Iranians look at rugs displayed at Iran's International hand-woven carpet exhibition in Tehran on September 29, 2013 (BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images[/caption]On December 2, two former US Secretaries of State, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, wrote an opinion piece entitled, “What a Final Iran Deal Must Do.” They came to the conclusion that American diplomacy has three major tasks: “To define a level of Iranian nuclear capacity limited to plausible civilian uses and to achieve safeguards to ensure that this level is not exceeded; to leave open the possibility of a genuinely constructive relationship with Iran; and to design a Middle East policy adjusted to new circumstances.”
Their conclusion is absolutely correct, and anyone who considers negotiating with Iran to be by far a superior and more rational means of addressing a threat of Iranian nuclear weapons than going to war will agree with it.
Nevertheless, the article suggests its authors hold strong negative doubt as to whether the current negotiations can ultimately prevent Iran becoming a nuclear weapons state. That is certainly a risk, but it is a risk well worth taking if the only alternative is war.
Shultz and Kissinger conclude that “Iran's technical ability to construct a nuclear weapon must be meaningfully curtailed in the next stipulated negotiation through a strategically significant reduction in the number of centrifuges, restrictions on its installation of advanced centrifuges, and a foreclosure of its route toward a plutonium-production capability. Activity must be limited to a plausible civilian program subject to comprehensive monitoring as required by the Non-Proliferation Treaty.”
Again, this conclusion is correct. But it is very unlikely that professional US government Middle East analysts were not aware of this problem from the get-go. Of course, US foreign policymakers have had a different problem this time, dealing with powerful domestic political groups that did not want to see any successful negotiations at all (as have Iranian policymakers). But it is my feeling that the former Secretaries’ intervention would have been far more useful if they had addressed the irrationality of the idea that going to war is the only sure way to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon.
These views should not be taken as criticism of Kissinger’s and Shultz’s policy toward Iran during their time in office. During my years in the State Department, I served under both of them as a Middle East analyst and later as a counter-terrorism official. I believe that they were among the better Secretaries during those years, and they had to consider US domestic politics in making foreign policies in making choices as to what the best possible policy options were of those available at the time.
However, as a Middle East area specialist, I did not find them particularly conversant with Middle East cultures in general and Iranian culture in particular. For example, they write: “For 35 years and continuing today, Iran has been advocating an anti-Western concept of world order, waging proxy wars against America and its allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and beyond, and arming and training sectarian extremists throughout the Muslim world.”
That is so. But behind it has been Iran’s ambition to play a major hegemonic role throughout the Gulf and beyond that goes back to the Persian Achaemenid Empire (c. 550–330 BCE). The Pahlavi Shahs had the same ambitions as the Islamic Republic’s rulers do, only they sought to use the US and Israel against anti-Western Arab Nationalist regimes.
A second Iranian cultural norm that was not adequately addressed is the tendency to negotiate with the other party as hard as possible in order to obtain absolutely the best possible gains for the least possible cost. Back in the early 1980s, I was asked to join a panel to discuss the possibility of negotiating a new relationship with the new Islamic Republic of Iran. It was assumed that I would put the case for it, but when it was my turn to speak I said we should not. There was total silence until I added, “Iranians invented rugs and rug merchants, and if we negotiated with them we would probably lose.” When the crowd realized my statement should be taken just the opposite of what I actually said, everybody broke into laughter.
The point is that at the moment the only options for dealing with Iran being discussed are negotiations or going to war, which is definitely not a rational first solution. But if the US and its international partners genuinely want negotiation to succeed, they must offer something positive in return—not just more sanctions.
