Front matter
- Chapter 1. A Post-American Foreign Policy for the Post-American World
- Chapter 2. The “Human Ink-Blot” : Obama, Foreign Policy and the 2008 Election
- Chapter 3. The Obama Doctrine : “Leading From Behind”
- Chapter 4. Afghanistan, Pakistan and the War on Terror
- Chapter 5. Iran
- Chapter 6. Israel, Palestine and the Arab Spring
- Chapter 7. China
- Chapter 8. Russia
- Chapter 9. Continuity We Can Believe In : Keep the Change
Back matter
Barack Obama's Post-American Foreign Policy
The Limits of Engagement
Bloomsbury Academic 2012
Bloomsbury Open Access
[244]To
those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the
silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of
history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to
unclench your fist.
[245]
When the
Israelis begin to bomb the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, the
formerly secret
enrichment site at Qom, the nuclear-research centre at Esfahan,
and possibly even the Bushehr reactor, along with the other
main sites of the Iranian nuclear program, a short while after
they depart en masse from their bases across Israel –
regardless of whether they succeed in destroying Iran's
centrifuges and warhead and missile plants, or whether they fail
miserably
even to make a dent in Iran's nuclear program – they stand a good
chance of changing the Middle East forever; of sparking
lethal reprisals, and even full-blown regional war that could lead
to the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Iranians, and
possibly Arabs and Americans as well; of creating a crisis for
Barack Obama that will dwarf Afghanistan in significance and
complexity; of rupturing relations between Jerusalem and
Washington, which is Israel's only meaningful ally; of inadvertently
solidifying the somewhat tenuous rule of the mullahs on Tehran; of
causing the price of oil to spike to cataclysmic highs,
launching the world economy into a period of turbulence not
experienced since the autumn of 2008, or possibly since the oil
shock of 1973; of placing communities across the Jewish diaspora
in mortal danger, by making them the targets of Iranian-sponsored
terror attacks, as they have been in the past, in a limited though
already lethal way; and of accelerating Israel's conversion
from a once-admired refuge for a persecuted people into a leper
among nations.
If
the notion of a post-American world held forth the promise of
transformative
change, one important feature of the international landscape
appeared mired in geo-political inertia. Barack Obama became
the sixth US president since 1979 to be confronted by the vexing
dilemma of how to productively shape American relations with
the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran represented “Exhibit A” in the
readjustment of US foreign policy from the Bush
era, and the marquee test case for the administration's strategic
engagement approach, which saw several public and private overtures – some unprecedented – to the Iranian leadership
and people during 2009–10. The Obama administration's overt emphasis on multilateralism, diplomacy and engagement received
crucial tests in several bilateral relationships, but none so explicitly as Iran.
Iran
also posed a fundamental test to the logic underlying the Bush Doctrine
and,
hence, the extent to which Obama could successfully depart from
that logic: no rogue state can be permitted to develop a militarized
nuclear weapons capacity that can be made available to
anti-American terrorists, not least those for whom martyrdom counted
as a divine blessing. While engaging with Iran to find a
diplomatic solution to the nuclear impasse, the Obama administration
also sought to revive the stalled international momentum against
nuclear proliferation in general and to build strong multilateral
support against Iran's nuclear ambitions in forums such as the UN
and the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The notoriously opaque features of Tehran's governing regime make it very difficult
to assess how far internal Iranian deliberations seriously entertained any concessions on its nuclear program, still less
a broader “grand bargain” with Obama's Washington that might normalize bilateral relations. As Karim Sadjadpour rightly observes, “If 20th-century
Russia was to Winston
Churchill a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, for
observers of contemporary Iran, the Islamic Republic often resembles
a villain inside a victim behind a veil.”[246]
What
is reasonably clear is that the ultimate outcome of such discussions in
Tehran
was a decisive rejection of Obama's outstretched hand. US policy
options therefore became focused on four possible approaches
(engagement, sanctions, military strikes, and
containment/deterrence) and bounded by five possible outcomes on Iran
policy:
an Iranian retreat; an effective set of unilateral and
international diplomatic and economic sanctions; regime change in Iran;
containment and deterrence; and military action, on a continuum
from covert attacks to a full-scale air assault. With the
costs of strong military action widely seen as prohibitively high,
and the open endorsement of containment and deterrence
a concession of effective defeat, administration policy shifted
from an initial emphasis on engagement to one that oscillated
between a sanctions approach that sought to alter regime behavior
and a more open effort – abetted by covert action – to encourage regime change, albeit from within
rather than through direct US intervention.
