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.
9 comments:
One of the interesting, but not much-highlighted, considerations related to the coup against Mossadegh concerns the stance taken during that time by the Mullahs. Evidently, they - or, at least an important faction among them - supported the coup. https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/20/64-years-later-cia-finally-releases-details-of-iranian-coup-iran-tehran-oil/
That position, of course, makes sense in the context of Iranian history because Mossadegh threatened the privileges and vast property holdings of the Mullahs. At this point, the Mullahs would like their position from back then forgotten. But, facts are facts.
Whether engagement with Iran makes sense is always an open question. Given the ideology of the Mullahs - something you don't seem to address one way or another -, I don't see too much basis for any real engagement. Obama, of course, thought such a basis might exist but it is to be noted that the present-day ideological basis for the Mullah's power as leaders in the country is tied to their ideological commitment to an Islamic version of a Reconquista. As with most people engaged in a political cause, having opponents handing that cause billions of dollars is a reason of its own to talk but not necessarily one to change political commitments. So, call me skeptical.
Niles,
Thank you for reading, and for your thoughtful comment.
I know that the mullahs supported the coup against Mossadegh. I can see why you might think that this undermines my argument, but I hope to persuade you that you are wrong. The fact that the mullahs backed the coup against Mossadegh is an object lesson in precisely the phenomenon that I hoped to underscore in my essay: alliances shift, political bedfellows change. We are accustomed to thinking of the mullahs as implacable enemies of both the Shah and the US, but in backing Mossadegh's ouster the mullahs were (however inadvertently) allying with the Shah and the US. If we cooperated once, we can cooperate again.
Perhaps you were underscoring the inconsistency of the idea that the revolutionaries of 1979 backed the mullahs because they were angry about the coup against Mossadegh. But there is less inconsistency than you suggest- an Iranian individual could be angry that the coup against Mossadegh had installed the Shah INSTEAD OF the mullahs. That person would resent the US for derailing what they perceived to be the correct and natural Iranian choice- one that would be most expressive of the popular will.
The 1979 Revolution was a complex affair. Some of the revolutionaries were outright supporters of the mullahs. Some of them were social democrats along the lines of Mossadegh. Others were communists. Some might have prefered a secular military dictatorship. The mullah's faction won because they were able to amass a critical coalition and the greatest fund of political and material capital.
Why? I contended in my essay that the outcome was driven by the pressures of the Cold War- with the US squeezing on one side and the Soviets on the other, the complex and fractious revolutionary forces were driven to accept the leadership of the mullahs and their supporters, who were structgurally and ideologically best equipped to resist BOTH US and Soviet influence.
This is why hope remains for detente. You are oversimplifying the ideological orientation of the mullahs (I think you mean "jihad" rather than "reconquista," but I get your drift), but even if you are right, there is no reason to assume that the mullahs' preferences will always and everywhere determine Iran's foreign policy, even while the mullahs remain in power.
The mullahs only came out on top of the 1979 revolution because they satisfied the least common denominator among the diverse revolutionaries: a shared passion for Iranian nationalism in the face of Cold War Soviet and US meddling. They remain in power at the sufferance of many Iranians (especially urban, well-educated middle class Iranians) who have little tolerance for their religious fundamentalism but respect their defense of Iranian independence. If the US could convincingly cool the strategic atmosphere in the Middle East, the mullahs could be pressured by their own people (who would very much enjoy the fruits of commerce with the "West," and know it) into adopting a less confrontational posture toward the US and its allies.
Such a change might be slow and incremental, and might never lead to fully warm Iranian-US relations, but it is worth trying to achieve. We have just been treated to a lesson in what the greatest potential of the alternative path is. 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. Obama 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.
I actually meant Reconquista. I had in mind a speech given some years back by the former Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. You might recall the speech he gave at his so-called World Without Zionism event. In that speech, he focused on an Islamic Reconquista, with opposition to Israel seen, if you read his speech carefully, as simply a means towards a greater end - i.e., reconquering lost lands.
Jihad, as a form of war, is a bit less focused a term than what I was looking for. In any event, Iran - since the time the Islamic Republic was formed -, has promoted the idea ridding the Islamic world of what Iran's leaders have called the arrogant powers and cultures and, if that is successful, to restart efforts to acquire and civilize new lands. However, that latter part is more wishful thinking than reality given that Iran's technological and military prowess is so limited.
