The Economist: Far from “appeasing” Iran, did Barack Obama give up on diplomacy too soon?
Jan 14th 2012 | from the print edition
WITH the glaring exception of Ron Paul, most of the Republicans who want to be president agree on one thing. Barack Obama has been soft on Iran. Mitt Romney calls Iran “the greatest threat we face” and accuses Mr Obama of a woeful failure to understand the danger. Newt Gingrich, who spends a lot of time reminding voters of his hitherto overlooked role (along with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II) in the downfall of the Soviet empire, says that as president he would put together a similar plan to topple the regime in Tehran. Rick Santorum, on the stump in the old mill towns of New Hampshire, takes time out from the economy to alert voters to the perils of Shia theology. He and Mr Gingrich agree with Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, that under its present leadership Iran is to be understood not as a rational actor but as an apocalyptic suicide cult which, if it built a nuclear bomb, would not be constrained by the usual logic of deterrence. Mr Santorum promises that if he were president and Iran did not submit, he would send in the bombers.
The Republican focus on Iran makes sense on two levels. First, Iran is unarguably dangerous. It is uttering threats against American warships in the Strait of Hormuz. It is developing the wherewithal to make a nuclear bomb. It has spent years ignoring United Nations instructions to stop enriching uranium. It says it wants Israel to disappear. Second, Iran is a national-security problem that Mr Obama has so far failed to solve. He may have killed Osama bin Laden, decimated al-Qaeda and helped to rid the world of Libya’s grotesque Muammar Qaddafi, but the hand he stretched out to Iran three years ago was in the end met with a clenched fist. Here at least, foes at home have concluded, is one area in which he can be safely accused of “appeasement”.
And yet that is a strange choice of word—unless you believe that the very act of talking to an enemy is tantamount to appeasement, a view that would have astonished the sainted Reagan during his long chats with Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. It is an especially strange word given the unprecedented pressure Mr Obama has methodically persuaded the world to apply to Iran. That pressure, it is true, has not yet achieved its aim: Iran continues equally methodically to enrich uranium. But Mr Obama, who insists that he will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, appears to be trying every means short of war (including, some say, sabotage, cyberwar and the assassination of scientists) to stop it. And if all else fails, war could follow. He has made a point of saying that “all options” remain on the table.
Sure, Mr Obama has made mistakes. While promising that all options are on the table, he has let successive defence secretaries say that bombing Iran would be futile and dangerous, which may be true but blurs the message. He also fumbled his response to the popular demonstrations that followed Iran’s fraudulent presidential election of June 2009. Having worked hard to start a dialogue with the Iranian leadership, and calculating that the Green movement would not be able to topple the government, he was slow to denounce the crushing of the protests. That looked weak. But the Republican claim that this squandered an opportunity to fell the regime is questionable. In contrast to Egypt, where America had influence on both Hosni Mubarak and the army it had helped to equip, it had no serious leverage on the ground in Iran, and its verbal support might have damaged the credibility of the very people it was trying to help.
Iran’s internal crisis also paralysed decision-making in Tehran and so killed a confidence-building deal that might have created more time for nuclear diplomacy. The idea was for Iran to ship 1,200kg of its low-enriched uranium overseas to produce fuel for a research reactor, thus leaving the country for a while with too small a stockpile with which to make a bomb. After the election this idea became too hot for the regime to handle, especially after one of the reformists’ leaders, Mir Hossein Mousavi, denounced it as a “surrender” to foreigners. Turkey and Brazil resuscitated the deal in the spring of 2010, but by then Iran’s stockpile had grown and Mr Obama was on the point of guiding a new, hard-won sanctions resolution through the Security Council. After the work he had invested in bringing Russia and China on board for the new resolution, the president seems to have decided that he could not risk letting the sanctions unravel.
Why not try again?
While Republicans accuse him of appeasing Iran, Mr Obama faces critics from the opposite direction who say his biggest mistake was to withdraw his outstretched hand too soon. In a thorough new history of the president’s engagement with Iran (“A Single Roll of the Dice”), Trita Parsi, the founder of the National Iranian American Council in Washington, DC, regrets Mr Obama’s failure to accept the proposal from Brazil and Turkey. Having chosen to pursue diplomacy and pressure simultaneously, he bet all the diplomacy on a single roll of the dice, and when that got nowhere was left only with the pressure—which may in time also fail. If diplomacy is ever to succeed, Mr Parsi says, America must not retreat at the first sign of Iranian intransigence or congressional opposition, both of which are inevitable. The trouble, he concludes, is that the 30-year enmity between Iran and America is no longer a phenomenon, “it is an institution”.
Inside both countries, accusations of appeasement have become part of the institution. Mr Obama has not yet “failed” on Iran: Iran grew stronger on George Bush’s watch and has grown more isolated on his. Among all the options supposedly still on the table might be another go at diplomacy. But time is short, and this week’s Republican ruckus from New Hampshire will make it hard to try again until America’s election season is over.