Ultimately
Obama's administration
appeared to settle on a policy of extended “wait and see and
delay,” seemingly more in hope than expectation that
either an Iranian back-down, the success of sanctions or domestic
regime change might materialize. The administration appeared
to reach a consensus of sorts to put off the crisis point of
decision – the supremely difficult moment when Washington
has to choose between taking military action against another
Muslim nation, sanctioning a surrogate Israeli attack, or accepting
a nuclear-capable Iran
as a fait accompli
– until a later date, either for a second term or a new administration
after 2013. But in some key respects this ultimate outcome
appeared to resemble less a coherent policy – never mind
a deliberately calibrated strategy – than an aspiration. In this
instance, Obama's appeals to “hope” seemed
to rely on the notion that a combination of the Green Movement,
acute internal divisions within the Tehran governing authorities,
the contagion of the Arab uprisings and covert action against the
program would together propel the regime uneasily into “the
dustbin of history.”[247]
But,
although the eruption of the Arab Spring threatened a region-wide
democratic
contagion that could potentially encompass Iran as well, nervous
Iranian authorities nonetheless relished its adverse consequences
for the “Great Satan.” As Robert Satloff of the Washington
Institute for Near East policy testified to the House Foreign Relations Committee in June 2011:
Over just the past six months, Iranian leaders revelled in the demise of US allies in Egypt and Tunisia, the departure of the pro-American ruler of Yemen, violent clashes in Bahrain, and the deep tensions that have emerged between Washington and its two most significant strategic pillars in the region – Saudi Arabia and Israel.[248]
As
both domestic divisions and international concerns on Iran mounted
during his
presidency, Obama's outstretched hand itself appeared to be
steadily but inexorably closing in the face of implacable Iranian
intransigence on its nuclear program and a carefully calculated
pragmatic fanaticism by Ayatollah Khamenei – waging
an intense internal battle against the more accommodationist
President Ahmedinajad
– on increasing its malign regional influence.
During his campaign for the Democratic Party nomination and subsequently the presidency,
Obama's stated position towards Iran
encompassed two key elements.
First, he made it clear that he was willing to reach out to US
adversaries and seek a dialogue to end long-held enmities and
make progress towards new relationships based on mutual interests
and mutual respect. On
several occasions, Obama cited the example of Ronald Reagan negotiating
with the Soviets
as proof that, no matter how difficult and ideologically distant
the parties, dialogue was invariably preferable to isolation.
In one Democratic Party debate, his willingness to do so “without
preconditions” was even pounced-on by his primary
opponents – not least Hillary Clinton – as a sign of
his alleged lack of international experience and policy expertise, and his more general political naivety.
At the same, time, however, Obama made it clear that the US would defend Israel's
security and that, like his predecessor in the White House, no option – including military action – would be prematurely
ruled off-the-table regarding Iran's nuclear ambitions. As early as 2007, Obama had asserted that “Iran and North Korea could trigger regional
arms races, creating dangerous nuclear flashpoints in the Middle East and East Asia. In confronting these threats, I will
not take the military option off the table.”[249] Obama also reassured an influential domestic
lobby, the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that he would “do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”[250] A nuclear Iran
was “unacceptable.”
In
terms of his strategic engagement approach, an obvious logic informed a
change
in how the US dealt with Iran. Bush's “Global War on Terror,”
Obama reasoned, was a classic example of overreach.
Bush had defined the strategic threat as the convergence of state
sponsors of terrorism, terrorist groups, and weapons of
mass destruction. That definition placed the United States in
conflict with al Qaeda, obviously, but also with Iran, among
other states. From Obama's perspective, lumping all terror
sponsors together was an excessively crude, un-nuanced and expensive
strategy: it forced a number of potentially helpful states,
including Iran, solidly into the enemy camp. The Iranian regime
might be deeply unsavory, Obama reasoned, but it shares with the
United States a strong hostility to the Sunni al Qaeda –
albeit that it approached the group pragmatically – and a desire
for stability in Iraq. While Obama did not appear to
share the provocative analysis of former CIA operative Robert Baer[251] – that Iran could potentially prove a far more reliable and effective ally for the US than
Sunni Saudi Arabia – a less Manichean approach could nonetheless allow Washington to exploit the overlap in national
interests and, perhaps, move towards some kind of more ambitious “grand bargain.”
Consequently,
Obama defined the strategic threat facing America much more narrowly:
as the previous chapter detailed, he declared war to be waged
narrowly rather than expansively, with a specific focus on al
Qaeda and its affiliates. Iran, though certainly not a friend of
the US, was no longer clearly defined as an implacable adversary.
On balance, Obama's initial approach leant heavily towards
reconciliation, renewal and accommodation,
more so – in both public and private – than any American president since Jimmy Carter. In March 2009 Obama recorded
a YouTube address targeted directly at
the Iranian people. The president also sent private letters to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic.
The
calculus informing the outreach effort was readily understandable. But
the difficulties
of engaging the Iranians were threefold. First, the approach
relied on minimizing the salience of the form of regime that
Washington was dealing with, along classical realist
prescriptions. While historic examples here pointed in different
directions,
the evidence overall seemed to weigh more heavily in the direction
of “ideology” broadly conceived as a factor,
even if not the dominant one. As with the Soviet Union in the
1970s, ideology did play a role in Iran's strategic calculations,
alongside geo-politics. Second, as Colin Dueck notes, diplomacy may
be desirable or undesirable, bur rather than being an end in itself it constitutes but one important tool among several in
a nation's foreign policy toolkit:
The notion that diplomatic contact or unilateral concessions on their own can transform hostile regimes is not well supported by historical experience, to say the least. Diplomatic promises and warnings must be supported by other forms of power, including military power, or else they are meaningless in practical terms.[252]
Third,
for those other forms of power to be meaningful – whether sanctions,
blockades, or the threat or use of military force – the
administration (and, ideally, its allies and “partners”)
needed to be unified in its public face. One of the problems of
the Obama administration was that, like its immediate predecessors,
the internal stresses and differences among its members
occasionally found public expression. In particular, the obvious doubts
expressed by figures such as Clinton, Gates and Mullen about the
use of military force against Iran substantially undercut
the credibility of invocations by others of that particular
dimension of US power. Moreover, the Obama administration proved
only marginally more successful than its predecessor in assembling
a united international front against the Tehran regime.
