The Race for Iran

With the impending publication of our Going to Tehran:  Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran, we have decided to move our blog to a new platform, www.GoingtoTehran.com.  Race for Iran will remain active as a repository for our previous posts and comments, going all the way back to October 2009, but henceforth our new posts will be published on Going to Tehran.  As you will see, it looks and operates very much like Race for Iran, so hopefully the transition will be non-stressful.  We thank all who have read, engaged, and supported us on Race for Iran, and look forward to seeing you and new readers who might join us on Going to Tehran.

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett 

One of the many satisfying aspects of Flynt’s appointment as a professor of international affairs and law at Penn State is his service on the faculty editorial board for the new Penn State Journal of Law and International Affairs, published jointly by Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law (DSL) and School of International Affairs (SIA).  As its name suggests, the Journal focuses on subjects that lie at the intersection of law (international or national) and international relations.  In keeping with the traditional law review model, Flynt’s wonderful colleague, Executive Editor (and assistant dean at DSL and SIA) Amy Gaudion oversees a talented batch of student editors from both schools who produce each issue.

The newest (second) issue of the Journal (vol. 1, no. 2) is out, see here.  It includes our most recent article, “The Balance of Power, Public Goods, and the Lost Art of Grand Strategy:  American Policy Toward the Persian Gulf and Rising Asia in the 21^st Century”; for a pdf version, click here.  It also includes pieces by (among others) Harold James, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Ronald Deibert, and P.J. Crowley.  The issue grew out of a series of presentations that the Journal sponsored over the course of the last academic year around the theme of America’s emerging national security narrative.

Our article seeks to explore the roots of the worsening crisis in American foreign policy, of which America’s dysfunctional policy toward Iran is an especially salient manifestation.  As we write,

“While no single factor explains the relative decline of American standing and influence in world affairs, one of the most important is the failure of American political and policy elites to define clear, reality-based goals and to relate the diplomatic, economic, and military means at Washington’s disposal to realizing them soberly and efficaciously.  Defining such ends and relating the full range of foreign policy tools to their achievement is the essence of what is known among students of international relations and national security practitioners as ‘grand strategy.’  Questions of grand strategy are becoming an increasingly important element in America’s emerging national security narrative—because of accumulating policy failures, relative economic decline, and the rise of new power centers in various regional and international arenas.”

To explore what is wrong with contemporary American grand strategy and what it would take to put that strategy on a sounder course, our article evaluates “Washington’s posture toward two regions where the effectiveness of American policy will largely determine the United States’ standing as a great power in the 21^st century:  the Middle East (with a focus on the Persian Gulf) and rising Asia (with a focus on China).”  As we explain,

“Fundamental flaws in America’s stance vis-à-vis these critical areas have contributed much to the erosion of the United States’ strategic standing.  Over time, deficiencies in policy toward each of them have become synergistic with deficiencies in policy toward the other.  Recovering a capacity for sound grand strategy will require a thoroughgoing recasting of American policy toward both—and a more nuanced appreciation of the interrelationship between these vital parts of the world for U.S. interests.”

We have come more and more to appreciate that recasting American policy in this way must necessarily be preceded by a kind of “cultural revolution” in the United States.  Since the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy has been increasingly driven by a grand strategic model—we call it the “transformation model” in our article—in which “the United States seeks not to manage distributions of power but to transcend them by becoming a hegemon, in key regions of the world and globally.”  Such a commitment to hegemony—an assertion of military, economic, and ideological dominance that aims to micromanage political outcomes in far-flung parts of the world and to remake, or at least to subordinate, vital regions in accordance with American preferences—is deeply problematic, strategically as well as morally.

Strategically, the transformation model rejects a lesson that balance of power theorists, foreign policy realists, and astute students of international history all know:

“While hegemony seems nice in theory, in the real world it is unattainable; not even a state as powerful as the United States coming out of the Cold War can achieve it.  Pursuing hegemony is not just quixotic; it is counter-productive for a great power’s strategic position, dissipating resources…and sparking resistance from others.  Pursuing hegemony ends up making you weaker.  This is the critical factor that has undermined the effectiveness of American foreign policy over the last 20 years or so.”

