Abuse of Power is a Crime

Listening to the opening arguments of lawyers defending Donald Trump in the ongoing impeachment trial, it became clear that much of the president's attorneys' defense hinges on semantics. Alan Dershowitz, for example, citing precedents from the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, argued that a president could only be impeached for "crime-like behavior," and since "abuse of power" is not a statutory crime, it does not meet the constitutional criteria for removal of a duly elected president. This arguments fails for the simple reason that, by any reasonable understanding, abuse of power is a crime. Indeed, it is the most basic crime that might justify the impeachment of a president, if we follow the clear logic of the constitution itself.

While the constitution does demand that the president be removed only on commission of "high crimes," the claim that, in the case of the president, such infractions can only be recognized by consulting the current federal criminal code is absurd. It remains a point of controversy, 222 years after the adoption of the US constitution, whether the president is subject to criminal indictment at all (current Justice Department directives say "no"). Since the criminal code does not regularly apply to the president, it is foolish to expect that it would outline every infraction of which the office was capable. Why would Congress pass a law that cannot be adjudicated?

This reality is acknowledged by the impeachment process itself. If the crimes for which impeachment was legitimate could be found in the criminal code, the power of impeachment would be invested in the courts. Because the crimes for which impeachment is warranted constitute a special class of infraction, the process is entrusted to the legislature.

If the crimes for which the president can be impeached are not violations of the criminal code, what body of law regulates such infractions? The answer is quite simple: the Constitution of the United States itself. The constitution is, by its own account, "the supreme law of the land." When a president is impeached, he is fundamentally being accused of crimes against the constitution. Since all of the President's power is invested in him by the constitution (as Article II, Section 1 declares: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America")  and the oath he took to uphold the same, "abuse of power" is the most basic crime for which he may be impeached.

How then, does what Donald Trump has been accused of constitute an abuse of power? The most basic dimension of the infraction lies in the simple act of asking for a political favor from the government of the Ukraine (a transgression that he then repeated and amplified on camera, adding China to the foreign powers from which he solicited such gifts). The constitution binds all officials of the government, but especially the president, to act in "the common defense," not out of a concern for their personal political fortunes. Nothing about the favor requested by the president enhanced the security or well-being of the people of the United States. It was pursued exclusively for the purpose of enhancing the President's electoral chances in November.

This constituted an "abuse of power" because it was a maneuver of which the President, alone among officials of the US government, was capable by virtue of his office as "chief diplomat." The constitution makes the President the prime point of contact between the US and foreign powers, but places discrete constraints on the legitimate exercise of that special access, because it explicitly acknowledges the danger of abuse. All officials are forbidden to accept "gifts, emoluments, offices or titles of nobility from foreign states and monarchies" and the president is made particularly impeachable on the charge of "bribery" because the constitution recognizes the potential for foreign affairs to undermine the democratic processes of our governance. The key check on impropriety by  US government officials is the scrutiny of the American citizenry: any action by an elected official may result in loss of power at next vote. Foreign kings and leaders face no such checks on their actions as regards the US. In their dealings with the US, they are accountable to only one American: the president, and their actions might never be made available for the US voting public to investigate.

If a president were sufficiently free to do so, therefore, he could "outsource" all manner of tasks that would be politically advantageous if their motives and true conditions could be obscured from the voting public. Fabricating a murder scene in a hotel room to discredit a political opponent, for example, carries huge risk for a US official because freedom of the press, independence of the judiciary, and other checks on government power stand as powerful deterrents. But those deterrents do not constrain the actions of a foreign government acting on the president's behalf (this would of course be true in an autocratic government like North Korea, but might even apply in the case of a democratic country whose people were sufficiently hostile to the United States). From any angle that one examines the question, solicitation of political favors from foreign leaders is a violation of the office of the presidency severe enough to constitute a "high crime" in and of itself.