Iran's
domestic political crisis profoundly complicated the Obama outreach
effort,
notably with the popular demonstrations that erupted after the
June 12, 2009 presidential election was widely seen as having
been stolen by incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. While most
outside observers conceded the possibility that the president
might indeed have won re-election legitimately, the claimed
landslide of almost twice as many votes as his nearest competitor
was simply not credible. Some three million Iranians took to the
streets, claiming the vote had been rigged. Ayatollah Khamenei's
intervention, describing the result as a “divine assessment,”
increased the sense of injustice while undermining
his own legitimacy as Supreme Leader. Determined to prevent
an Iranian “velvet revolution,” the violently repressive reaction
to the protests reflected longer-term trends
in which the theocratic regime was increasingly morphing into a
security state or quasi-military dictatorship, with the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) assuming ever greater influence
in economic policy, politics and foreign policy-making.[253] The government arrested hundreds of protestors, employed the plainclothes Basij
paramilitary militia to use brutal deadly force, and detained many
young men and women in prison, among reports of widespread
torture and rape.
Obama's policy towards Tehran had been one of strategic patience from the outset,
in part to afford the Iranian regime time to reach a unified reaction to his overtures, but also because with the June 12
elections no rapid response was likely to be forthcoming. When Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu urged Obama to speed up the outreach efforts with
a clear three-month deadline, Obama replied that he expected to
know by the end of the year whether Iran was making “a
good faith effort to resolve differences.” The post-election
turmoil both implicitly endorsed but also complicated Washington's
new efforts at engagement. In one respect, Obama's open-hand
policy in some ways assisted the protests, since the Iranian
regime could not credibly accuse a US transparently seeking rapprochement
with Tehran
either of malign intent or pursuing regime change. Indeed, many
Iranian protestors were deeply disappointed with Obama's initially
muted response, with “Obama, Obama, either you are with them or
us” a popular chant. But the popular protests
also ensured that Obama faced a difficult tactical decision. Overt
public support from Washington could taint the opposition
cause, leading to charges of the protestors as foreign puppets and
facilitating even greater repression. Yet the size and
vehemence of the crowds, and the existing fissures within the
Tehran regime, together held out the enticing potential for
an internal struggle that could result in an opposition victory.
While not a panacea for the US, a less hard-line government
might at minimum prove a more willing negotiating partner for
Washington; conversely, the popular opposition made the existing
hard-line government even less likely to abandon its nuclear
aspirations, one of the few remaining sources of its dwindling
popular legitimacy.
Many reform-minded Iranians and American proponents of regime change therefore supported
a greater emphasis on enriching human rights than opposing uranium enrichment, arguing for ceasing US engagement in order
to deepen the legitimacy crisis and hoping that a successful Green Movement would at least prove more willing to negotiate
on the nuclear issue. Even prior to Obama's election, even erstwhile “hard-line” neo-conservatives such as Robert
Kagan had urged an opening to Iran.[254]
With the turmoil in the nation of the summer, though, influential
commentators
such as Kagan and Richard Haass concurred that the moment had
passed and that embracing regime change now made optimal sense
for Washington.
Obama's
evolving response anticipated that of the Arab Spring in 2011. His
relative silence after the elections suggested that his
realist inclinations were triumphing over his Wilsonian idealism,
preferring a quiet subsidence in the protests so that diplomatic
engagement with Tehran could continue apace. But the increasingly
repressive regime response caused a steady shift in the
Obama administration's approach. In his December 10, 2009 Nobel
Peace
Prize acceptance speech, the president called forcefully for the
respect of human rights and liberties, condemning the “violent
and unjust suppression of innocent Iranian citizens,” and the
White House also that month accorded moral support to
the popular opposition by joining the public mourning of the
funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, an outspoken
opposition cleric. But the waning, after several months, of
opposition protests encouraged the administration to quietly abandon
a human rights focus and instead concentrate increasingly on how
best to employ targeted sanctions
against Iran.
Obama's outstretched hand had yielded some modest movement in Tehran. In June 2009,
Iran had requested help from the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in obtaining replacement fuel for its
Tehran Research Reactor (TRR). By October 2009, an offer
was placed on the table: if Iran would export the bulk of its
low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia, Russia would enrich it
to 19.75 percent and ship it to France for processing into fuel
assemblies for the TRR – sufficient to produce fuel
for the reactor. But because the French would take a year to
reprocess, Iran would have to part with its LEU before receiving
the TRR fuel. Surprisingly, President Ahmadinejad's
representatives accepted the principles of an exchange in an October 1
meeting in Geneva (one that featured a rare bilateral meeting with
US officials), only for domestic opposition to cause him
to reverse course.[255] No further discussions with the P5+1 (the permanent UN Security Council members
plus Germany) were to occur, due to Iranian refusals.
