Carrots and Sticks

Obama is right on Iran

By Dhruv K. Singhal

It would seem obvious that, if you are unpopular, endorsing a cause or person you support would be counterproductive. Unfortunately, many Republicans forgot this in the wake of the massive protests that whelmed Iran in response to the execrable President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s alleged landslide “victory” over reformist former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Selectively amnesiac to America’s deep disrepute in Iran, a wide array of GOP leaders boisterously clamored for a more vocal expression of solidarity by President Barack Obama with Mousavi and his shamrock-green-wielding revolutionaries.

Some went as far as to question the President’s motives. Commentators like John Podhoretz lobbed the preposterous accusation that Obama desired an Ahmadinejad victory, performing astounding mental gymnastics to argue that the Islamist hardliner would be more conducive to the President’s agenda of diplomatic engagement. William Kristol and Stephen F. Hayes of the Weekly Standard, likewise, declared Obama the “de facto ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.”

Among the more mainstream of President Obama’s critics was Arizona Senator John McCain, who declared that he did not “see it as meddling when you stand on the side of the principles that made us the greatest nation in history.”

McCain’s vision of an American foreign policy in which the United States gallantly gallivants about the globe to champion its principles without any regard for the consequences of its actions might be romantic and heroic, but it is highly irresponsible. It embodies the unnerving trend among elements of the neoconservative movement toward advocating idealist foreign policies founded on the assertion of power rather than patience and prudence.

Republicans have long been right to criticize the liberal affinity for diplomacy for diplomacy’s sake as practiced by Presidents Wilson and Carter, manifested in the former’s League of Nations and the latter’s appeasement of the Soviets with his decrial of Americans’ “inordinate fear of communism.” Under Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and H. W. Bush, Republican administrations practiced a foreign policy in which strategic thought and appropriate use of military assertion and diplomacy were orthodox. Nixon did not rattle sabers with Communist China; he engaged them as part of a broader strategy of triangulation to isolate Russia. Reagan gradually ceased his vilification of the U.S.S.R. when Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in order to court him and the Russian public; he even retracted his characterization of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” when he visited Moscow in 1988, saying he had been “talking about another time, another era.”

However, more and more we are seeing this doctrine of realism being cast aside by the right in favor of the dangerous ideology of the late Irving Kristol that calls for assertion for assertion’s sake, the equally reckless inverse of the foreign policy of Wilson and Carter.

Granted, Ahmadinejad is no Gorbachev, but that is beside the point. President Obama’s goal, one must presume, is to curry favor with the Iranian people, not the Iranian President and his clerical puppeteers. That is why he was correct to caution that “It’s not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling, the U.S. president meddling in Iranian elections. The last thing I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States. We shouldn’t be playing into that.”

Two of the most emblematic practitioners of the realist school of foreign policy, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, endorsed Obama’s approach. Kissinger believes the President “has handled this well…. Anything that the United States says that puts us totally behind one of the contenders, behind Mousavi, would be a handicap for that person.” Scowcroft, likewise, explained that “the administration is about right in their reaction. We have to keep our eye on the ball. While it would be comforting to blast what is happening over there, you have to ask how it would help matters. A more belligerent tone would not be helpful.”

We saw the cleavage between prudence and tub-thumping yet again in the wake of the President’s recent decision to forsake the missile defense shield in Poland as a means of courting Russia. Many conservatives accused Obama of weakness and appeasement reminiscent of Jimmy Carter, and once again they declined to acknowledge that foreign policy requires a delicate dance between assertion and negotiation, carrots and sticks, a dance whose moves are dictated by the imperatives of levelheaded strategy.

President Obama is courting the Russians as a means to the end of securing their cooperation in harsher sanctions against Iran, for without the support of Russia and China, any such measure would be essentially toothless. It is too early to determine whether his efforts will reap the fruits they seek, but already they are yielding progress. In an unprecedented shift, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced at a joint press conference with President Obama “that we believe we need to help Iran to take a right decision…sanctions rarely lead to productive results, but in some cases, sanctions are inevitable.”

It is not only Russia, however, that the President is charming. By creating the impression that the United States is attempting to engage Iran in good faith, any misbehavior by the Islamist regime will be seen by the international community and the people of Iran as impudence on the part of the Iranian government, not the United States. This facilitates the formation of a sturdier multilateral front against Iran, something whose nonexistence with respect to Iraq turned out to have dire consequences. Even the President’s courtship of Iran is beginning to reveal small signs of progress, as evidenced by the latter’s recent concession to allow three quarters of its uranium to be sent to Russia for enrichment, an arrangement that prevents Iran from developing enough of its uranium in such a fashion as to create nuclear weapons.

Granted, there are several details that could render this agreement meaningless, such as a rate of shipping uranium to Russia slow enough as to enable Iran to develop weapons with the uranium waiting to be shipped, or the existence of secret nuclear stockpiles. It is obvious that we cannot trust Ahmadinejad, but were the United States to jettison any attempts to court Russia, China, the international community, and the Iranian people and embrace a policy of pure assertion, war with Iran would become inevitable. The United States can avoid such a conflict if it opts for the slower and more reasoned route of strategic diplomacy.