Donald Trump's alleged transgression in the particular case of Ukraine, moreover, is compounded by the fact that he not only solicited a political favor, but is accused of trying to extort it from Ukraine's president using his powers as conductor of foreign policy. The founders were focused on "bribery" as an impeachable offense because they viewed the nascent US as a weak nation vulnerable to the sway of foreign potentates, thus the abuse of power that they most easily imagined a president committing entailed capitulation to foreign pressure. But now that the US is among the world's chief superpowers, the president is able to pressure foreign governments into aiding his undermining of the democratic process. If the president had threatened Ukraine with a military strike unless they announced an investigation of Joe Biden, for example, that would not violate any criminal statutes, yet under those circumstances the president's lawyers could not plausibly argue against such an action being an abuse of power worthy of impeachment. To argue that the withholding of military aid from an embattled ally facing an existential threat is not an impeachable abuse of power similarly violates common sense. In both cases, the president's abuse of otherwise legitimate powers for personal political ends are a crime against the constitution.

As the supreme law of the land, the constitution guarantees us the right to live in a Republic. The basic embodiment of that entitlement is the assurance that our government contains no official with the arbitrary and unchecked powers of a king. The constitution acknowledges that foreign affairs are a realm in which the democratic checks and balances of government are most vulnerable to subversion. That is why proscriptions and sanctions constraining officials' dealings with foreign powers were built into the constitution, and why the powers for the conduct of foreign affairs were shared out between the president and the Congress. Lawyers may argue about the facts of the case involving Donald Trump and the government of Ukraine, but there can be no question that what the president is accused of is an impeachable offense. If the President attempted to extort a personal political favor from the government of Ukraine, against the will of Congress and to the potential detriment of an ally's security, he abused his power as chief diplomat and executor of US foreign policy. Such an act is a crime against the constitution, and would warrant removal from office.

Imagining an Iranian Spring

The recent brush with war between the US and Iran underscores the persistent question of US-Iranian relations: will the two countries ever reach a point of mutual toleration ever again? In my past two posts I suggested ways in which the US would have to change in order to facilitate such a development. But one perspective would suggest that no amount of adjustment in US attitudes or foreign policy would make a difference. The Iranian theocracy is so incompatible with American values, so goes this view, its ruling ideology so antithetical to American interests, that detente will remain forever out of reach unless and until regime change transpires in Iran

Thus here I would like to take a moment to explore whether or not there is any plausible future in which a changed Iran might find common ground with the US. My aim here is not to ponder the ways that Iran must change, but to think through the possibilities of how it might change. Is there any reason to believe that Iran and the US could grow toward one-another, given world enough and time?

The first reality one must confront in answering such a question is that the system of theocracy and the institutional leadership of an ayatollah as "Supreme Leader" is not likely to disappear from Iranian politics, even in the long term. The durability of these structures in the face of extraordinary diplomatic, economic, and military pressure shows that they have deep-rooted support in Iranian society that cuts across lines of class, education, region, ethnicity, and gender. This fact engenders the most vehement pessimism among outside observers of Iran. "A theocracy," so goes this line of reasoning, "is hopelessly behind the times. So long as the Iranian people accept the leadership of the mullahs, they can never truly be part of the modern world."

The latter perspective, however, overlooks several important realities. The first of these is the reason for the resilience of theocracy in Iran. Outside observers might be inclined to believe that Iranians follow the mullahs because, as a society, they are more devout or awestruck by religious authority. This might be true for parts of Iranian society (as it is true for some evangelical Christians in American society that would like to see our government become more theocratic), but it does not statistically explain the persistence of the current system in Iran.

On the whole, the mullahs enjoy the broad support they do because of Iranian nationalism, not religious devotion. Pious Muslim farmers and cynically atheistic university students can be counted among the mullahs' supporters (to varying degrees), because all respect the clerical authorities as successful stewards of Iranian independence. The Shah was widely perceived to be an American puppet, and elected politicians like Mohammed Mossadegh had proven vulnerable to the combined machinations of the US and Soviet Union. Ayatollah Khomeini succeeded in establishing Iran as a neutral party in the Cold War, an achievement that few nations as small as Iran had been able to accomplish.

His legates have profited from the lingering credit for that achievement. Moreover, the theocracy is a source of pride among Iranians because it is a system uniquely their own. Because it is built upon the peculiar foundations of the Shi'ite clerical establishment, it distinguishes majority Farsi-speaking Iranians not only from "the West," but from their Arab-speaking neighbors, who (with the exceptions of Bahrain and Iraq) generally adhere to Sunni Islam.