By
early 2010, US policy shifted further with a renewed emphasis on
economic sanctions
and diplomatic attempts to increase Iran's international
isolation. In May, Iran suddenly agreed to a deal brokered by Turkey
and Brazil, incorporating elements of the October 2009 fuel swap.
But due to its more lax provisions, the major powers declared
it too little, too late. UN Security Council Resolution
1929 was
adopted on June 9, 2010 by a 12-2-1 vote, over the objections of
erstwhile US allies Turkey (a NATO member) and Brazil, who
both voted “no,” and Lebanon, which abstained. While far less than
the crippling sanctions sought by the US, UK
and France, 1929 imposed new
targeted sanctions
on Iran. China and Russia ensured that there were no measures
targeting Iran's oil and natural gas sectors and few mandatory
restrictions of any type. The US went along with that on the basis
that Security Council unity was more valuable than tough
content, of which there nonetheless were some examples: specified
categories of arms sales to Iran were banned; Moscow agreed
to interpret the ban as including S-300 ground-to-air missile
systems Iran had been keen to import; and ballistic missile
development activity by Iran was prohibited.
Most
significant, 1929 called on countries to restrict a number of financial
activities,
including transactions involving the IRGC that could contribute to
sensitive nuclear and missile programs. EU heads of government
agreed on June 17, 2010 to go beyond the UN measures by
prohibiting new investment and technology transfers in key parts of
the gas and oil industries, and to focus additional sanctions on
trade, insurance, banking and transport sectors. On July
1, 2010, Obama also signed legislation – the Comprehensive
Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 –
imposing new extraterritorial sanctions on foreign entities
doing business with key Iranian banks or the IRGC and involved in
refined petroleum sales. (Most congressionally imposed sanctions
on Iran would be terminated if the president certified that Iran
has “ceased the pursuit, acquisition, and development
of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and ballistic
missiles and ballistic missile launch technology” and is
no longer a state sponsor of terrorism.[256])
In
essence, UNSC 1929 reiterated demands made in resolutions 1737 (2006),
1747 (2007),
and 1803 (2008) and required Iran to “cooperate fully with the
IAEA on all outstanding issues ... without delay comply
fully and without qualification with its IAEA Safeguard Agreement
... ratify promptly the Additional Protocol, and ... suspend
all reprocessing, heavy water-related and enrichment-related
activities.” Beyond this, 1929 also: embargoed eight categories
of heavy military equipment; expanded penalties against Iranian
companies, including those associated with the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards Corps; restricted the sale and transfer of missile
technologies; prohibited Iranian investment in nuclear industries,
including uranium mining; and called for more stringent measures
on Iranian shipping, financial, commercial and banking activities.
UN sanctions and penalties against Iran would be lifted if the IAEA Board of Governors
confirmed that “Iran has fully complied with its obligations under the relevant resolutions of the Security Council
and met the requirements” of the Board.[257]
By
tightening the economic pressure on Tehran, and especially through
exerting pressure
on foreign firms to limit or abandon economic activities with
Iranian entities directly or indirectly supporting the nuclear
program, the administration sought both to bring Tehran back to
the negotiating table and to further hamper the program's
advance. But implementing sanctions is typically an
imprecise
and unreliable science. Even if effectively adhered to, monitored
and enforced, the impact of tightening a sanctions regime
is normally unclear. One possibility is that, much like Saddam
Hussein's tyranny through the 1990s, sanctions simply serve
to entrench the Tehran regime in power. Alternatively, sanctions
could – as in South Africa in the 1980s – embolden
the opposition forces amid an economy in turmoil or, equally,
encourage the regime to enact even more repressive measures
to crush dissent. Or, possibly, the economic, political and social
impact could be such that they alter the calculus of key
elements within the regime to either halt or delay the nuclear
program's progress.
The
evidence of Obama's efforts here was inconclusive. On the one hand, the
various
new sanctions agreed to in 2010–11 did appear to be having a
serious effect on aspects of the Iranian political economy.
The factional conflict and rifts within the regime that had been
growing for decades also seemed to be exacerbated by the
new sanctions and the willingness of key non-US players, such as
all twenty-seven EU member states, to go along with them.
After mobs stormed the British Embassy in Tehran in November 2011,
the EU also moved to impose an embargo on oil imports from
Iran to cripple its economy. As the former parliamentary speaker
of the Majlis and a leading opposition figure, Mehdi
Karoubi, wrote
in an open letter to Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former
president, the consolidation of power by the IRGC that had previously
been prevented by the leader of the Iranian revolution, Ayatollah
Khomeini, now “threatens the nation”: “Chaos
is evident in all of the Government's decisions ... The sanctions
against us ... are due to the lack of wisdom, lack of expertise
and continuous bragging by the Government, especially by the
President.”[258]
Tighter
international sanctions appeared to be biting deep into the national
economy,
reinforcing Iran's domestic economic problems and fuelling
political unrest and dissent. In a nation possessing the third-largest
oil reserves in the world, and the second-largest natural gas
reserves, the population had long been shielded from the full
costs of consumer goods by government subsidies on basic
foodstuffs and other essentials such as petrol, gas and electricity.