Notwithstanding such a dismal record, the commitment to hegemony remains deeply rooted in American strategic and political culture.  It is grounded in venerated notions of American exceptionalism and of the United States as “the indispensable nation.”  It is driven by a teleological view of history reflecting a culturally-conditioned belief in “progress”—the inevitable triumph of liberal, secular modernism over other ways of looking at human and social existence—and a conviction that, ultimately, everyone wants to be “just like us.”

Of course, one can argue that there are resources available in American political culture to push back against the embrace of hegemonic foreign policy.  For all that the United States has come, over the course of its history, to embody an ideology of liberal universalism, many of its founders (e.g., James Madison) and early leaders could well be described as hard-core “republican (small ‘r’) realists,” who understood that imperial ambitions are bound to undermine liberty at home and national strength abroad.  But, for a long time, the relative balance of cultural resources has been tilted ever more in favor of liberal hegemony as the reigning paradigm for American foreign policy.

Today, this is most urgently felt with regard to U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Pushing back against that is our primary task for the coming year—first and foremost, through our forthcoming book, Going to Tehran:  Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which will be published just eight days into 2013.

Best wishes to all for a Happy New Year.

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett 

We are just back from another visit to the Islamic Republic and see even more clearly that the real obstacles to successful nuclear diplomacy with Iran lie in Washington, not Tehran.  Prior to our visit, we outlined several of the reasons for this in an extended interview on Ian Masters’ Background Briefing about our forthcoming Going to Tehran; click here to listen.

We open by taking issue with the conventional wisdom that the upcoming talks between the P5+1 and Iran will be the “last chance” to reach a nuclear deal with Tehran before the Islamic Republic gears up for its presidential election next year.  On this point, Flynt notes that the only reason nuclear talks over the next few months would be a “last chance” is

“because of arbitrary deadlines and frameworks that the United States and some of its partners have imposed on these negotiations.  In the end, the Iranian nuclear problem is actually quite simple:  if the United States was prepared to accept Iran’s right to enrich uranium, under safeguards, on its own territory, you could have a deal in fairly short order…You could probably get limits on Iran’s 20-percent enrichment, you could get much more intrusive verification on its nuclear activities.  But you would have to accept the Islamic Republic as kind of a normal state, with legitimate interests and rights.”

The Obama administration, of course, has shown no willingness to approach nuclear talks with Iran on such a basis.  Instead, it has imposed the arbitrary deadlines and frameworks highlighted by Flynt.  The dysfunctionality of this approach is reinforced by deeply flawed—and self-deluding—assessments of Iranian decision-making.  As Hillary explains,

“The anxiety here, or the urgency, is because it’s put out that, if we don’t do something now, if we don’t try to make a deal now, the Iranian elections will come…and that will somehow derail any possibility for talks.  This is something that, time and time again, permeates the American debate—that somehow the problem with negotiating with Iran is in Iran, is in Tehran…It’s either the “mad mullahs” are so crazy, so irrational that we can’t count on them to negotiate like a rational state, or various things are going to come up in their calendar, particularly elections (which in itself should make us question this idea that there are “mad mullahs” there)…

The whole debate here is that something is wrong in Iran, something is wrong in Tehran that is going to derail talks.  There’s never any examination of what drives American politics to demonize countries like the Islamic Republic of Iran…The issue is something here; it’s about domestic politics here.

If President Obama cannot get a negotiation going with the Iranians in the next few months, he has a problem domestically here, because domestic constituencies here—and the Israeli government—will say, ‘Time is up.  You’ve had enough time.  We can’t let the Iranians continue to progress in their nuclear program.  You have to take even more coercive action, either more coercive sanctions or military action.’  It’s a domestic problem here.  It’s not because of something going on in the decision-making or some irrational craziness among Iranian clerics or Iranian lay leaders.”

On Israel’s role—and its motives for constantly pushing an alarmist view of the Islamic Republic, Flynt says,

“The Israelis are perpetually concerned—I think that their concern is exaggerated—but they are perpetually concerned that the Obama administration is going to try, in a serious way, to pursue a deal.  Because the Israelis know that the only kind of deal you could really get out of this process that would have any meaning for both sides would be a deal that actually recognized Iran’s right to enrich—again, under safeguards, not building a nuclear weapon, but they do have a right to enrich…That’s what the Israelis are out to stop.   They do not want the United States, other Western powers, to accept this basic fact of international law and international life—that the Iranians have this right, and they are not going to be bullied into giving it up.

