear weapon as a deterrent.
What is the explanation for Ross and Makovsky’s assertions about Iranian thinking? Are they exhibiting one of those psychological heuristics, or covering a hidden agenda, or something else? I don’t know; I don’t pretend to be able to read their minds.
]]>Zbigniew Brzezinski, Iran should be key topic at hearings: The former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter urges the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to include a discussion about the implications of a “self-generated” war with Iran during its upcoming hearing. Key paragraph:
It follows that a failure to reach a satisfactory negotiated solution with Iran [...]]]>
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Iran should be key topic at hearings: The former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter urges the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to include a discussion about the implications of a “self-generated” war with Iran during its upcoming hearing. Key paragraph:
It follows that a failure to reach a satisfactory negotiated solution with Iran should not be viewed as the trigger for a new U.S.-initiated war that is not likely to be confined just to Iran. A more prudent and productive course for the United States would be to continue the painful sanctions against Iran while formally adopting for the Middle East the same policy that for decades successfully protected America’s European and Asian allies against the much more dangerous threats emanating from Stalinist Russia and lately from nuclear-armed North Korea. An Iranian military threat aimed at Israel or any other U.S. friend in the Middle East would be treated as if directed at the United States itself and would precipitate a commensurate U.S. response.
Seyed Hossein Mousavian and Mohammad Ali Shabani, How to Talk to Iran: The Iranian perspective provided by a former lead Iranian negotiator (now at Princeton) and a SOAS doctorale candidate. Any deal with Iran needs to offer Iran a face-saving way out, they argue:
While Tehran views a deal on its nuclear program as being in its self-interest, Western leaders need to grasp that it would be devastating for Iran’s aberu to take the first step solely in exchange for promises. The dominant discourse in Tehran portrays the 2004 decision by the former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami to suspend uranium enrichment on a voluntary, temporary basis as a failure because it resulted only in humiliating calls by the West for an indefinite suspension. The moral of this narrative is that placing maslahat above aberu, even temporarily, leads to nothing good.
Trita Parsi, Is A Deal With Iran In The Offing?: The Iran expert, whose book, A Single Roll of the Dice – Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran topped Foreign Affairs’ Best Books of 2012 on the Middle East list, describes the motivation behind the US-led Iran sanctions regime in his analysis of whether a deal is possible this year:
…the deal must not just prevent a nuclear weapon in Iran, it must also put Iran “back into its place” within the regional pecking order. While acceptance of limited enrichment in Iran opens the way for a nuclear deal, strangulating sanctions are deemed necessary to remind Tehran and other regional powers who is the de facto hegemon in the region—and who isn’t.
Reza Marashi, Step by Step with Iran: The former Iran desk state department staffer and analyst argues that a step-by-step process based on reciprocity provides a framework for the least bad option for both sides of the Iranian nuclear spectrum:
Tehran would stop enriching to the 20 percent level; ship out its stockpile of corresponding uranium to a mutually agreed-upon third-party country; shut down its Fordow facility; and reduce its existing stockpile of low-enriched uranium below the level needed for any possibility of weaponization. In turn, Washington would suspend key banking sanctions, back a suspension of the EU oil embargo, and freeze new sanctions initiatives. Under this arrangement, both sides are trading an equal number of concessions, which in turn builds trust, buys time for negotiations to continue, and helps disarm spoilers in Washington, Tehran, Tel Aviv, Brussels and Riyadh.
Joe Klein, Obama’s Next Foreign Policy Battle: The TIME political columnist sums up how the battle over Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Secretary of Defense factors in to the tug-of-war between Israel lobby groups in the US and the President and his allies:
And then there’s Iran. A nuclear deal may be negotiated this year. The Iranians are suffering economically; there are indications that they are ready to talk. But any such deal will be vehemently opposed by Netanyahu and the neoconservatives. The Hagel nomination, if it comes, will be the warm-up act for those battles. It is a fight that would send an important message about the President’s intentions–to Iran, to Israel and to the out-of-touch leaders of the American Jewish community.
Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Former Supreme National Security Chief: Crass talk is not foreign policy: The title says it all. A key quote from a former Chief of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council:
“It is not clear whether the actions that have been undertaken in these last couple of years were engagement or confrontation. If we want to have a role in global decision making, we must in reality choose engagement…Let’s define “offensive”; “offensive” means an action we undertake which doesn’t allow the enemy to implement his plan against us or a conspiracy he wants to commit against us, and we move one step”.
David Axe, Iran Unveils Copycat Arsenal: The Danger Room’s military correspondent provides a rundown of Iran’s makeshift though still potentially dangerous weapons arsenal:
]]>But that doesn’t mean all of Tehran’s weapons suck. Far from it. While some of the sillier Iranian gear is obviously meant mostly for fleeting propaganda purposes, the main hardware is grounded in experience and hardship. Driven by desperation and shaped by the isolation that comes with widening external sanctions, Tehran’s copycat arsenal could contain a few nasty surprises for the U.S. and its allies in the unlikely event that tensions over Iran’s nuclear program come to blows.