Dancing with the Devil. Michael Rubin
diplomacy, Barack Obama’s election offered a chance to test their strategy. Before he took office, Obama had become diplomats’ favorite candidate when he promised to meet the leaders of Iran “without preconditions.”205 Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary for policy at the State Department, explained the logic, saying, “An unconditional offer deprives Iran’s leaders of the excuse not to negotiate.”206 For many of Obama’s supporters, the key to success was easy: simply remove any bone of contention from the agenda. Thus Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist, urged Obama not to “obsess” over the nuclear issue.207
Iranian officials recognized that the American press “was in favor of talks . . . without preconditions,”208 and they were willing to encourage the idea. Ahmadinejad sent Obama a congratulatory letter upon his election.209 Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, also welcomed a broad dialogue with Obama.210
Obama was a man of his word regarding outreach to the Islamic Republic, which became his marquee foreign policy issue. The State Department sent a letter to Ahmadinejad to pave the way for face-to-face talks. Then, less than a week after taking office, Obama told Al Arabiya’s satellite network, “If countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.”211
Soon there were signs that Iran’s embrace of dialogue was merely tactical. The speaker of Iran’s parliament, Ali Larijani, rebuffed a request from Howard Berman, a prominent Democrat chairing the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, to meet in Bahrain.212 Then, Khamenei waved off Obama’s outreach as “bogus gestures.”213
Iranian culture is subtle, and its diplomacy is a reflection of its culture. The White House did not pick up on the hints. Instead, Obama called a news conference and again called for face-to-face talks.214 William Perry, a former defense secretary and an influential figure for the Obama White House, met a high-level Iranian delegation led by a senior Ahmadinejad advisor, Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi, to emphasize the point. The Associated Press reported, “Not since before the 1979 Iranian revolution are U.S. officials believed to have conducted wide-ranging direct diplomacy with Iranian officials.” If talking to a brick wall was diplomacy, then the press report was true.
As diplomats cycled through excuses for why diplomacy had yet to work, one theory became prominent: insufficiently respectful language. Just as Madeleine Albright tried to bypass the problem of rogue regimes by renaming them “states of concern,” Obama tried to revamp American rhetoric in order to conjure up diplomacy. To Obama and his aides, Iran’s inclusion in the axis of evil was original sin—never mind that Americans seemed to object to the phrase more than Iranians did.
The vocabulary makeover soon turned from the sublime to the ridiculous. For example, William Luers, Thomas Pickering, and Jim Walsh warned that Iranians “bristle at the use of the phrase ‘carrots and sticks,’” because it depicted them as donkeys and because it implied a threat to beat Iran into submission if they could not be bought.215 That Iranians would raise such manufactured grievances suggests that they saw elder statesmen like Pickering as useful idiots, willing to accept any reason short of Iranian insincerity to explain the failure of U.S.-Iranian engagement. After all, the phrase “carrots and sticks” had long been used in the Iranian press.216
Obama continued his efforts to set a new tone when he offered Iranians the traditional Persian New Year’s greeting on March 20. Whereas Bush had taken care to differentiate between the Iranian people and the regime, Obama broke precedent and paid homage to the Islamic Republic rather than the Iranian nation. His attempt to ingratiate himself with the regime came to naught. Ali Akbar Javanfekr, an aide to Ahmadinejad, responded by calling on the United States to compensate Iran for previous American mistakes. If Americans believed that dialogue would lead to compromise, Iranians saw the process leading to American surrender. The Supreme Leader ridiculed the idea of diplomacy with the United States.217
Meanwhile, the Iranian nuclear program kept moving forward. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that “the Iranians are on a path to building nuclear weapons.”218
To jumpstart diplomacy, Obama offered a unilateral concession: recognizing the Islamic Republic’s right to enrich uranium. With a single statement, he voided three Security Council resolutions forbidding further uranium enrichment by Iran. Rather than enable diplomacy, he poisoned it. Iranian strategists concluded that defiance pays.219 It was around this time that a revolutionary court lodged espionage charges against Roxana Saberi, an Iranian American freelance journalist and former Miss North Dakota.
Persistent American outreach efforts, each coupled with new incentives, also eroded regional allies’ faith in America’s commitment to them. Arab allies worried that Obama might sacrifice their security for the sake of U.S.-Iran rapprochement. Israeli officials worried that the Iranian government aimed only to run out the clock.220 Perhaps this is why Obama signaled that his patience was not infinite. “We do want to make sure that, by the end of this year, we’ve actually seen a serious process move forward,” he declared.221
The American preconditions lifted, Ahmadinejad responded with his own.222 The United States offered concessions to get Iran to the table, but from the Iranian perspective, the dance had long since begun. Iranian negotiating behavior represented a culturally different understanding of diplomacy: everything was about position. Formal dialogue was not the beginning of the process, but its middle. By playing hard to get, Tehran could win objectives even before the horse trading started. By offering concessions without demanding anything in return, Obama played into Iranian hands and encouraged Tehran to shift the goalposts and stake out more extreme positions.
The State Department operated as if it were in a vacuum, pursuing diplomacy with little regard to the Iranian response. Hence, American diplomats would pounce on the feeblest hints that Iran was willing to talk, even as Khamenei vetoed that possibility.223 Embracing hot dog diplomacy, the State Department instructed American embassies to invite their Iranian counterparts to Fourth of July celebrations.224 Reality intruded when Iranians took to the streets in outrage after blatant fraud in the June 2009 presidential elections. With Iranian security forces firing on crowds in the streets, Secretary Hillary Clinton reluctantly rescinded the July 4 invitations. Otherwise, the administration remained largely silent. “We respect Iran’s sovereignty,” Obama explained.225 To speak publicly, the administration feared, would hinder efforts to engage. Shortly before the botched election, Obama had sent a second letter to the Supreme Leader seeking dialogue, but received no reply.226
In 1986, Ronald Reagan stood in solidarity with the people of the Philippines after the dictator Ferdinand Marcos had tried to throw an election. In 2000, Bill Clinton stood with Serbs who were troubled over Slobodan Milosevic. By contrast, George H. W. Bush, in his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech, elevated engagement with the Soviet Union above hastening its collapse. Obama likewise lost perspective, effectively favoring the preservation of the Islamic Republic out of a desire to engage the regime. Protestors’ chants of “Obama, ya una ya ba ma” (Obama, you’re either with us or against us) underscored the point. Silence born from the desire to talk had a cost.
As the protests over the Iranian election were about to enter their fourth week, Obama again proposed talks with the regime. Speaking at the conclusion of the Group of Eight summit in L’Aquila, Italy, he said the world’s main powers would “take further steps” if Tehran failed to make good-faith efforts to resolve concern about its nuclear program by the time of the G20 summit two months later. He refused to elaborate on what steps he had in mind, and instead merely said, “Our planning is how to prevent us from getting too close to that point.”227 If Iran’s leadership believed Obama had any remaining credibility, he soon disabused them of the notion as the deadline passed without immediate consequence.
That the Iranians would test Obama’s ultimatum was a certainty. Iranian diplomats regularly allow deadlines to grow close if not pass before responding, in order to derail the Western response. Only a day before Security Council diplomats were to discuss new sanctions did Iranian officials signal their readiness to engage.228