The institutions of the Islamic Republic thus do not mark Iran as any more captive to "superstitious religiosity" than any other nation in the region. A belief in the irredeemable stasis of the Iranian system is more a product of European and American bias, grounded in the prejudices of the Enlightenment, than of empirical fact or observation. The role that the mullahs play in the construction of Iranian national identity is comparable to that of the Queen in Britain or the Emperor in Japan. If the latter countries could evolve to claim a place in the modern world, so can Iran.

How might this occur? By the same process in Iran as occurred in many of the most exemplary democracies of the current era. In both Britain and Japan, for example, democratic (the Parliament and the Diet) and anti-democratic (the royal thrones) institutions shared power in dynamic tension with one-another over decades and centuries. Each of those nations became the "constitutional monarchies" that we see today through a process by which power bled away from the royal throne and toward the legislatures.

A similar process could occur in Iran, transforming it into a "constitutional theocracy." This would require much less system-building than many people might realize. Iran already possesses relatively robust democratic infrastructure. It has an elected parliament and president, both of which have genuine authority and are substantially accountable to the electorate. These offices are presently rigidly constrained and impeded by the arbitrary fiat of the mullahs, but that admixture of power could shift in Iran over time, as it did in Britain and Japan.

Such a shift is more than a hypothetical fantasy. The Green Movement of 2009-10 and the even more violent spasms of civil unrest that have rocked Iran over the last year show that the government of Iran is under constant pressure to further democratize. As unlikely as it is that the mullahs will be overthrown, it is equally unlikely that they will be able to resist pressure to yield power to the democratically elected leadership indefinitely.

Again, some in Europe and America might protest that religious leaders "will never surrender power that they believe comes to them from God." But this again betrays an Enlightenment bias. Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire portrayed "religion" as a uniquely pernicious force because they were preoccupied with their own struggles against the Catholic Church. But to insist that Iran's system is uniquely irredeemable by comparison to that of Britain or Japan is to wildly overstate the difference between an ayatollah and a king or emperor. The Queen is after all, the head of the Church of England, and the Emperor is the Chief Priest of the Shinto faith.

The leaders of Meiji Japan were so sensitive to "modern" contempt for "religious superstition" that they encoded the ludicrous proposition that Shinto was "not a religion" into imperial law, so as to  clear the imperial throne of any charges of "theocracy" even as mass participation in Shinto rituals was made compulsory throughout the empire. This did not prevent democratic reform, however. During the Taisho Era Japan saw a burgeoning of democratic political life, in which the imperial throne gradually yielded control to civilian politicians and the elected representatives of the legislative Diet. Writers like Minobe Tatsukichi (1873-1948) envisioned a future of constitutional government for Japan like that I am imagining for Iran, one that bears close resemblance to the democracy operative in Tokyo today.

Some might point to the case of Japan as proof that real democratic reform requires regime change. But this is to (at least in part) overlook the lessons of the Taisho Spring. The rising prosperity and robust international diplomacy (the willingness of the industrial powers to enter into the Kellogg-Brian Pact, for example) of the post-WWI era helped foster democratic reform in Japan. The tide was only turned toward militarism and autocracy by the cataclysm of the Great Depression.

Japan's experience suggests that military pressure and the infliction of economic distress through sanctions will not encourage progressive tendencies in Iran. The forces for democratic reform in Iran obviously exist. For them to prevail, they must be empowered to compete with the forces that would retrench religious authoritarianism. If that were to occur, we could see a shift of power from the "Supreme Leader" and his fellow ayatollahs to the elected legislature and president. The role of the clerical establishment would not disappear, but would become progressively more ceremonial and symbolic (like that of the Queen in England or the Emperor in Japan).

Though violent conflict might play a role in that process, historical example would suggest that violence is not the only or necessary means of such a transition. Rather than continuing to pursue its fruitless decades-long policy of military coercion, diplomatic isolation, and economic deprivation, the US could thus more effectively foster an "Iranian Spring" by being open to commerce and diplomacy with Iran. Such a transition might be long in developing and might never lead to complete trust and amity, but it would assuredly yield profound benefits for the people of Iran, the US, and the entire world.

Why Did We Just Risk War?