WITH the glaring exception of Ron Paul, most of the Republicans who want to be president agree on one thing. Barack Obama has been soft on Iran. Mitt Romney calls Iran “the greatest threat we face” and accuses Mr Obama of a woeful failure to understand the danger. Newt Gingrich, who spends a lot of time reminding voters of his hitherto overlooked role (along with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II) in the downfall of the Soviet empire, says that as president he would put together a similar plan to topple the regime in Tehran. Rick Santorum, on the stump in the old mill towns of New Hampshire, takes time out from the economy to alert voters to the perils of Shia theology. He and Mr Gingrich agree with Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, that under its present leadership Iran is to be understood not as a rational actor but as an apocalyptic suicide cult which, if it built a nuclear bomb, would not be constrained by the usual logic of deterrence. Mr Santorum promises that if he were president and Iran did not submit, he would send in the bombers.
The Republican focus on Iran makes sense on two levels. First, Iran is unarguably dangerous. It is uttering threats against American warships in the Strait of Hormuz. It is developing the wherewithal to make a nuclear bomb. It has spent years ignoring United Nations instructions to stop enriching uranium. It says it wants Israel to disappear. Second, Iran is a national-security problem that Mr Obama has so far failed to solve. He may have killed Osama bin Laden, decimated al-Qaeda and helped to rid the world of Libya’s grotesque Muammar Qaddafi, but the hand he stretched out to Iran three years ago was in the end met with a clenched fist. Here at least, foes at home have concluded, is one area in which he can be safely accused of “appeasement”.
And yet that is a strange choice of word—unless you believe that the very act of talking to an enemy is tantamount to appeasement, a view that would have astonished the sainted Reagan during his long chats with Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. It is an especially strange word given the unprecedented pressure Mr Obama has methodically persuaded the world to apply to Iran. That pressure, it is true, has not yet achieved its aim: Iran continues equally methodically to enrich uranium. But Mr Obama, who insists that he will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, appears to be trying every means short of war (including, some say, sabotage, cyberwar and the assassination of scientists) to stop it. And if all else fails, war could follow. He has made a point of saying that “all options” remain on the table.
Sure, Mr Obama has made mistakes. While promising that all options are on the table, he has let successive defence secretaries say that bombing Iran would be futile and dangerous, which may be true but blurs the message. He also fumbled his response to the popular demonstrations that followed Iran’s fraudulent presidential election of June 2009. Having worked hard to start a dialogue with the Iranian leadership, and calculating that the Green movement would not be able to topple the government, he was slow to denounce the crushing of the protests. That looked weak. But the Republican claim that this squandered an opportunity to fell the regime is questionable. In contrast to Egypt, where America had influence on both Hosni Mubarak and the army it had helped to equip, it had no serious leverage on the ground in Iran, and its verbal support might have damaged the credibility of the very people it was trying to help.
Iran’s internal crisis also paralysed decision-making in Tehran and so killed a confidence-building deal that might have created more time for nuclear diplomacy. The idea was for Iran to ship 1,200kg of its low-enriched uranium overseas to produce fuel for a research reactor, thus leaving the country for a while with too small a stockpile with which to make a bomb. After the election this idea became too hot for the regime to handle, especially after one of the reformists’ leaders, Mir Hossein Mousavi, denounced it as a “surrender” to foreigners. Turkey and Brazil resuscitated the deal in the spring of 2010, but by then Iran’s stockpile had grown and Mr Obama was on the point of guiding a new, hard-won sanctions resolution through the Security Council. After the work he had invested in bringing Russia and China on board for the new resolution, the president seems to have decided that he could not risk letting the sanctions unravel.
Why not try again?
While Republicans accuse him of appeasing Iran, Mr Obama faces critics from the opposite direction who say his biggest mistake was to withdraw his outstretched hand too soon. In a thorough new history of the president’s engagement with Iran (“A Single Roll of the Dice”), Trita Parsi, the founder of the National Iranian American Council in Washington, DC, regrets Mr Obama’s failure to accept the proposal from Brazil and Turkey. Having chosen to pursue diplomacy and pressure simultaneously, he bet all the diplomacy on a single roll of the dice, and when that got nowhere was left only with the pressure—which may in time also fail. If diplomacy is ever to succeed, Mr Parsi says, America must not retreat at the first sign of Iranian intransigence or congressional opposition, both of which are inevitable. The trouble, he concludes, is that the 30-year enmity between Iran and America is no longer a phenomenon, “it is an institution”.
Inside both countries, accusations of appeasement have become part of the institution. Mr Obama has not yet “failed” on Iran: Iran grew stronger on George Bush’s watch and has grown more isolated on his. Among all the options supposedly still on the table might be another go at diplomacy. But time is short, and this week’s Republican ruckus from New Hampshire will make it hard to try again until America’s election season is over.
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