Can the United States Come to Terms with an Independent, Technologically Sophisticated, and Truly Sovereign Iran?
by alethoBy Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett | Going to Tehran | May 16, 2014
As negotiations on a final nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 proceed, CCTV’s news talk program, The Heat,
invited Hillary earlier this week to offer her perspective on the
requirements for successful negotiations, click on the video above or
see here.
The program also included interview segments with Seyed Mohammad
Marandi from the University of Tehran and with former Iranian diplomat
and nuclear negotiator Seyed Hossein Mousavian. All three segments are
worth watching. We want to highlight here some of Hillary’s more
important points.
Hillary
notes that, while the chances for diplomatic breakthrough between
Washington and Tehran are “the best they have been for at least a
decade,” gaps between the United States and Iran remain “wide” on key
issues. Most importantly, “at this point, the United States doesn’t want Iran to have an industrial-scale nuclear program.”
In
Hillary’s view, the “big picture” strategic challenge for the United
States in pursuing a diplomatic opening with Iran is recognizing that
the Islamic Republic “has sovereign rights, treaty rights, and can be
treated like a normal state.” In the context of the nuclear talks, more
specifically, the question is whether the United States “can
countenance a country that will be strong, independent, and a real
nuclear power—not a weapons power, but a real nuclear power.”
On
this point, Seyed Mohammad Marandi says that, from an Iranian
perspective, “the crux of the problem is the very notion that Western
powers are in a position or they have the authority to determine what
Iran is allowed to have and is not allowed to have. Iran is not going
to accept anything less than its full rights within the framework of
international law.”
Hillary describes how, to a considerable degree, Washington
has been compelled to drop thirty-five years of rejecting the Islamic
Republic’s very legitimacy and to consider cutting some sort of deal
with it because of the erosion of U.S. military options vis-à-vis Iran and the strategic failure of American sanctions policy.
–With
regard to military options, Hillary observes that “one of the things
that has made these negotiations possible in a constructive manner is
that, from August 2013, when President Obama declared that the United
States would attack Syria after chemical weapons were used there, and
then had to walk it back and say, “No, actually I can’t do that,
Congress isn’t going to support me, no one around the world is going to
support me’—with that, the United States’ ability to credibly threaten
the effective use of force greatly diminished. So now you don’t hear
President Obama say nearly as much, ‘all options are on the table’—not
because the United States doesn’t want to have that [option], but
because we don’t have it. We lost it over Syria, and over some of the
other failed military interventions over the last decade.”
–While
“the idea that sanctions have so crippled the Iranians, and especially
the Iranian leadership, that they have come crawling to the table” is
popular in American political discourse, this is a false assessment,
“put out there to justify a policy that we have put in place for
thirty-five years that has not brought down the Islamic Republic, has
not overthrown its government, and has not weakened it. We’ve seen
Iranian power rise and rise. And I think in some ways the Iranians are
letting us have a bit of that narrative, to justify how sanctions have,
in a way, let the United States come to the table…It’s a bit the reverse
of what the American rhetoric is here, from Washington—it’s not so much
that sanctions brought the Iranians to the table; they really brought
the Americans to the table.”
Hillary explains that, because of these difficulties, the
Obama administration has, over the last two years, determined that the
United States might be able to “accept” the Islamic Republic—but “only
if it can become part of a pro-American, U.S.-led security and political
order in the Middle East.” To join such an order, “states in the
region have to give up some elements of sovereign rights—to have a big,
functioning military; to have full industrialization—and to have
policies that support the United States. So I think what the U.S.
team is really trying to test is whether the Islamic Republic of Iran
can join this pro-American political and security order”—and, to show
that the Islamic Republic could do this, whether Iran “would limit [its]
ability to have a civilian nuclear program, according to American
wishes.”
Hillary elaborates that, in broader perspective,
“The
nuclear deal is almost like, when Nixon and Kissinger first went to
China and the relationship opened, we had the Shanghai Communique. At
the end of the day, it was just a piece of paper; it means nothing in
the broader scheme of what has become a huge relationship between the
United States and China. The nuclear deal between the U.S. and Iran
would essentially serve that function; it would be the equivalent of the
Shanghai Communique, to allow for this opening of a relationship
between Iran and the United States.
Now the big difference is that the
United States wants this relationship on terms that would shore up a
pro-American political and security order throughout the region,
throughout the Middle East. What Iran wants in that relationship is to
maintain its independence, maintain its sovereignty, and to continue to
have this ability to rise as an important power. Now it may be possible
for those two goals to be met, but it’s going to be extremely difficult.”
This
difference in fundamental goals is also manifested in U.S.-Iranian
disagreements over sanctions, with the Iranians seeking to end sanctions
while the Americans talk about suspending them, with specific triggers
for re-imposing them. Hillary explains that the U.S. position grows out
of Washington’s greater goal,
“which
is to bring Iran into this pro-American political and security order in
the region that allows the United States to punish states that don’t go
along with U.S. policy preferences—including by the re-imposition or
increasing of sanctions on them. So that is a big strategic goal for
the United States.
For
Iran, though, Iran has not had trade relations with the United States
for thirty-five years. Their strategy is, if they can get all U.S.
sanctions lifted, great. But the real goal is not this idea that the
United States is somehow going to change overnight. But if the United
States can at least get out of the way, stand to the side, not enforce
those sanctions, waive those sanctions at least every six months, that
would allow room for other states that Iran is very focused on—in
Europe, in Asia, especially with China, and other countries—to allow
them to trade and invest more freely (and without the constant threat of
punishment from the United States), to allow them to invest in the
Iranian economy. That’s the real economic prize; it’s not to open up
U.S. trade or U.S. investment per se.”
Looking
ahead to a prospective final agreement, Hillary cautions that
negotiators “are going to try to have it as specific as possible, to
really hold each side to account—not to build trust, but essentially to
build in triggers to punish the other side if something goes wrong.
That is not going to be a durable agreement.” Instead of this approach,
Hillary argues that
“the most effective agreement that could come to fruition, whether its July 20
(the self-imposed deadline) or after that, will be something more
vague. It will be something more along the lines of the Shanghai
Communique between the United States and China, which essentially will
say that Iran will be recognized as a sovereign state. There may be
some interim period for confidence building, but that will be temporary,
and after that interim period Iran will be recognized—especially by the
United States, but by all of the P5+1—as a normal sovereign state
exercising normal sovereign rights, including those for a civilian
nuclear program…If they get bogged down in the details of exactly how
many centrifuges Iran can run for exactly how much time, that’s a recipe
for failure.”
The rest of Hillary’s interview is worth watching, as are the segments with Seyed Mohammad Marandi and Seyed Hossein Mousavian.
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