In Wednesday's speech that (for the moment has) successfully de-escalated the mounting confrontation between the US and Iran, Donald Trump displayed a discipline that is rarely seen from the current president. He stuck closely to his scripted remarks and left the venue swiftly without pausing for extemporaneous questions, suggesting that he was aware (or was made aware) of the danger that an errant phrase might incite more provocations from Tehran (which was under extraordinary pressure from its own people to create at least the impression that the US had "cried uncle") and re-open hostilities. Whether Trump and his advisors were aware of how inflammatory the assassination of Qasem Soleimani would be before taking the step is unclear, but by Wednesday they seem to have understood how high the stakes had become. Given that fact, it is strange that the Trump administration still cannot produce a coherent explanation of the decision-making process leading up to Soleimani's death.

Last night's campaign rally, in which Trump offered the new explanation that Iran was preparing to "blow up" our embassy in Iraq, provides a clue to the White House's dilemma. The story about "blowing up" the embassy is far-fetched. If there was clear intelligence establishing that fact, why would it not have been shared with members of Congress at yesterday's briefing? But the mention of the embassy is telling. The penultimate "move" in the escalating game of chicken that led to Soleimani's death was the assault on our Baghdad embassy by Iranian proxies. Why would this have invited the assassination, and why will the White House not be candid about its reasons?

The assault on the embassy itself was shocking, and deliberately so. The Shi'ite militias that carried it out were almost certainly acting on Qasem Soleimani's orders. They left graffiti bearing his name (news organizations have variously reported graffiti declaring "Soleimani passed through here" or "Soleimani is our commander"). The messages themselves were most likely left at his deliberate instructions. Indeed, Soleimani was killed as he was arriving in Baghdad, where he was met by the commander of the Shi'ite militias that had executed the embassy assault (Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was also killed), so the assault and its aftermath were obviously on his agenda.

The embassy assault was thus almost certainly the provocation that incited Soleimani's assassination. We know that the drone attack against the Iranian general was only the most extreme option of several offered to Trump by his national security team. Why would the embassy assault drive Trump to the riskiest end of that spectrum, and why can he not coherently explain his decision in its aftermath?

There are two explanations for this, which are not mutually exclusive of one-another. The first is that the taunting intent of the embassy assault was so enraging to Donald Trump that he struck out at his tormentor, heedless of the potential consequences. This explanation is persuasive because Trump seems to have been surprised by the violent outpouring of grief and rage unleashed in Iran by Soleimani's death. The president does not seem to have been aware of his target's political profile, suggesting that he might have been focused on the degree to which he had been personally insulted by Soleimani. To the extent that this explanation bears out, it is easy to understand why the administration would be reticent to be fully candid about the decision making process that led to Soleimani's death. It would not be politically advantageous to Donald Trump to admit that he unwittingly risked all-out war with a nation of 80 million people over what was effectively a "pissing contest."

At the same time, however, we know that the assassination of Soleimani was strongly urged by hawkish advisors like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and their reasons for countering the embassy assault with an attack on Soleimani are likely to have been more complex. Though it only penetrated an outer "reception area" of the Baghdad embassy (the largest US foreign mission in the world) and inflicted no casualties, the message of the embassy assault must have been deeply disturbing to the entire diplomatic and national security apparatus of the US government. The embassy itself still sits within a larger fortified area known as the "Green Zone," thus to penetrate into even the low-stakes reception area of the embassy the militia assailants would have needed the complete complicity of the Iraqi government and US-trained Iraqi military. The message that Qasem Soleimani sent was clear: "We can reach you anywhere in Iraq, our influence is all-pervasive. You persist here at our sufferance." The evocations of Benghazi and the 1979 hostage crisis was thunderously blatant.

Given the clarity of that message, the thought process of someone like Mike Pompeo is easy to reconstruct.  The only thing that could buy US diplomats and military personnel any modicum of security in the wake of such a provocation was to ratchet the stakes maximally high. The message had to be sent: "You may be able to reach us anywhere in Iraq, but if you do, the retaliation will be devastating." Soleimani's death was thus conceived as a means of "brushback," done out of the sheer necessity to call Tehran's bluff or fold.

This of course raises the question: if the imperatives for Soleimani's assassination were so clear, why is the Trump administration not being candid about them? Why resort to fables like an uncorroborated bomb plot? Here again an obvious answer suggests itself: if the administration discloses its strongest motives for the death of Soleimani, it admits the extreme vulnerability of the US position in Iraq. The embassy assault demonstrated that after almost seventeen years of military engagement and trillions of dollars spent, America continues to skate on very thin ice in Iraq. Throwing a spotlight on that fact can only invite both strategic and political mayhem.