The unsustainability of these subsidies was expected to see their
controversial termination in 2011 or 2012.[259]
On the other hand, three weaknesses hampered the extent to which the sanctions could
bite sufficiently to induce a genuine shift in the decision calculus in Tehran.
First, the evidence that key states were complying with sanctions packages was not
fully compelling. States as varied as China (the only major foreign nation still active in Iran's oil exploration, and for
whom Iran represents the third-largest supplier of crude oil and a key guarantor of price stability), Austria and Switzerland
have
either refused to authorize sanctions or tried to undermine and
circumvent those that were agreed. Moreover, Iran was actively
responding to the tightening knot by seeking either to subvert or
circumvent the sanctions. For example, after the US Treasury
Department blacklisted sixteen Iranian
banks for allegedly supporting Iran's nuclear program and terrorist
activities,
other countries responded with their own measures against Iran's
banking sector. Iran in turn attempted to secretly establish
banks in Muslim countries around the world – including Iraq and
Malaysia – using dummy names and opaque ownership
structures in order to skirt sanctions that have increasingly
curtailed the Islamic republic's global banking activities.
Although US officials suggested that Tehran's search for new
banking avenues was a clear sign of the growing effectiveness
of the sanctions, others interpreted Iran's response as an
indication of their limited impact.[260]
Second,
while the Iranian economy was adversely affected, this has rarely been a
dominant factor in the regime's assessments on the nuclear
program's relative costs and benefits. As in the Arab states across
the region, the welfare of the people has rarely been a motivating
factor in authoritarian regimes' strategic calculations.
Moreover, while US, EU and UN sanctions appear to be having an
effect to some degree, sanctions have often not generated the
sought-after results, even when imposed on nations that are more
vulnerable than Iran, such as Syria and Cuba. Strategic patience
is also an important issue, since tough sanctions entail political
costs and can also erode over time, as was memorably the
case with Iraq under Saddam Hussein.
Third,
in geo-political terms, the Iranians believed themselves to be in a
strong
regional position. While, in virtue of this, some analysts
recommended either a conventional Cold War-style containment and
deterrence posture, others still favored a new detente in which
the US would “publicly recognise Iran's legitimate security
requirements and offer credible security guarantees to Iran, in
terms that relate to objective but not fanciful Iranian requirements,
provided, of course, that Iran meets key US requirements, as well
as those of regional countries.”[261] But as the
twin sets of “requirements” in Table 5.1 suggest, the prospects of reconciling such stark differences and basic
conflicts of interest remain slight. Iran's shadow wars with the US in Iraq and Afghanistan reflected the core conviction
of its leaders that while it cannot properly compete with the US, “it does believe it can exhaust it,”[262]
a strategy
reliant on the inherent anarchy of the ever-volatile Middle East.
By the end of Obama's term, visible symptoms of that growing
US exhaustion were increasingly clear as the Arab Spring convulsed
the region.
Like the Bill Clinton administration (1993–2001) previously, which had pursued
a policy of “dual containment” of Iran and Iraq that then latterly sought tentative outreach to Tehran under the
reformist Khatami presidency, the well-intentioned efforts by Obama to engage Iran were ultimately unproductive, a case less of “hope”
than of “giving futility its chance.”
Table 5.1. US-Iran security requirements
and guarantees
|
|
But
the Obama administration's approach nonetheless entertained from
the outset the prospect of Tehran refusing to unclench its
fist and soften its hard-line approach. As Colin Dueck observed:
The irony of Obama's diplomatic overtures toward Iran is that they may well reveal, more fully than Bush's approach ever could, the underlying intransigence of Iranian policy. Whether or not this result is intentional, it will have the effect of hardening opinion against Tehran inside the United States and perhaps even among America's leading allies.[263]
That was precisely the intention underlying the engagement
strategy. The fourth round of UN sanctions,
the very pointed Iranian
exception to the new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) of 2010 that
made it US policy not to employ nuclear weapons against states
that were not nuclear-armed,[264]
and the subsequent revival of speculation about possible military
action –
whether genuine or merely a tactical bluff – occurred after a
number of transparent American tests of Iranian intent
had conspicuously failed. By September 2010, the effective
abandonment of strategic engagement in favor of a type of hybrid
policy of tightening sanctions while promoting regime change from
within was complete, with Hillary
Clinton publicly calling for “some effort inside Iran, by responsible
civil and religious leaders, to take hold of the apparatus of the state.”[265] 2011 also saw
an increase in malware computer attacks on the nuclear program, targeted assassinations of nuclear
scientists, and covert attacks on missile and uranium processing plants in Iran – widely attributed to Israel but with
the possible assistance of the US and others.