The Mullahs themselves, by the way, championed the Shah. Then he turned on them, which led to their opposition to him. And, they brutally eliminated other movements that supporting removing the Shah, akin to what the Bolsheviks did to other groups who helped overthrow the tsarist regime.
I don't think that the Mullahs can make peace with us because we are, for them, permanent enemies, akin to what we were for the USSR. Yes, the Mullahs can work with us from time to time, just like they work with Sunnis. But, at the end of the day, the Iranian leadership has its own ends in mind and that includes, as noted, getting us out of the region permanently. So, unless we want to work towards that end - and by getting us out, the Mullahs also have in mind our culture, not just our armies -, we are not going to have any real common cause.
Following the success of the Reconquista, the Spaniards did not stay home. They worked quickly to spread their influence far and wide. That is to be expected because that is how things work in the world. In the case of Iran, it is not that simple because the strength of the US is overwhelming. Presumably, the Iranian leaders know that to be the case. But, it does not mean that the Iranians will simply accept their fate. And, the countries leaders have not made a secret about their hopes and dreams, some more openly than others and some more sincerely than others.
That we helped the Mullahs at one point does not mean that there is a way at this point to have a real detente with them. Detente about what? Given that, at this point, there is a real war between the Shi'as and the Sunnis, with Iran playing footsie about questions related to the non-proliferation, detente is not realistic.
Lastly, I don't think that I have oversimplified. I think that taking people at their word - albeit being careful about context (which always raises questions) - is important. Nothing coming out of the Mullahs suggests any interest in detente with us.
Niles,
I was not aware that Ahmadinejad had used the word "reconquista," but it makes sense as a rhetorical provocation- thanks for schooling me. If we go by the rhetoric of the Tehran regime no, there would be no chance for detente, but that was true for the Soviet Union as well. The Communist Party was set on a "Conquista" of its own, after all- workers of the world unite, capitalism is headed to the dustbin of history, yada yada yada. But detente was achievable there, albeit within limits and to variable effect.
If history proves anything, it is that any bilateral relationship- whether it is that of the mullahs and the Shah, Japan and the US, etc., can be transmuted from one polar extreme to the other, given world enough and time. The history of US-Japan relations (or US-German relations) provides one model for how that change can be induced- through unconditional surrender and regime change.
That model is not likely to be a practically effective one in the case of Iran. We are never likely to embark on a total war with Iran, and even if we did, the Iranians would be no more likely than the people of Iraq to offer "unconditional surrender."
So with the Iranians, as with the Soviets (where Mutually Assured Destruction likewise foreclosed the pathways that had led to resolution in Germany and Japan), we are forced to choose between/employ in tandem opposing mechanisms of peaceful suasion and military coercion.
Without the coercive forces employed by Reagan, the Soviet-American relationship would not have changed significantly. But the same is true for the peaceful methods advocated and employed by the proponents of detente. Without the low-level contacts of commerce and cultural exchange that were cultivated by successive American administrations (including Reagan's) the Soviets would not have been pushed toward glasnost and perestroika.
America's Iran policy has been focused too preponderantly on coercion, to the detriment of peaceful suasion. Trump has ratcheted up coercive pressure as high as it will go, to no good effect and to much ill. Our most strategically wise course is to take another tack more focused on commerce and cultural exchange.
Will it bring down the Tehran regime? Impossible to say, in the long run. But will it put pressure on Tehran, given what we know of Iranian society and politics? Absolutely. We are foolish to abandon such leverage. It is not likely to achieve perfect harmony, in the same way that the thawing of Soviet-American relations have not led to unalloyed harmony between Washington and Moscow today. But it could not possibly make our relations with Iran any worse, or the situation in the region at large any more dysfunctional. On that very principle Obama was right- it is worth a try.
I did not say that Ahmadinejad used the word "Reconquista." I said that he used words that express that meaning. I'll quote them (from the NY Times translation):
[QUOTED MATERIALS] We need to examine the true origins of the issue of Palestine: is it a fight between a group of Muslims and non-Jews? Is it a fight between Judaism and other religions? Is it the fight of one country with another country? Is it the fight of one country with the Arab world? Is it a fight over the land of Palestine? I guess the answer to all these questions is "no."