American administrations have had the opportunity to kill Soleimani since he became the leader of the Quds Force in 1998. The recent crisis demonstrated why no prior president seized upon such opportunities: the act was the last possible step before (and unavoidably risked) all-out war. The invasion of Iraq taught us what such a war would mean. Though US forces would destroy the combat capabilities of the Iranian military very quickly, in a nation that has almost 3X as many people as Iraq, the aftermath of a full-blown war would be long, painful, tragic, and unpredictable- for Iran, the US, and the entire world.

In opting to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and initiating its "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran, the Trump Administration set off a slowly escalating chain of provocations and counter-provocations leading to the point at which the assassination of Qasem Soleimani became appealing. Having broken the glass, pulled that lever, and assumed all of the risks it entails, they are left with very little to show for it. Iran is no less likely to develop a nuclear weapon. The regime in Tehran is no less secure, either at home or abroad.

We have been presented with an empirical lesson in the limits of confrontation with Iran. The Trump administration does not seem disposed to learn from that lesson, and even if it did, there is little time between now and November for them to develop an alternative policy, given the complexity of the situation they helped create.  If the "maximum pressure" campaign has taught us anything, it is that the regime can survive the worst economic and diplomatic punishment that we can inflict, and that we are not willing to resort to the degree of military force necessary to redeem the failure of such sanctions. The Obama administration had admittedly only explored the nearest edges of the frontier of diplomacy, but Trump has taken us to the very end of the path of coercion, and proven that it leads nowhere. It is time to tack back and try the other path again. Hopefully the next election will give us an administration possessed of the skill, imagination, and patience to forge a new path forward, in both Iran and the Middle East at large.

Obama was Right, Trump is Wrong on Iran

Last Thursday's assassination of General Qasem Soleimani again accelerated the spinning wheel of US-Iranian confrontation that has been in motion since 1979. It is a bitter irony that if you told a US state department official in 1975 that the American military would one day target and kill the second-most powerful leader of Iran, that official would scarce believe you. Why would we so violently antagonize one of our closest allies in the Middle East? What could have happened to turn a security partnership almost as close as that between the US and Israel into such a vitriolic conflict?

We know in hindsight what that hypothetical state department official could not: in 1979 a new revolutionary regime in Tehran would condone the capture of 52 American diplomatic personnel and hold them hostage for 444 days. That act was one of the most serious blows to American prestige in the 20th century, and an egregious betrayal of what had been for more than two decades a relationship of mutual trust and cooperation. Though the hostility of the 1979 revolutionaries toward the US was not wholly arbitrary or gratuitous (more on this below), the hostage crisis was a folly of tragically epic proportions, in that it foreclosed the possibility that the US and Iran could ever recover the degree of amity and trust that had once existed between Washington and Tehran.

The legacy of the hostage crisis has predictably engendered a "hard line" wing of the foreign policy establishment in Washington with respect to US-Iranian relations, represented by figures such as Paul Wolfowitz, Daniel Perle, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. From their perspective, the current regime in Tehran must be treated as irredeemably hostile and malignant. It can be contained, but it can never truly be engaged. No diplomatic efforts with the regime can aim at developing mutual trust or working toward a modus vivendi- the best that diplomacy can achieve is to win concessions or elicit guarantees of good conduct.

Certainly there is justification for this view. Whatever the sins of the US prior to 1979, the breach of diplomatic inviolability was an act of contempt and an insult to American sovereignty that few nation-states have had to suffer in modern history. It is not a stretch of the imagination to insist that if we cannot trust you not to attack our diplomats, there is little chance we can trust anything you say to them. Moreover, above and beyond having many sins of its own (some against the US, some against its own people or those of its neighbors), the Iranian regime (a constitutional theocracy that oppresses religious minorities such as Sunni Muslims, Jews, Christians, Baha'is, and Zoroastrians) is inimical in principle to US ideals such as those laid out in the First Amendment.

The hard-line view of Iran has dominated American foreign policy for most of the last forty years. Or rather, the spectrum of options pursued by various American administrations has arguably had only "hard-line" dimensions. Aggressive presidents have pursued "regime change," the only "softer" orientation developed outside that ambit has been "containment." No path that might lead to a normalization of relations between US and Iran has ever been seriously described by a US official, much less implemented.

