As they prepare to leave office, some members of the Biden administration are penning op-eds and making speeches to advise the incoming Trump team on a range of issues. The gist of their message is simple: Do what we tried to do but failed!
One such issue is the perennial headache that Tehran has caused eight US presidents over almost half a century.
One outgoing official Richard Nephew, who headed the Iran desk in the National Security Council, calls for “dialogue and negotiations” with the enthusiasm of a street urchin looking at candy store’s window.
His enthusiasm has found an echo among the new presidential team in Tehran. Muhammad Reza Aref, who has self-upgraded to “Vice President” for President Masoud Pezeshkian writes: “We are keen on dialogue and negotiations” and adds that diplomacy provides the key to all problems
(He is an assistant to president as there is no vice-presidential post in the Khomeinist system.)
The official news agency IRNA goes further by pretending that several countries including Japan, Oman and Iraq could act as “mediators” paving the way for negotiations.
Majid Takht-e-Ravanchi, who is cast as Deputy Foreign Minister for Political Affairs, plays the same tune in a more scherzo mode.
He cast aside his minister Abbas Arqachi’s emphatic statement last October that JCPOA is “dead and buried” and tries to paint a tantalizing horizon at which nuclear talks would extend to “all other issues.”
Joe Biden had expressed a similar illusion at the start of his four-year tenure at the White House with his tart slogan “Diplomacy is back!” Now, however, we know that diplomacy which had supposedly been booted out by President Donald J Trump didn’t come back for two reasons.
The first was that Biden and many others before him had a fetishistic understanding of diplomacy not as a tool for achieving policy goals but as an end in itself.
Henry Kissinger took a walk up the garden path with his naïve understanding of détente that implied equivalence between the Soviet Union and the “Free World” led by the United States, and arguably helped prolong the life of the Evil Empire.
The late Jimmy Carter prided himself in concluding the notorious Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement (SALT) that lightened the burden of a massive arms race from the broken shoulders of the USSR. Carter never wondered that if strategic arms are a threat to US security, why not aim at eliminating rather than limiting them? Diplomatic fetishists noted that before SALT, a thermonuclear war between the two “superpowers” could destroy the world 22 times, while after SALT it could be destroyed only 20 times over.
The next reason for diplomatic failure was that successive US administrations tried to build a puzzle from disparate pieces that kept changing because no overall guiding image was available. IRNA recalls the “Algiers Accord” mediated by Algeria. But it forgets that the accord in question was only dealt with releasing US diplomats held hostage in Tehran, something that Carter needed to keep his chances of re-election. It did not even lead to an end of hostage-taking by the mullahs who in the four decades that followed, seized over 1,500 hostages from 43 countries, including many Americans.
The Obama “nuke deal” was another example of a tree hiding the woods from the view. Obama never wondered why a country that has only one nuclear power station - the fuel for which is guaranteed by its Russian builder for its entire life-span - needs to spend huge sums enriching uranium that has no obvious peaceful use.
Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry hailed the “nuke deal” as a diplomatic triumph because Tehran agreed not to enrich uranium above 6 percent until 2025 when the “deal” is supposed to end. Kerry didn’t know that once you have the industrial wherewithal to enrich uranium you could accelerate the process to reach the level needed for building the bomb.
That was one example of fitting a place a piece into a puzzle without knowing what its final shape is supposed to be. The question that Obama and Kerry didn’t tackle was why the mullahs might want to build a bomb and that if they did what they might do with it.
Robert Malley, the pro-mullah part-time diplomat that Biden named as his “Iran talks man” had the answers. He noted that Iran behaved the way it did because it felt vulnerable and insecure and thus needed its nuclear program, its missiles stockpile and its proxy forces around the region as a triple deterrent. Thus he recommended full surrender across the lines set by “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei.
What Malley didn’t ask was why should a regime feel as vulnerable and threatened as to need such deterrents?
The answer was obvious: because the Guide openly talked of wiping Israel off the map, exporting revolution, seizing hostages, creating a state within the state in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the eastern portion of Yemen and sending murder-squads to kill real or imagined opponents in 11 countries including the United States. If the mullahs decided not to do any of those things, who would wish to threaten them because of a putative nuclear arsenal? After all, the US and allies have never imposed sanctions on any nation because of nuclear weapons.
Unlike US politicians and pundits, Khamenei, however, sees the big picture of the puzzle he has helped shape.
Here is what he says: “The assumption that the country’s problems can be solved through talks or even relations with America is a manifest error. America has fundamental problems with the very nature of our regime. Will our problems with America end if we retreated on the nuclear issue? No, sir! They will raise the issue of our missiles. Why do you need so many missiles and what do you mean to do with them? Then they will raise the issue of the Axis of Resistance that we have created (across the region). If we solve those problems and retreat, they will raise the issue of human rights. But, even if you retreated on that, they will demand a separation of religion and state. In other words, they want us to become an ordinary country something that a system created by Imam Khomeini can never be!”
There you go!
Khamenei offers a full agenda for any negotiations with Iran.
Accept on its own terms warts and all or don’t fall for the fetishistic diplomatic clap-trap peddled by Obama, Kerry, Malley and Kerry.