This is something that I think the United States really has to come to terms with.  For its own interests, it needs to get a nuclear deal with Iran; it needs to start realigning its relations with this important country in the Middle East.  And we need to be able to separate Israeli preferences—that have more to do with [Israel’s] own commitment to military dominance in the Middle East—and Israeli security.  Iran enriching uranium under safeguards doesn’t affect Israeli security at all.  But we need to be able to sort out what our real interests are.”

Against the stereotypes of Iranian “irrationality” and internal political divisions that render effective diplomatic engagement with Tehran impossible, Hillary outlines some important realities about the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy and national security strategy:

“There is consensus [among Iranian policymakers] that Iran should and can engage with almost any country in the world, if [engagement] is to protect its own interests.  Where it draws the line is anywhere that Iran would be asked to or expected to cede any of its sovereign rights.  Iran is not going to agree to that kind of negotiation…In terms of what Iran should push for, what kind of deal Iran could make in the end, there is certainly discussion and debate—vociferous debate—in Iran about those kinds of tactics.  But the strategy—that Iran is a strong country, that it can and should negotiate and deal with other countries in its own interests—is something that is really put forward by the Supreme Leader, by Ayatollah Khamenei.  And it’s something, I think, that every senior official follows…

You hear in Washington, especially, periodic discussion…some days it’s Ahmadinejad is the hardliner and he would never be able to deal with the United States.  And then someone points out, ‘Well, he actually wrote a 20-page letter to Bush.  He actually wrote a congratulatory letter to President Obama on his first election.’  Then people say, ‘Well, maybe the issue is really the speaker of the parliament, or maybe it’s this person or that person.’  There’s a constant attempt in the United States, particularly in Washington, to read the tea leaves, as if [the Islamic Republic is] a very opaque system.  These kinds of critics analogize it to the Soviet system.

But it’s not really opaque.  If you listen, read, talk to [Iranian] officials, talk to a range of people in their political class, on their political spectrum, and take what they have to say seriously…you can really understand their strategy.  You can understand where they’re coming from, and their strategic determination to be a very strong, independent country.  The problem, I think, on our side—why we try always to see where there’s some daylight, where this person is competing with that person—is that we’re very reluctant to accept that Iran could be a strong, independent, not secular, not liberal, but still legitimate political entity…

We document rather exhaustively in our book the number of times that the Iranians have engaged with the United States…[In one of these episodes, I] worked personally with them as an official in the State Department and in the White House, with a small team of American officials, to deal with Afghanistan and the problem we were facing there after 9/11 with Al-Qa’ida…[The Iranians] were not paralyzed by internal conflict.  The internal conflict was here.  It’s the opposition that I had when I was in the White House, from my superiors or people who worked for Vice President Cheney, trying to undermine what Ryan Crocker and I were trying to do with the Iranians.”

Looking ahead, Flynt underscores that, notwithstanding recurrent debate among American political and policy elites over Tehran’s willingness to talk directly, on a bilateral basis, with Washington, “the Iranian position on dealing with the United States has been pretty clear and consistent for a long time, for years.  They are open to improved relations, they are open to dialogue and diplomacy to facilitate serious improvement in relations.  But they want to know, upfront at this point, that the United States is really prepared to accept the Islamic Republic as a legitimate political order representing legitimate national interests.  And they want to know upfront that the United States is really serious about realigning relations with them.

They are not interested in having negotiations just for the sake of having negotiations.  They are not interested in having negotiations if they think that the United States is just going to keep piling sanctions on them.  They want to know upfront that the United States is serious.

So they will go the P-5+1 talks; they certainly are not refusing to participate in the P-5+1 process.  And if, as part of that, the United States makes it clear that it really is interested in a different sort of relationship—that it really does accept the Islamic Republic and wants to come to terms with it as an important player in the Middle East—at that point the Iranians would be very open, very receptive to bilateral dialogue.”

In the interview, we also discuss the 2003 non-paper sent to Washington by Iran via Swiss intermediaries and why incremental, step-by-step cooperation between the United States and the Islamic Republic doesn’t work to improve the overall relationship (mainly because Washington won’t allow it to do so).