 The closest thing to "engagement" pursued by any American administration was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (aka the Iran nuclear deal) negotiated by the Obama White House as part of the P5+1 coalition. Though this was a very tentative step toward diplomatic interaction, the structural properties of the JCPOA (the fact that it only committed Tehran to a fifteen-year freeze on nuclear enrichment, for example) would have effectively pushed future American administrations toward engagement with Iran. The best hope that the JCPOA could secure peace in the long term was if the 15-year window that the agreement laid out were used to draw the Iranian government into a more productive and stable relationship with the US and its allies.

Was there any reason to believe this might work? Yes there was. In their myopic focus on the very real causes of enmity between the US and Iran, hard liners have overlooked both the deeper context of that animosity and the countervailing forces that drew the US and Iran together before 1979.

With regard to the former context: the antagonism between the US and Iran is a lingering relic of the Cold War. Because Iran bordered the Soviet Union, US leaders felt it necessary to meddle aggressively in the internal politics of Iran by way of cultivating it as a strategic partner. Iran was on a path to becoming one of the most prosperous and vibrantly democratic nations in the Middle East when the US helped launch a coup (toppling the democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh) in 1953, ushering in 25 years of despotic rule by the Shah. It was thus not an accident that the 1979 revolutionaries vented their fury on the US. Moreover, much of what transpired in 1979 must be viewed against the backdrop of the Cold War. The institution of a theocracy (a system equally objectionable to the US and the Soviets) and the radical break with the US (a reassurance to the Soviets that Iran would be neutral in the Cold War) were driven (at least in part) by the desire to fortify Iranian society and politics from destabilizing Soviet interference in the chaotic aftermath of the Shah's fall.

But if it was no accident that the 1979 revolution opened up a chasm of animosity between  the US and Iran, it was likewise no accident that the two nations had drawn close to one-another in the first place. In the mid-20th century Iran displayed all of the nascent promise and potential of developing nations such as Japan or South Korea. It had an educated populace, an abundance of resources, and a long history of strong state institutions. The robust democratic traditions that had begun to form in the 1940's and 1950's in Iran never completely disappeared. Even today the National Front founded by Mohammed Mossadegh, though much diminished and subject to various forms of repression by the theocracy, continues to operate and compete in Iranian elections.

All of the Cold War contingencies that drove the US and Iran apart have disappeared, while most of the basic underlying affinities that brought the two nations together remain. It is probably unrealistic to expect that the US and Iran can ever be allied as closely as they once were in the wake of the hostage crisis and everything that has happened since. But it is likewise foolish to insist that the two countries are doomed to eternal mutual hostility. However objectionable Americans may find the Iranians' commitment to theocracy or Tehran's hostility to Israel, such contingencies have not prevented Washington from enjoying warm relations with Saudi Arabia. However malignant and dangerous Iran's sponsorship of groups like Hezbollah or its killing of US soldiers in Iraq have made Tehran to US interests, anyone who insists that this enmity must remain permanent would have a hard time explaining what transpired between the US and Japan in the wake of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima.

Barack Obama joined the JCPOA in a gamble that US-Iranian relations could be improved, if not normalized. Donald Trump took US policy in the opposite direction, committing to the proposition that America's "Iran problem" could only be resolved through intensifying opposition and hostility. We were never given much evidence by which to assess the effect of Obama's gambit, but the achievement of the JCPOA itself suggested that the path of engagement could pay out benefits in the long run. By contrast, three years of Trumpian belligerence have produced only an escalating cycle of conflict and liability. With the assassination of Qasem Soleimani Trump's measures have reached maximalist territory- there is little room between the point of confrontation we are at now and outright territorial war.


Moving forward, it appears that the best-case scenarios entail de-escalation, with very little movement on the fundamental questions that brought us to this impasse. That is not progress. As is so often the case, the debate over our current policy is likely to devolve into a shouting-match over whether hostile measures toward Iran are justified. This misses the point. There is no question that US-Iranian relations are unavoidably problematic. The debate worth having is over how that problem might be at least ameliorated, if not resolved.  Restoring US-Iranian relations to some level of functionality is crucial to the peace and prosperity of both nations, the Middle East, and the world. Working toward that end will require leadership that is imaginative, creative, and flexible, and that is equipped to view the problem in its larger historical context.