First, Arab alarm at Iran's growing power grew substantially over 2009–12.[266] Arab concern about Iran has a very long
pedigree. In recent years, for example, after the revolution
of 1979, Arab states assisted in arming Saddam Hussein's Iraq for
its invasion and war with Iran during 1980–88. While
unsuccessful in toppling Khomeini's regime, the effort nonetheless
halted the spread of Khomeinist revolutionary fervor to
Iraq and the Gulf. But the prospect of Iran marrying its arsenal
of long-range ballistic missiles with unconventional warheads
– including, over time, nuclear warheads – represents the greatest
threat facing Gulf Arab states. In the case
of Saudi Arabia, in particular, the traditional rivalry between
Riyadh and Tehran has been exacerbated in recent years by
perceptions of a steadily shifting balance of power towards Iran:
the unchecked nuclear program; greater influence in the
region's conflict zones, from Iraq and Lebanon to the Palestinian
territories, and the construction of a Shia crescent menacing Sunni Muslims across the region; the removal of the Baathist check in Iraq and the imminent US
withdrawal of all its military forces; and the possibility of
Iranian retaliation against Saudi territory in the event of an
Israeli, or American, strike against its nuclear and military
facilities. In
the fall of 2010, the Saudis
requested eighty-five new F-15 fighter jets and the upgrading of
seventy existing F-15s from Washington; the UAE submitted
requests for Patriot and THAAD missile defense systems along with
assorted helicopters, transport aircraft and UAVs; Oman
requested eighteen new F-16 jets and upgrades to twelve existing
ones; while Kuwait asked for thirty-nine F-18 jets to be
replaced, to upgrade Patriot missile defenses and
command-and-control computer systems. The Saudi deal alone, at $67
billion,
represented the largest order in US arms history.[267]
Beyond the conventional weapons and defense deals, though, the Iranian
program also encouraged other states in the region to pursue their own
nuclear
programs – assisted by the renewed political and economic
viability of nuclear power in the face of rising oil prices
and concerns about the environmental impact of fossil fuels. Some
estimates suggested that by 2025 at least fifteen new nuclear
reactors would be built in the Middle
East, including sites in Jordan,
Egypt, Turkey, Kuwait, Saud Arabia and the UAE. While some states,
such as the UAE, had ruled out the uranium enrichment or
reprocessing required to make weapons-grade material, the danger
remained that other states would be less scrupulous if their
security or regional status became under threat.
Notwithstanding
such commitments to the IAEA, the dangers of a volatile region in
which several aspirant nuclear states exhibited high corruption
levels, low political stability and limited regulatory capacity
are strikingly acute. The resumption of the Iranian uranium
enrichment program after 2005 was married to a fast-track plan
to construct a nuclear power plant on the Gulf, just over sixty
miles from several major Arab cities, including the Kuwaiti
capital. Not only is the plant located in an earthquake zone, but
its waste will likely be washed into the shallow Gulf waters,
threatening an ecological disaster.[268] It was hardly surprising, in this context, when the Wikileaks disclosure in late
2010 of thousands of US State Department cables featured as a lead item several pleas from Arab leaders to the US to take
decisive military action against Iran – most notably, Saudi King Abdullah's request to the Bush administration in 2008
to “cut off the head of the snake.”[269]
The
second problem with Obama's patient engagement approach was that, while
intelligence
assessments admittedly varied, further advancement in the Iranian
nuclear program had clearly occurred since 2009, as even
the ever-cautious IAEA confirmed in November 2011. The revelation
by President Obama and the leaders of the UK and France
at the UN in September 2009 that intelligence had uncovered a
secret nuclear facility at the Iranian holy city of Qom had
added to international concern about Iran's intentions and Iranian
duplicity. Iran's consistent games of cat-and-mouse and
bait-and-switch echoed those of Saddam during the 1990s and early
2000s – a disquieting example, especially in the context
of intelligence services' historic failures to estimate accurately
the extent of the adversarial regime's WMD stocks. While
the Stuxnet computer virus attack in the fall of 2010 and a
“decapitation” strategy involving
assassinations of Iranian
nuclear scientists in 2010–11 – widely attributed, without
clear or conclusive evidence, to Israeli saboteurs – undoubtedly created serious problems in the uranium enrichment
program, this appeared at best a temporary, albeit important, palliative by Iran's
international enemies.
Third,
even greater repressive control exerted by the regime on the most
pro-American
population in the region (outside Israel) occurred throughout
2009–12. Obama's studied silence in the immediate aftermath
of the popular protests in the summer of 2009 reflected the
delicate balancing act between offering steadfast support to a
people whose grief after 9/11 for America's pain was spontaneous
and heartfelt – unlike the gleeful street demonstrations
of some Palestinians and the obvious relish of Saddam Hussein –
and worsening their plight still further by inadvertently
discrediting their independence. As a succession of horrific
instances of regime brutality revealed, however, such reticence
in support of human rights and democratic values did nothing to
alter the thuggish mindset of an embattled and divided regime
increasingly fighting for sovereign control between the military
and the mosque, with elements of the Revolutionary Guard
alleged to be complicit in exporting drugs to the West and the
mullahs increasingly resistant to the attempts of Ahmedinajad to end Iran's international
isolation.