The establishment of the occupying regime of Qods [Jerusalem]was a major move by the world oppressor [ the United States] against the Islamic world. The situation has changed in this historical struggle. Sometimes the Muslims have won and moved forward and the world oppressor was forced to withdraw.
Unfortunately, the Islamic world has been withdrawing in the past 300 years. I do not want to examine the reasons for this, but only to review the history. The Islamic world lost its last defenses in the past 100 years and the world oppressor established the occupying regime. Therefore the struggle in Palestine today is the major front of the struggle of the Islamic world with the world oppressor and its fate will decide the destiny of the struggles of the past several hundred years.
The Palestinian nation represents the Islamic nation [Umma] against a system of oppression, and thank God, the Palestinian nation adopted Islamic behavior in an Islamic environment in their struggle and so we have witnessed their progress and success. [END OF QUOTED MATERIALS]
If he had been speaking about Jihad, he would have said things quite differently. Rather, the speech is about winning back lands lost in the struggle between the Christian world and the Islamic world.
Address the substance of your comment, a great many historical disputes go on for centuries. Then they end or not. Some disputes are more permanent. Even if that were not the case, Iran is not in a situation where disputes are likely to be ended. The movement that dominates Iran is based on an anachronism. It would be somewhat analogous to a situation in which, for example, in France, the Catholic Church itself formed the government. Religion has a remarkable ability to maintain faith without regard to contrary evidence. So, looking to more secular countries as models for what Iran might do seems unfounded, at least to me.
Meanwhile, the world will be infinitely more complicated if Iran ever gets the bomb. At that point, there will be something closer to the dispute between the US and the USSR. But, it will still not be quite the same because disputes involving people of different religions that have never peacefully reconciled their differences are more complicated than disputes involving only ideological differences - which, of course, are not so easy to resolve either. So, I think you are hoping without much basis in fact.
Detente with Iran that would bring cultural exchanges runs into the problem that Islamism is premised on a pre-existing familiarity, but rejection, of our Western Culture. So, I would not count on that, even if there is a sizable portion of Iran's population that wants those exchanges. The Mullahs likely think it appalling. And, many Western countries, other than the US, have had substantial commerce with Iran. yet, the Mullahs have not notably changed course. Their revolution, from early on, adopted certain reforms urged by the West, from the days of the Ottoman Empire, by taking into account the voices of the people via "elections", albeit for candidates that are approved by the Mullahs. So, they are a modernized version of a theocracy. So, I don't think that detente will much undermine Iran's government.
Niles,
I am beginning to understand your reasoning more clearly. The appropriation of the term "Reconguista" to describe what Ahmadinejad is talking about in this speech is certainly legitimate. But I would question its value for projecting the wisdom or chances of US=Iranian detente.
I consider myself an intellectual historian, and I believe that we must take ideology absolutely seriously in observing and assessing the behavior of any political regime. But as much as history teaches the importance of a society's ideological commitments, it also warns against reductive ideological determinism. Ideological imperatives are always held in tension with other factors- economic needs, geographic contingencies, etc. Moreover, ideology itself can be very complicated, so that in the process of negotiating multiple variables between disparate interests, the same texts or messages can yield radically different meanings or options in the move from one context to another.
Take, for example, your speech. Other than placing the struggle in a specifically religious context, calling for the "repatriation" of Palestine in one form or another doesn't make Ahmadinejad exceptional among leaders in the Islamic world-quite the contrary. Even his casting the struggle in religious terms has echoes in messaging of other actors. ISIS, for example, would agree with Ahmadinejad that the struggle for "al-Quds" is irreducibly a religious one- but that would not alter their mortal hatred of Iran. By contrast, Bashar al-Assad would probably feel constrained by his Ba'athist doctrine to frame the struggle for Palestine as one for Arab self-determination rather than Islamic religious duty, but that disagreement does not prevent Damascus and Tehran from being close strategic partners.
Ideology definitely creates a gulf between the current Iranian regime and the United States (as I acknowledged in my original post, where I talk about the First Amendment). But history would suggest that many (if not all) ideological barriers can be traversed or worked around, given the political will, some creative thinking, and enough effort at compromise. Whether or not this is possible in the case of US-Iranian relations is a question about which reasonable people may disagree, but the very existence of those impediments can't be adduced as proof that detente is not possible.