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Speaking with Antiwar Radio’s Scott Horton earlier this week (listen to podcast here) about our forthcoming book, see here, Flynt took on widespread stereotypes in American discourse about Shi’a Islam as a martyrdom-obsessed, death-seeking, and “irrational” culture that makes the Islamic Republic of Iran a threatening and dangerous actor on par with Hitler’s Reich.  He confessed that “I’m reaching a stage where I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when [I hear that sort of thing from] people who I don’t think know very much about Shi’a Islam, don’t know very much about Iran, haven’t spent a lot of time, I would suspect, talking about Shi’a Islam with people who believe it, live it, think about it.”  But, evoking a major theme in Going to Tehran:  Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran, he rejoins,

“Just look at the historical record.  The Islamic Republic has never used weapons of mass destruction.  In its war with Iraq—when the United States, among others, was supporting Saddam Husayn in an eight-year war of aggression against the new Islamic Republic—Ayatollah Khomeini’s own military leaders came to him and said, ‘We inherited the ability to produce chemical weapons agent from the Shah.  We need to do that and weaponize it so that we can respond in kind.  We have tens of thousands of our people, soldiers and civilians, who are being killed in Iraqi chemical weapons attacks.  We need to be able to respond in kind.”  And Imam Khomeini said, ‘No, because this would violate Islamic morality, because it is haram—it is forbidden by God—to do this, and the Islamic Republic of Iran will not do this.’  Imam Khomeini and his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, have said repeatedly, over years, that the acquisition or use of nuclear weapons would also violate God’s law; Khamenei has said that to do it would be a ‘big sin.’  This is not the rhetoric of people who are out to bring the apocalypse down upon everyone else and themselves…

The most detailed, data-rich extensive study of suicide terrorism, done by scholars at the University of Chicago and the U.S. Air War College, concluded that there has literally never been an Iranian suicide bomber…And so people like to talk about the Islamic Republic as run by these ‘mad mullahs,’ or even if the president is a layman, it’s this ‘crazy,’ ‘millenarian’ Ahmadinejad who just is waiting to get his hands on a nuke so he can turn the whole 70-plus million people in Iran into history’s first ‘suicide nation.’  And there is just absolutely no historical or even rhetorical support for that line of argument.  This is a country that, since its revolution, has basically been much, much more concerned about defending itself, defending the Iranian people, consolidating and maintaining its own independence in the face of hostile regional powers and hostile outside powers including, most notably, the United States.

Spurred by a reference to Hannah Arendt’s observation that “the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution,” Flynt notes,

“The first task of a revolutionary, once he or she has overthrown the incumbent regime that he’s opposing, the first task is to consolidate power.  And that was certainly the case for the Islamic Republic—and the Islamic Republic had to do this when, in fairly short order as I said, Saddam Husayn launches this eight-year-long war against it, supported by most of his regional neighbors and supported by the United States.  So they were having to consolidate power while they were also having to defend the Iranian people against this onslaught.

And then if you look at what they did, after they came out of this war in in 1988—after it’s over and their military has been very, very badly decimated in this war, as has their economy as a whole—they actually diverted significant resources away from military spending, so that they can focus on postwar reconstruction, on building up a health care system, on building up an education system for their people.  And if you look at the outcomes they have produced for Iranians in those areas, considering the baseline they started from, it’s really impressive what they have accomplished.

Today, the United State spends 70 times more on defense than Iran.  Saudi Arabia spends more than four times what Iran spends on defense.  Israel spends twice as much on its military as Iran does.  Iran today has basically no capability to project large amounts of conventional military force beyond its borders.  The idea that Iran is going to come across its borders and, to borrow a phrase from the U.S. Army, park it’s tanks in somebody else’s front yard, is just fantasyland…

So they are no conventional military threat to their neighbors.  They do have a lot of ballistic missiles—conventionally-armed ballistic missiles—which they have said they would use in response to attacks on them.  But they are certainly not the only country in the world that makes that sort of deterrent, retaliatory threat as part of its defense posture.  And if you are concerned about those missiles not flying anywhere, I would suggest you don’t attack Iran, and those missiles aren’t going to go anywhere.”

Scott Horton raises the discomfiting prospect that facts don’t really matter where Iran is concerned—that, regardless of the facts, “there is this endless drumbeat of bad things that Iran did, and it doesn’t matter that none of them are true…In the popular narrative, Iran is a terrible danger that must at some point be dealt with; I think the war party has won on that and that means it’s just a matter of time.”  Flynt responds,

“You may be correct; I hope you’re not.  Hillary and I have written the book that Harper’s was good enough to print an excerpt from in no small part because we want to do everything we can, at least, to make sure that the war party doesn’t win.