Finally,
a reassertion of Iranian influence across the Gulf, the Levant and Gaza
was apparent as Tehran sought determinedly to bog the US down in
the region and advance an ignominious American retreat. As
Frederick
Kagan observed, “Iran sees both a threat and an opportunity
in the Arab Spring, and it's trying to take advantage and extend
its reach by engaging in proxy conflicts all around its periphery,
to include in Afghanistan, Yemen, Bahrain, and especially Iraq ...”[270] Despite the inherent contradictions in its approach – hailing the Arab Spring as a popular
“Islamic Awakening” inspired by its own revolution in 1979, yet at the same time backing Damascus in its repression
of a supposedly foreign-inspired revolt akin to its own in 2009 – Iran's proclivity for pragmatism over doctrinaire
religious or ethnic positioning once more prevailed. Even if this appeared to be taking international chutzpah to a breathtaking new level, such a choice was especially important in the context of Iran's popularity
declining among the Arab masses while that of a growing regional rival, Turkey, soared over 2009–12.
In
the Syrian case, for instance, Tehran felt it necessary to balance its
interest
in preserving a friendly regime in Damascus with its unwillingness
to stand squarely against popular Arab opinion. While assisting
Assad's brutal repression, some Iranian officials hedged on the
ultimate outcome by making contact with opposition groups
in Syria
and commending reform by the autumn of 2011. Iran's approach
to Iraq and Afghanistan, too, amounted to a pragmatic policy of
systematically promoting “managed chaos”: assisting
indigenous insurgents to cause sufficient problems to US and
allied forces to hasten their withdrawal, but without hastening
a total state collapse that could threaten Iran's vital interests. Iran
thus declined to participate in a January 2010 conference in
London on Afghanistan's future, but while Ahmadinejad condemned
the US presence there in a visit to Kabul in March 2010, he
simultaneously called for ISAF to do more to tackle Afghanistan's
narcotics trade, a major problem for Iranian youth. In Iraq,
Tehran concluded six agreements deepening economic, technological,
health and cultural cooperation between it and Baghdad in 2011,
causing alarm among American and Saudi officials that a US
abandonment of Iraq could prompt its re-emergence as a proxy
battlefield between Sunni
groups supported by the Saudi and Persian Gulf monarchies and Shiite militias supported by Iran.
The
fundamental dilemma
for US policy-makers was therefore no closer to resolution towards
the twilight than at the dawn of the Obama administration.
If an Iranian nuclear capability, or actual weapon(s), represented
a strategic “red-line” for Washington, what
coercive measures would the White House realistically contemplate
to prevent it, given both the inevitable Iranian military
response across the region to American or Israeli strikes and – as
Table 5.2
documents – the limited international support for yet another US use of military force against a Muslim state? Well
prior to the Obama
administration, a fairly broad (though by no means universal) consensus had developed among the majority of Iran observers that a military strike was, on balance, not the optimal solution to the threat of the Iranian nuclear program. Reflecting the general parameters of that consensus, then Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated on April 13, 2009 that, “Militarily, in my view, it [a bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities] would delay the Iranian program for some period of time, but only delay it, probably only one to three years.”[271]
Not
only was international support for military action against Iran
limited, but
the post-Bush American public too was deeply sceptical about US
options. While opinion surveys confirmed that most Americans
supported actions to try to stop Iran enriching uranium and
developing a weapons program, they were hesitant about resorting
to military action because of the perceived dangers and presumed
limits of such a response. Even though 54 percent opposed
restoring diplomatic relations with Iran, for example, 62 percent
favored US leaders meeting and talking with Iran's leaders.
Only 18 percent agreed that the US should carry out a military
strike against Iran's energy facilities, with 41 percent preferring
economic sanctions and 33 percent wanting to continue diplomatic
efforts to encourage Iran to cease enriching uranium. 77
percent nonetheless opposed engaging in trade activities with
Iran.[272]
Having
said that, while Americans were pessimistic about the prospects of a
strike
causing Iran to give up its nuclear program, or even slowing it
down, and believed that an attack would increase Muslim hostility
to the US and prompt retaliatory action against US targets in the
region and even America itself, almost as many supported
a military strike (47 percent) as opposed it (49 percent) in the
event that diplomacy and economic sanctions ultimately failed.[273] It is worth noting in this context that,
far more so than Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan, the place
of Iran in American history has a very powerful resonance, given
the chequered post-1979 history: the fall of the Shah, the
American Embassy hostages held by the regime, the abortive rescue
attempt in 1980, and the Iran-Contra affair. There are,
after all, few other nations in which a presidential candidate
could happily recite in public a popular song calling for another
nation's bombing (and relatively few where such a popular song
would be made [and reissued seven years later]).[274] Moreover, among
the commentariat, the options for military intervention were not universally held to be prohibitively costly. As Amitai Etzioni argued, it may be that a successful military strike need not – and
perhaps should not – target the nuclear facilities in whole or even part in order to induce the required effect on the
existing, or an alternative, Iranian governing regime.[275]
As the Arab Spring erupted, ebbed and flowed through 2011, and the Obama administration
became increasingly erratic in dealing with the unanticipated popular challenges to entrenched (and, mostly, pro-US) Arab
autocrats, it became increasingly apparent
that the prospect – if it ever had existed – of large-scale US military
action against Iran
was now minimal under Obama's leadership. Admittedly,
the president still sought to provide reassurance about the
steadfastness of the US position. In his May 22, 2011 speech to
AIPAC, Obama stated:
You also see our commitment to our shared security in our determination to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons ... Its illicit nuclear program is just one challenge that Iran poses. As I said on Thursday, the Iranian government has shown its hypocrisy by claiming to support the rights of protesters while treating its own people with brutality. Moreover, Iran continues to support terrorism across the region, including providing weapons and funds to terrorist organizations. So we will continue to work to prevent these actions, and will stand up to groups like Hezbollah who exercise political assassination, and seek to impose their will through rockets and car bombs.
