Greetings Arms Control Wonk readers. I am yet another pasty, dark-haired contributor. I normally wear glasses too, but Jeffrey asked for a picture sans spectacles so that you could better tell us apart. I said, “Dude, your readers can look at satellite photos and tell the difference between a DF-5 and a DF-5A. Shouldn’t they be able to tell us three apart?” But Jeffrey insisted.
Anyway, check out the Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett op-ed in today’s NY Times. I whole-heartedly agree with their assessment that the United States must be willing to address Iran’s security concerns if we are to expect Iran to address ours.
But I worry that the sort of Grand Bargain that Flynt and Hillary advocate simply asks too much of both Washington and Tehran. They are right that “[t]he idea of “engaging” Iran diplomatically is becoming less politically radioactive than it was early in the Bush years,” but the chances of the lame duck Bush administration cutting a comprehensive deal with Iran in the next 12 months are awfully slim.
And the Democrats? Flynt and Hillary say that:
Even Democrats who have talked about “engagement” have yet to spell out what it would take to engage Iran successfully. Most hide behind a vague incrementalism, epitomized in a recent statement by Hillary Clinton’s top national security adviser extolling the candidate’s willingness to consider “carefully calibrated incentives if Iran addresses our concerns.”
I share Flynt and Hillary’s frustration with the Democrats’ general lack of clarity on Iran policy (particularly in the sanctions realm, where Congress has run amok with the Iran Counter-Proliferation Act). But I think what Lee Feinstein (author of the above quote) said here is quite appropriate, and ahem, carefully calibrated. What more could he say without committing political suicide?
Indeed, I fear that the Democrats may be in an even worse position than the Bush administration when it comes to cutting a serious deal with Iran. My sense is that the party’s policy elders firmly believe that the United States must contain and engage Iran. But frankly, I can’t imagine a Democratic president cutting a comprehensive deal with Iran so long as Ahmadinejad is president. The U.S. domestic politics are simply too messy. I wish I could say it wasn’t so, but there you have it.
At any rate, what worries me most about the “Grand Bargain” strategy is that it would transform a dynamic in which Iran is pitted against the UN Security Council and its Arab neighbors to one where it is Iran versus the United States. That would be a diplomatic battle fought on Iran’s terms, not ours.
My view is that we ought to negotiate with the Iranians on discrete issues such as the fuel cycle program, and then see where the individual negotiations take us. (Joe Cirincione and I argued this in our February 2007 report “Contain and Engage: A New Strategy for Resolving the Nuclear Crisis with Iran.”)
The problem with the piecemeal approach is that it asks Iran to give up its strongest card – its advancing uranium enrichment capability – while giving nothing in return. I don’t think anything short of a grand bargain, which should be negotiated privately as a package even if it is announced publicly in steps, will offer Iran what it needs to get in exchange for another major course correction.
I think, also, that you are pandering too much to Washington hubris by agreeing that we need to “contain” as well as “engage” Iran. Rather, it seems to me that it is still the Bush gang that needs to be contained.
Great OpEd.
Can’t wait for the knee-jerk pro-Israel-lobby letters-to-the-editor advocating scuttling any such possibilities.
The OpEd sez: “But neither Republicans nor Democrats have been willing to consider such an approach, because of the pursuit of a nuclear weapons option and support for terrorist organizations that Iran employs to defend what it sees as its fundamental security interests”
Most likely, neither the majority of Democrats nor Republicans politicians really deeply give a crap about any of that. What they are interested in is getting re-elected and any bargain with Iran is a knee-jerk no-no for the Israel lobby.
Wonk-infused readers don’t need me to point this out, but the London Review of Books article on the Israel Lobby’s deleterious influence on US and Israeli foreign policy by Harvard and UChicago Professors Walt and Mearsheimer has been turned into an excellent book.
A must-read to discover why it is, unfortunately, most likely that no reasonable solution to the “Iran problem” will be possible due to AIPAC and others torpedoing any such efforts.
PS: for the record, I can tell apart the two pasty dark-haired blog authors, glasses or otherwise!
The whole point of talks is not to pit someone against something – its to reach mutually beneficial compromises.
I don’t understand why the US will not sit down and talk to Iran about their differences. We talked with the Soviet Union throughout the cold war era, and may have prevented WW III by doing so. I hope and pray that the idiot in the white house does not start another war before he gets out of office.
Andy,
Congrats on the guest blog. And I agree with your conclusions generally. Negotiations on a grand bargain would be so complicated and intractable that it would simply Iran to stall while it moves forward with relations with Russia, China, the Eu, and the Arabs and isolates the US. If there is to be any progress in that manner I think you would need multilateral talks a la the 6 party talks so it’s clear that it’s Iran vs. everyone else, not just the US (this was the point of the 5+1 offer actually) What we need to do is find a way to strengthen the incentives on the one hand and the penalties on the other instead of simply throwing in the towel on the current strategy which actually seems to be paying some dividends in Iran’s domestic debate—see recent comments from Khatami and Rowhani. I think Andy and Joe had one good idea on incentives in terms of gasoline refining. But let’s think bigger— Iran has the world’s second biggest reserves of natural gas but has no foreign pipelines or significant LNG capacity. How about, for example, making a public offer to the Iranian people that we will provide export credits to help Iran build a pipeline to Pakistan and India (as it wants to do) if it will suspend its program for three months to get negotiations started and while we suspend UN sanctions.
The problem with this approach is that it’s relying on a paradigm that has already ran its course.
Since the begining of the 70, the US strategy has consisted of replacing the waning Britsh military presence in the Persian Gulf and preserving the long-term containement policy of the trading maritime powers toward USSR/Russia. This strategy was consistently applied during both Republican and Democratic administrations although whith different degree of political posturing – offense/defense. The Iranian Revolution, the end of the communist rule in Russia and 911, among other major political events of the last 30 or so years, had profound effect on the tactics used by American administrations, but never altered this strategy.
The much sooner than anticipated return of the Russia to the world scene, and the emergence of Iran as a key player in the region – not less for the helping hand of the Bush offense tactics in the last 6 years – has completely changed this paradigm. Now, what US is facing is not a weakened Russian state trying to protect itself by giving up its southern flanks and not a sluggish Iranian State coming along sheepishly; Russia sees itself as the other half of the European body – maybe eventually the whole head – and for that, it claims all its due: eastern European leadership position in a politically strong and independant Europe and a rampart against the East and South. Iran, sitting on top of a plateau – and lots of energy resources, see itself as the necessary cornerstone for all the wheeling and dealing in the region and major center of future economic development.
In this context, US needs urgently a new political posture reflecting the change in the balance of power in the region, In particular regarding Iran. Some important strategic shift seems to have taken place behind the scene – and the new NIE is a solid proof of that. But US is still some distance away from projecting a strenghtened and independant Iranian State as the least harmfull alternative among the one present.
The diplomatic approach you are proposing here, i.e. not accepting a “grand bargain”, slicing the whole issue list and going slice by slice – probably to tire them and make them succomb at the end, fit completely with the “old vision” of the region: using the Iranian state as a tool to accomplish other goals beyond the mere aspirations of Iran. This approach won’t work, since the reality on the ground has changed and Iran sees itself as one of the major players in the region. It won’t work because it is not anymore in the US interests to weaken the state sitting on top of the Iranian plateau against a re-awakened Russia. It won’t work because US can not protect anymore its energy resource routes in the Persian gulf alone.
Ataune
Dude, this photo looks nothing like you!