Propitiating Iran

Co-authored by Ray Takeyh

American presidents are always emotionally and politically drawn to the plight of American hostages overseas. In his sympathy and paternalism, Barack Obama seems just like Ronald Reagan, who traded Hawk missiles to Iran for the release of Americans held by the Lebanese Hezbollah, the clerical regime’s most successful and obedient kidnapping offspring. Through President Obama's diplomacy, five Americans who were languishing in Iran's prisons can come home. The deal's shortcomings, however, ought to be obvious, as those innocent Americans were traded for seven Iranians and Iranian Americans who were convicted of transferring illicit technology—in some cases dual-use nuclear technology—to Tehran. (The administration also agreed to take 14 others off Interpol's arrest list.) This latest deal reflects a larger problem with the president's diplomacy toward adversarial regimes. Through much of his tenure, Obama has practiced what can be called “We just can't get that.”

This approach has been most debilitating in the case of the Islamic Republic. The administration's heralded nuclear agreement with Iran, after all, lifts sanctions while conceding a vast enrichment capacity that will only grow over time. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has the distinction of being the most deficient arms control accord in U.S. history, for unlike all of its predecessors it promises an end to restrictions within 15 years. Historically, the objective of arms control agreements has been to impose meaningful and permanent limits on the other side's nuclear aspirations. When the administration's critics called for more stringent terms, the president and his supporters shrugged their shoulders and asserted, “We just can't get that,” preemptively conceding Iranian demands for fear that the mullahs would walk.

The hostages-for-criminals swap is the latest example of this all-too-familiar pattern. The White House had previously asked for the immediate (meaning unconditional) release of all American prisoners. It was Iran's president Hassan Rouhani who first dangled the possibility of exchanging the Americans for Iranians and Iranian Americans held in the United States. It's helpful to remember that Rouhani was the clerical regime's point man in the missiles-for-hostages Iran-contra affair and, according to the memoirs of former president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, always eager to demand more for the release of American hostages.

The Islamic Republic has patiently observed its red lines during Rouhani's presidency. It refused to concede that its holding of Americans was an egregious violation of international law and (prerevolutionary) Persian custom. Sure enough, the administration once more complied. Instead of holding fast to its demand that all hostages be freed and stressing that sanctions relief would not come until then, President Obama issued clemency for the Iranians and Iranian Americans who'd violated U.S. law. The response to critics asking for better terms: “We just can't get that.”

The permissive and passive Obama doctrine has found application elsewhere, most notably Cuba. The United States normalized relations with the country without demanding any fundamental changes in the Castro dictatorship's treatment of its citizens. In unveiling its diplomatic triumph, the administration denigrated the longstanding U.S. policy of revisiting ties with Cuba only after the Castro government initiated important reforms. The United States imposed sanctions on Cuba for decades not out of spite, but because Cuba repressed its people, acted as a surrogate of Soviet power during the Cold War, and did much to destabilize Latin America.

The Obama administration made no demands of Cuba for the simple and straightforward reason that the regime likely would have rejected those demands and thus ended Obama's hope for a new diplomatic era.

Much of the commentariat is celebrating the exchange and the nuclear deal as an indication that the so-called Iranian pragmatists were besting their hardline detractors. All governments suffer from factionalism, including that of the United States. The Islamic Republic is the only regime that has turned its factional politics into an excuse for international misbehavior. Every time the clerical regime engages in unacceptable practices—for example, publicly humiliating U.S. sailors it captured at sea—a cascade of U.S. commentators, not to mention White House officials, blame the hardliners seeking to undermine President Rouhani. Forceful American actions are always discouraged because “moderates” in Tehran would suffer; American “restraint,” on the other hand, strengthens the moderates' internal position—presumably because the “hardliners” will not be offended by American aggression and thus be more disposed to the wisdom of “moderates.”

A full account of the “moderates-vs.-hardliners” narrative has never really been put forward by the Obama administration, or for that matter by the president's supporters in the media and academe, a few of whom actually know Persian and might be able to present a historical case to argue, say, that Hassan Rouhani is a moderate who no longer views the United States as the primary and defining enemy of the Islamic Republic. Why American foreign policy should be pegged to the success of the weakest players in the Iranian regime, and not to the guys with the guns, remains unasked and unexplained. It is an underappreciated irony of Obama's presidency that the Iranian “moderates” of his tenure are the same—the very same—”moderates” of Reagan's Iran-contra sojourn.

The Obama administration and congressional supporters of the hostage exchange and nuclear deal ought to look at the recent massive disqualification by Iran's Guardian Council of “moderate” parliamentary candidates for the upcoming elections. They might consider the possibility that their policy of engagement has produced within Iran the opposite of their intentions. The more Obama and other Western leaders express their hopes that the nuclear deal can be the beginning of better rapport between the Islamic Republic and the West, the more Khamenei and his Revolutionary Guards recoil from outreach and crack down on those in Iran who want closer Western ties—or just want more Western commerce and investment to build up Iranian Islamist power (the Rouhani camp).

It is really past time for the clerical regime to be treated like any other government: When it violates international conventions, it should be held responsible as a nation-state. Iran is a country, and the clerical regime has one undisputed leader. The Islamic Republic is not a collection of factions and warring militias in the manner of a banana republic. American foreign policy would be more cogent and effective if Washington let Tehran know that Americans aren't going to fall for the “good-cop-bad-cop” routine anymore. That doesn't mean there aren't real differences among members of the ruling revolutionary elite, let alone between the ruling elite and the educated middle class; the United States, as a government, just shouldn't try to turn sociology and psychiatry into foreign policy. But that might curtail the conversations between Secretary of State John Kerry and foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who has a first-rate sense about when to deploy “moderate-vs.-hardliner” munitions against Westerners.

At its core, the Obama presidency is about propitiating the United States' enemies who, in the mind of the president and those around him, have been historically transgressed by the American imperium. In the Obama cosmology, Iranian clerics, Cuban Communists, and Chinese chauvinists are all victims of centuries of American and Western abuse and exploitation. No agreement with them should demand reciprocity, since they are the disadvantaged and America is the superpower. Diplomacy in this view cannot be separated from the expiation of past wrongs. It is a variation of social work. The Obama doctrine—”We just can't get that”—is an inevitable outgrowth of such guilt.

The failures of the second Iraq war have convulsed the Republican party and given isolationism more running room. They have proven at least as disruptive and transformational on the left. President Obama's foreign raison d'être appears to be the new standard within the Democratic party. For those overseas who look to America to put some muscle behind its virtues, for those who admired well-armed liberal internationalists and know how essential they have been to bipartisan American foreign policy since World War II, such an evolution is depressing. For Khamenei, the Revolutionary Guards, and the big-power, big-economy imperialists behind Rouhani, however, it's good news all the way around.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a contributing editor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the coauthor of the forthcoming The Pragmatic Superpower: Winning the Cold War in the Middle East.