RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Iran nuclear agreement “was a great example of diplomacy,” stated former American ambassador to Iraq and Turkey, James F. Jeffrey, at an April 12 Middle East Policy (MPEC) Council Capitol Hill panel. While this presentation concerning “The Saudi-Iranian Rivalry and the Obama Doctrine” continued MPEC’s Iran deal promotion, the panelists’ arguments remained as depressingly unconvincing as before.

Jeffrey’s fellow former American ambassador (to Oman) and MPEC’s Chairman of the Board of Directors, Richard Schmierer, proclaimed:

[The] historic nuclear deal…addressed the fundamental and destabilizing challenge of a potential Iranian nuclear weapons capability, but it also opened the possibility of a more deep-seated change in Iran: the possibility that Iran’s leaders would use the economic benefits and the potential renewed economic access to the international community deriving from the nuclear agreement to change the country’s behavior.

For Jeffrey, this diplomatic success resulted from concrete economic and military measures “backed up by really tough sanctions that cut Iran’s oil exports by over 50 percent”; spoken in reference to President Barak Obama’s efforts to end Iranian nuclear weapons proliferation. Additionally, the nuclear agreement was supposedly “backed up with the red line that this one people actually believe, that the United States, including Obama, would act” in case of Iranian proliferation.

Yet Jeffrey’s analysis of the Islamic Republic that took over Iran in the 1979 revolution as a rogue regime made it suspect as a credible negotiating partner willing to sustain agreements. “Iran fundamentally is not happy with, does not accept, and is trying, at least in its own neck of the woods, to overthrow the international order,” he noted. RAND Corporation analyst Alireza Nader stated that while officially supporting the nuclear agreement, Saudi officials fear that “rather than forcing or compelling Iran to modify its behavior, that the agreement will actually embolden it.”

Arab Gulf States Institute fellow Fahad Nazer cited Saudi officials who worried that their regional competitor, Iran, “has had this policy of exporting its ideology and its revolution for some 40 years.” Adding that “Iran is one of the few countries or regimes around the world that has been implicated in the attempts to assassinate” diplomats. He cited the past Iranian plot to kill in Washington, DC, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, currently the Saudi foreign minister.

Nonetheless, like Schmierer, Nader entertained long-term hopes for Iran, which “has a sophisticated, forward-looking population that wants and demands change.” Nader believes that “one of the trends in Iran is greater nationalism, Iranians who say that they’re Iranian first and are not necessarily followers of the Islamic Republic.” Adding that “increased secularization in Iran” has produced “resentment of the Islamic Republic as an Arab phenomenon.”

Yet, among other factors, “with the nuclear agreement, the Iranian regime is more stable than it has been since the 2009 Green Movement protests,” Nader concluded; “there are no indications that the Iranian regime is near collapse.” Expressing an exceedingly optimistic view of the nuclear agreement, he stated that it “has done what it is supposed to do in terms of a nonproliferation agreement. It’s not meant to change Iran’s behavior.”Analysts have already mocked his suggestion that the agreement’s creation of “very high-level contacts with the Iranian government” have “produced some dividends on other issues” such as Iran’s return of seized American sailors.

Schmierer’s conceptions of promoting reforms in Iranian domestic and international behavior envisaged even more leniency toward Iran. “Iran still doesn’t really have access to the economic benefits of the nuclear deal because of continuing U.S. banking sanctions,” he noted. Schmierer attributed the Iranian March 9 test of a nuclear-capable missile to Iranian “hardliners” who will “try to provoke reactions against any lessening of tensions” and cautioned that “we have to be careful not to overreact.”

Nader made similar warnings to those of Schmierer. “If sanctions relief is effected in a negative manner, if Iran does not see major economic benefit through the nuclear agreement, if Congress passes new sanctions, that puts the nuclear agreement in danger.” By contrast, considering violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231 by the Iranian missile test, Jeffrey felt that American “reaction to it has been weak.”

American weakness characterized the impressions of Middle East observers of American policy described by Nazer. In Saudi Arabia, a “number of writers accused the Obama administration of weakness” and “failing to act as the sole remaining superpower in the world.” Obama’s revoked “red line” threatening to sanction chemical weapon use by Syrian dictator Bashar Assad presented a policy reversal that “seemingly happened overnight” and “certainly took a lot of people by surprise.”

MPEC executive director Thomas R. Mattair discussed how such restraint reflected Obama’s guiding foreign policy presumptions. As analyzed in an eponymous Atlanticarticle, Mattair stated that the Obama Doctrine “emphasizes restraint in the use of U.S. military force” in favor of diplomacy. Jeffrey added that Obama understands current international order “as primarily self-perpetuating. He is such a believer in Western values and kind of the Silicon Valley view of the world that he thinks that its appeal is almost irresistible.”

Strengthened by the nuclear agreement, Iran’s future endeavors will put Obama’s views to the test; if not in the remaining months of his presidency, then during a successor administration. Jeffrey praised sanctions for bringing Iran to the negotiating table, but it is unlikely that, once relaxed, sanctions can simply “snap back” in case of Iranian malfeasance. The only other alternative to preventing Iranian nuclear proliferation would be military force, but Jeffrey’s optimism notwithstanding, grave concerns exist that Obama’s Syrian “red line” precedent could recur in Iran.

President George W. Bush, “who became tragically overextended in the Middle East, whose decisions filled the wards of Walter Reed with grievously wounded soldiers,” haunting Obama, wrote the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. Obama would say privately that his predecessor had exemplified the foreign policy maxim, “Don’t do stupid s–t.” Yet while Bush came to grief through his actions in Iraq, Obama’s passivity towards neighboring Iran presents its own dangerous pitfalls.