Now, it’s a very tall order.  The war party, as you describe them—we saw what they are capable of doing, in terms of getting us to invade Iraq.  They can manufacture intelligence, they can create threats that aren’t there, they can link a country that they don’t like to other threats that Americans are afraid of, like Al-Qa’ida—even though there is no link between that country they don’t like and Al-Qa’ida.  They can manage to pull that off.  They can tie into very powerful domestic constituencies who can put lots of pressure on Congress, lots of pressure on the mainstream media, and so on.  We saw with Iraq what they are capable of doing, and you’re right—they are certainly trying to do it with Iran now.

Hillary and I saw that inside government during the run-up to the Iraq War.  Basically, all of the institutions Americans count on to provide a check on that sort of thing—the Congress, the media, think tanks, public intellectuals—with some few and extremely honorable and courageous exceptions, for the most part those institutions tanked.  They provided no independent check on the war party.  And Hillary and I have written this book, Going to Tehran, as I said, in no small part because, at least this time around, we want someone to be asking the hard questions and making the kinds of countervailing arguments that should have been asked, should have been made before we invaded Iraq but, to a large extent, really weren’t put forward.”

Scott and Flynt also discuss the possibilities for U.S.-Iranian rapprochement.  After reviewing the 2003 Iranian non-paper passed to the United States via Swiss intermediaries, Flynt makes a broader point:

“This is also part of the ‘mad mullah’ myth—that this is a regime, a government, that is either too ideologically committed to anti-Americanism or too dependent on it for its own domestic legitimacy ever to contemplate improved relations with the United States.  But, again, just look at the historical record.

The historical record is that whenever the United States has reached out to Iran and said, ‘We need your help with some problem—whether it’s American hostages in Lebanon, whether it’s getting weapons to Bosnian Muslims when U.S. law prohibited the United States from doing that, whether it’s help against Al-Qa’ida and in Afghanistan after 9/11—whenever we have reached out like that to Iran, they have tried to respond positively.  They have done much—not everything, but much—of what we’ve asked of them in those circumstances, in the hope that this would lead to an improvement in relations.  It’s never worked out, but not because the Iranians didn’t respond.  It didn’t work out because we decided to pocket their cooperation, and then cut it off.  They’ve advanced any number of proposals over the years for a more comprehensive improvement in relations, which we have pretty consistently rebuffed.

Their stated position, from Ayatollah Khamenei himself—and it’s been echoed by presidents, by foreign ministers, and by other senior officials—is if the United States is willing to accept the Iranian Revolution, to accept the Islamic Republic (the product of that revolution) as a legitimate political entity representing legitimate national interests and to deal with it on that basis, there is no barrier to improved relations between Iran and the United States—and in fact Iran would welcome improved relations on that basis.  From the Iranian perspective, it’s the United States that’s never shown itself seriously willing to proceed on that basis.  We think relations can only improve only after Iran has surrendered to every one of our demands, and then we’ll see if it’s possible, we’ll think about it then…

That’s never going to work with this political order…We tried that for twenty years after the Chinese Revolution with the People’s Republic of China, and it was an utterly stupid and counterproductive policy that, among other things, got us bogged down in Vietnam.  Fortunately, Richard Nixon [realized] that this is stupid, it’s hurting the United States; the United States needs to be able to deal with this large and important country in Asia.  I am going to accept the People’s Republic as a legitimate entity that has national interests just like we do, and we are going to see if we can’t align enough of those interests to make it possible these two countries that have been estranged from one another since the Chinese Revolution actually to have a productive relationship.  And it worked; it worked brilliantly.

That’s the kind of approach we need to take toward Iran today, toward the Islamic Republic.  It’s just like China—for twenty years, Mao and Zhou Enlai had said, ‘We’re not unremittingly and unreasonably hostile toward the United States.  If the United States is prepared to accept us, accept the revolution that we came from, accept us and deal with us as a legitimate entity representing legitimate national interests, there is no barrier to good relations between the United States and China.  We would welcome that.  But you’re not going to be able to bully us around, you’re not going to be able just to make demands of us, and you’re not going to be able to get us to compromise our sovereignty to accommodate your preferences.’  It took us twenty years, but we figured out how to do that” where Ch