Opinions

Barack Obama's first move: negotiating with Iran

In print | January 29, 2009

The saying goes that the United States has always elected great presidents in times of great adversity. I believe that Barack Obama will be a great president, and one who has already proven himself to be a masterful organizer and galvanizer of the American people. But a week after his historic inauguration, we should realize that the second part of the saying also holds true: this is indeed a time of great adversity, and if political pundits of disparate ideologies can agree on one thing, it’s that Obama has one hell of a task before him.

The president and his team have signaled that they plan to take care of domestic issues first, stitching up the wounds in the economy before turning their gaze to interests abroad. While a relatively introverted focus would be nice (God knows the economy needs it) there are at least a few key foreign issues where external pressures will force the Obama administration to take action. Chief among these is the issue of Iran, which has doubtless already spurred debates in the Oval Office. In dealing with Iran, time is particularly of the essence; within the year it could be recognized as a legitimate (i.e. “not just bluffing”) nuclear state.

In his recently released book, “The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power,” the Chief Washington Correspondent for The New York Times, David Sanger, makes the case that Iran will pose Obama’s most immediate and complex foreign policy challenge. This is not merely because of Iran’s nuclear recalcitrance, but also due to a history of American petulance regarding diplomatic relations with the prevailing Iranian leadership. All of this is said without even mentioning the threat of a tightening Israeli trigger finger, which is itching to pre-empt the emergence of a nuclear enemy.

Since the 1979 Iranian revolution and hostage crisis, the United States has had zero official diplomatic contact with Iran, preferring instead lofty rhetorical threats (by labeling them part of the “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea), or secretive negotiations conducted via European proxies. Sanger’s book is in some ways a response to this strikingly sophomoric policy. Specifically, it details what programs the American intelligence community has resorted to for curtailing Iranian nuclear capacity since open, equanimous options have been taken off the table. These include the usual list of spy tricks: “turning” foreign engineers to act as informers; sabotaging centrifuges so that they blow up and frustrate the process of Uranium refinement; as well as shadier, more speculative enterprises. Sanger notes that the top-secret classifications of these methods veil them in mystery, writing that he himself has withheld information for the sake of prudence.

But it is clear that neither Sanger nor many of the officials interviewed in his book place much faith in these programs as a realistic solution to Iranian nuclear progress. “‘I hope,’” one official told Sanger, “‘someone’s ready to tell the next president there’s not much chance any of this crap is going to work.’”

If it doesn’t, the Obama administration will have to find something that does, and quickly. In 2008, Sanger recounts, an Israeli delegation approached the White House, asking for equipment and permission for an aerial assault on the major Iranian enrichment facility at Natanz. The White House balked; sanctioning the attack could have placed our Iraqi forces in the crossfire of a regional war. (Unofficial Iranian support for insurgents in Iraq has proven damaging enough, and shows how much influence Tehran has over the relative safety of our occupying soldiers.) Still, the message was clear: Israel wants a functioning American policy that entails shutting down Iranian nuclear facilities, and if this doesn’t happen, they are prepared to implement their own policy. We know from the recent war in Gaza that they aren’t kidding around. So this is the impossibly thin line Obama has to walk—coaxing compromises out of the uncompromising Iranians, while convincing Israel that we are gaining enough ground to make the military option unnecessary. How in the world do we go about achieving this?

The answer, which has been endorsed by many of our top foreign-policy theorists, is beautifully simple: we talk to them. Communication is the foundation for successful diplomacy. For years, the United States has consistently flinched from this practice, somehow terrified that the symbolic consequences of meeting with an ostensibly “evil” country will tarnish our claims to moral superiority. To me, the election of Barack Obama—who promises he will open talks with Tehran—signifies a victory over this cult of arrogance.

In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Martin Indyk, former Ambassador to Israel, and Richard M. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (whose organization hosted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for an evening during his infamous visit to New York City), argue eloquently in favor of this diplomatic approach:

“To alter Iran’s behavior, particularly on the nuclear issue, the Obama administration should engage the Iranian government directly. Why? Because the alternatives are even less promising. Containment and sanctions have failed to change Iran’s course. A preventive military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would at best delay its nuclear program for a few years while exposing Israel and U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq to retaliation. And there is no realistic prospect of toppling the Iranian regime, either through military action or through support of an internal uprising. There are no guarantees that trying to engage the Iranian government more constructively would yield better results than current policy has. But a sincere attempt that failed would at least reinforce the case for then resorting to more hard-line options, in the eyes of both the American public and the international community.”

Pragmatism, not idealism, should dictate United States foreign policy throughout the Obama years, and that means open, direct, meaningful talks with Iran. It also means an end to systematic political arrogance, and the realization that we still hold considerable power in most of the world. If only we can be less clumsy in wielding it.

David Sterngold is a first-year. He can be reached at dstern1@swarthmore.edu