I think that Ahmadinejad's speech might have been written by Bernard Lewis in his description of the rivalry between Islamdom and Christiandom. Lewis, as you knows, saw that as a context to understand the relationship between the Islamic world and the Christian/Western world. Ahmadinejad, in his speech, located the war against Israel in that context but, in fact, his opposition to Israel, as he notes explicitly, is part of a symbolic politics, with the real goal being to reconquer lands lost to the Christians. I added the terminology Reconquista because I think it (a) fits in better with the historical record and (b) fits far more clearly with what Ahmadinejad said, even if it is not something he would actually ever say.
While anything is possible, I don't think that detente with Iran is possible anytime soon. Obama had no formula for it. I doubt that Trump does. Rather, the upshot of Obama's policy has been to extend the reach of Iran, something that made it more, not less, aggressive. And, Trump seems to want something else, assuming he has given the matter any real thought.
I'd like to say, the US should pull out of the region. However, I think that the results would be even worse, with even worse warfare than has already occurred in the last 10 years. A professor/scholar friend of mine who wrote a book about the rise of the Roman Empire as the dominant power of its time noted that it first came to that state of power in the wake of a power vacuum of sorts that occurred as a result of a major "world" war in the general region. Presumably, following my friend's model, if the US pulled back from the Arab Iranian region, chaos would become even worse until some power came to the forefront. It would almost surely lead to a major war, not simply the types of skirmishes that the US has had there. And, the types of casualties that have occurred in Syria would seem like minor losses. That would be unfortunate, to say the least.
Niles,
At this point we will just have to agree to disagree, as we obviously have different perspectives on the question. At one point you talked about the Iranian regime being "anachronistic," as if the Catholic Church had taken over France, and suggested that would be a system that the US would have difficulty dealing with. The Iranian regime may well be "anachronistic" (it is certainly authoritarian and culturally repressive), but one does not have to go into the past or create a synthetic thought experiment- the case of Saudi Arabia sits right next door. The Saudis are an absolute monarchy wedded to a theocratic oligarchy- whatever one says about Iran ("anachronistic," authoritarian, culturally repressive, socially regressive, yada yada yada) is equally true about Saudi Arabia. Yet the US and Saudi Arabia are close allies.
Religion can be a very destructive force (it can be the opposite as well, in the right context), and in Iran the degree to which religious fundamentalists have effected state capture is undoubtedly a problem =though mainly for the people of Iran. But Iran is hardly the only recent country to have a system grounded in a deeply irrational ideology. Nazi Germany. Imperial Japan. Stalinist Russia. Maoist China. All of them were animated by ideological systems as divorced as that of the Iranian regime from rationality and empiricism, yet all of them now enjoy better relations with the US than they once did.
The case of Maoist China is particularly relevant, in that the current regime in Beijing has never completely repudiated the ideology of former times. If you had visited China during the Cultural Revolution, seen the bizarre rituals going on there, and heard the luridly bloodthirsty anti-American propaganda, you might have predicted that the PRC and the USA would NEVER have normal relations, much less come to a day when tens of thousands of American tourists visit China every year, yet here we are. The process by which that detente was achieved involved the same kind of combination of diplomatic engagement and military deterrence that Obama was attempting to establish in Iran.
You overlooked of my main points, which is that the establishment of a theocracy and the key "fracture point" that poisoned Iranian-US relations was induced by the conditions of the Cold War. The mullahs took over not because the Iranian people or Iranian society was uniquely "anachronistic" (far from it), but because that political outcome gave Iran resources that were useful to surviving as an independent continental power trapped between the two great superpowers of the Cold War. That is what made Iran become an enemy of the US, while Saudi Arabia, which shares all of Iran's autocratic and theocratic traits but does not border the Soviet Union, remained within the orbit of US allies.
Now that the Cold War is over, the conditions that induced the split between Iran and America are gone, with the exception of the lingering legacy of the 1979 hostage crisis. It will take a proactive effort on the part of both powers to overcome that obstacle to peace. It is not unreasonable to expect that the nation powerful enough to destroy the other ten times over should be the one to take the first step. Trump can huff and puff all he wants- he is not going to blow Iran's house down. Some kind of shift in the state of US-Iran relations will have to wait for an administrative that is ready to work more creatively and on multiple tracks.
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