Dancing with the Devil. Michael Rubin
back and pressure relieved, Ahmadinejad pivoted and again ruled out any Iranian compromise. “Iran’s nuclear issue is over,” he said. “We will never negotiate Iran’s undeniable rights.”229
The State Department did not regard Ahmadinejad’s statement as sufficiently official, since it had not come through proper channels. This complaint was symptomatic of a mindset in which American diplomats judge rogue regimes by norms they do not accept. Accordingly, Secretary Clinton dispatched William Burns, the number-three State Department official, to meet his Iranian counterpart.230
Iranian authorities, meanwhile, quietly informed the IAEA of plans to build twenty nuclear reactors and ten new uranium enrichment plants.231 As Condoleezza Rice had struggled to get the Iranians to the table, they were secretly breaking ground on a new enrichment facility at Fordo, near Qom. As Obama extended his hand, Iranian engineers were finishing their new underground facility. Iranian diplomacy was undertaken in bad faith, meant to buy time.232 Nor was Tehran’s acknowledgment of the Fordo facility made in good faith; it was only to preempt a Western announcement of its discovery.233 Unbelievably, the White House rewarded Iran by allowing its foreign minister to visit Washington for the first time in a decade, a step that Iran remained unwilling to reciprocate.234
After months of angry posturing capped off with test-firing of new missiles, Iranian authorities hinted that they might return to the table only when new sanctions loomed.235 This was completely typical Iranian behavior, yet Western officials breathed sighs of relief. “Iran has told us that it plans to cooperate fully and immediately with the International Atomic Energy Agency on the new enrichment facility near Qom,” said Javier Solana at a press conference. In exchange, the Europeans and Americans “agreed to intensify dialogue.”236 Cheerleaders for Obama’s outreach celebrated. “Barack Obama pwned Bush-Cheney in one day and got more concessions from Iran in 7½ hours than the former administration got in 8 years of saber-rattling,” wrote Juan Cole, a fiercely partisan professor at the University of Michigan.237
Obama himself was more cautious. “We’re not going to talk for the sake of talking,” he said, adding, “we are prepared to move towards increased pressure.” Over the next weeks, he gave his imprimatur to an IAEA proposal that would see Iran ship its enriched nuclear fuel to Russia, which would enrich it further and return it to Iran for use in medical research. An Iranian delegation in Geneva said they would accept the compromise, and Iran’s foreign ministry called the deal “a national success.” All the international community needed was Iran’s formal acceptance. This never came. Rather, the Iranian regime tore up its agreement and demanded the right to enrich all uranium inside Iran. Such a scenario would have replicated the North Korea fiasco: After the Bush administration had acquiesced to Pyongyang’s demands to continue enrichment domestically, Kim Jong Il’s regime expelled inspectors and enriched its uranium to weapons grade.238 Even short of gaining consent to its demand, Tehran had already achieved its goal: derailing sanctions, while spinning its centrifuges without pause.
In the face of Iranian intransigence, Obama once again signaled weakness. He postponed punitive measures to give Iran time to reconsider.239 Then, Clinton appointed John Limbert to be her point man on Iran policy. A former hostage, Limbert worked as an advisor to an anti-sanctions lobby group and was dismissive of concerns about a nuclear Iran.240 The Iranian government had even celebrated his comments in its official press.241 In effect, Limbert counseled surrender.
At a speech commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the U.S. embassy seizure, Khamenei disparaged Obama’s efforts at engagement. “The Iranian nation will not be deceived by the US government’s apparently conciliatory words,” he told university students in Tehran.242 Obama ignored the Supreme Leader’s remarks. To do otherwise would have required him to choose between accepting Iran’s nuclear breakout and implementing a more forceful strategy. Obama’s worldview did not allow him to admit that he had no Iranian partner, so instead he made excuses for the Iranians to explain why diplomacy floundered. “Part of the challenge that we face is that neither North Korea nor Iran seem to be settled enough politically to make quick decisions on these issues,” the president explained.243 This excuse assumed that the Great Leader in Pyongyang and the Supreme Leader in Tehran took public opinion into account when making decisions.
With the White House refusing to observe its own red lines, the head of Iran’s atomic organization, Ali Akbar Salehi, announced plans for five more reactors.244 The following week, the foreign ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, acknowledged that Tehran had never had negotiations with Washington on its agenda.245 The Iranian parliament disclosed a request by Senator John Kerry to visit Tehran, which it refused. Less than a month later, Iran’s military launched a rocket capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
The White House condemned the missile launch as “provocative,”246 but Clinton still backtracked, saying, “We’ve avoided using the term ‘deadline’ ourselves . . . because we want to keep the door to dialogue open.”247 In effect, the Obama administration preferred to change its metrics rather than admit failure. Clinton’s flexibility reinforced Iranian intransigence. “We share the same idea with her,” said Mehmanparast. “Deadlines are meaningless.”248
As the State Department and its European partners began discussing how to augment sanctions, Turkey and Brazil, both nonpermanent members of the UN Security Council, began negotiating their own nuclear deal with Iran. Turkey took the lead, motivated less by a desire to end the standoff—Turkey’s prime minister had endorsed Iran’s nuclear program, after all—than by a desire to raise its own prestige. Iranian officials embraced such efforts, consistent with a long pattern of deferring sanctions while seeking to exploit divisions in the international community. On May 17, the three countries agreed to a deal similar to the one Iran had walked away from the previous year in Geneva. The new agreement did not take account of enrichment done over the previous half year, and so it left Iran with sufficient uranium to build a bomb.249 Nor did it bring Iran into compliance with UN resolutions.
What had begun as a confidence-building measure turned into the opposite. Not only the United States, but also the European Union, Russia, and China dismissed the deal. Turkey’s diplomacy had transformed Iran from a culprit into a victim of supposed U.S. diplomatic persecution.250 For the West and its partners, patience had run out. Almost nine months after the G8 leaders promised to punish Iranian defiance, the United Nations passed sanctions.251 Even then, Iran could count on Russia and China to water down the results. The United States and Europe, along with Japan and Korea, augmented the multilateral sanctions with their own unilateral measures.
The Iranian response was bluster and defiance. “What have they achieved today after passing four resolutions?” Ahmadinejad asked. “They thought if they pass a harsh resolution, they can usurp the rights of the Iranian nation and now they say, ‘We want to negotiate.’” Ahmadinejad made the Iranian position clear: “If you want to negotiate, you should abandon the behavior of those who rebel against God.”252 The Iranian foreign minister publicly rebuffed two attempts by Clinton to greet him at a security conference in Bahrain, and rejected her offer of diplomatic relations the following year.253
While Clinton renewed her outreach attempts, Iranian authorities intensified their crackdown on civil society.254 They understood that they need not fear accountability when Washington wanted them at the table. A round of talks in Geneva in December 2010 went nowhere when Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalali, refused to discuss any agreement that would have Iran forfeit its right to enrich uranium. In response, the West offered Iran more concessions.255 Proponents of engagement worried that Ahmadinejad might fall, and then Washington would have to find a new partner for diplomacy. For all his “messianic fantasies” and Holocaust denial, Ahmadinejad was still the Islamic Republic’s “most ardent advocate of direct nuclear negotiations with Washington,” observed Ray Takeyh, a former advisor in Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and his wife, Suzanne Maloney, a former Bush administration official.256 Diplomacy advocates in Washington kept tilting at windmills in a quixotic quest to engage. The Supreme Leader’s rejection