But the uprisings across North Africa, the Gulf and the Levant distracted both American
and international attentions from Iran's nuclear program. Moreover, as Jennifer
Rubin observed, Obama no longer even offered the standard mention of “all options being on the table.” As she
ruefully concluded, “The threat of military action is now clearly not credible.”[276]
One final factor in the Obama administration's strategic calculus was bringing to
a ultimate end the expensive and unpopular eight-year war with Iraq.
The Bush administration had negotiated the Strategic Framework
Agreement and the Status of Forces Agreement towards the end
of 2008; the former laid out a framework for future US-Iraqi
cooperation on matters such as diplomacy, trade, education, science
and technology, while the latter committed all US forces to be
removed from Iraq by December 31, 2011. Obama increased the
momentum by withdrawing all US combat forces by August 2010,
leaving a remaining presence of 50,000 troops for training,
counter-terrorism
and selective combat operations with Iraqi forces.
But
with 46,000 US troops still in the country in the summer of 2011, and
despite
the looming urgency of the end-of-year deadline, American and
Iraqi forces found it difficult to agree what a follow-on US
presence – and the broader bilateral relationship – might look
like. Despite his pledge for a complete withdrawal,
the Obama administration had made it clear to Iraqis that they
would provide a stay-on presence if so requested. The benefits
of such a force appeared clear: helping to defend Iraq's porous
borders, preventing Iranian weapons smuggling and insurgent
meddling, providing counter-terrorism support against al Qaeda in
Mesopotamia, and reassuring Iraqi
Kurdistan. Above all, for US strategic interests,
an American presence could help to maintain Iraqi independence from Tehran's malign orbit.
American officials were insistent that the Iraqi government had to come forward
with a request, placing the responsibility for a long-term US presence on the fragile coalition of Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki. But, while al-Maliki was granted the authority to engage in
negotiations
in August 2011, he did not make a public request for the US to
stay. al-Maliki feared the political costs such an extension
of the “occupation” would imply, and depended for support on the
Shiite party of Moqtada
al-Sadr – an Iranian client who threatened that his militia would wage war against US troops if they remained in Iraq.
The protracted process of internal bargaining in the Iraqi government compounded the problem of being seen to concede the
desirability of US forces staying put.
At
the same time, the Obama administration was once again wrestling with
its own
internal rifts and rivalries. Eager to depart in a responsible
manner that safeguarded the post-invasion political settlement,
the Pentagon – including the US Commander in Iraq, General Lloyd
Austin – had lobbied for follow-on forces ranging from 14,000 to
18,000 troops. But senior Pentagon officials let it
be known in early September 2011 that a much lower number, reputed
to be in the range of 3,000, had been imposed by the White
House as adequate, if not optimal, for US interests.[277]
Much as had occurred previously over the
surge and drawdown in Afghanistan, strategic considerations were
trumped by domestic ones for Obama. Ensuring the withdrawal
of almost all US forces and underscoring the end of the Iraq war
would represent a timely asset to his re-election ambitions
and “nation-building” at home. But in strategic terms, a US force
of fewer than 10,000 would encounter serious
problems in defending itself against Iranian-sponsored militants
and al Qaeda, much less carrying out effective training or
counter-terrorism missions. It also would necessitate abandoning
any effort to prevent violence in Kurdistan.
In the context of an already deteriorating security situation – with attacks by Sunni jihadists
on the increase and the Sadrists threatening to mobilize – a premature US withdrawal could threaten to unravel the fragile
gains of the 2007–11 years, imperilling Iraqi sovereignty and stability and empowering Iranian ambitions still further.
As even the normally pro-Obama Washington
Post argued, “Any continuing military mission in Iraq should be founded on clear goals and a calculation of the
troops needed to accomplish them – not an estimate of what troop number will acceptable to Congress or the president's
base of supporters.”[278] Ultimately, the failure of the Obama administration to secure a deal that provided
US forces with immunity from Iraqi lawsuits resulted in, once more, an outcome more congenial to the president's domestic
electoral interest than necessarily America's strategic one: the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.
Despite the unmistakeable symbolic contrast with its immediate predecessor, the
Obama administration encountered very similar challenges in seeking even a mild rapprochement
with Tehran, much less the “grand bargain” often touted by “realist” foreign policy commentators:
a fractious Iranian regime mired in intra-conservative and theocratic
convulsions, corrupt and despised by the Iranian people; a growing
crisis of state legitimacy, founded on a set of chronically dysfunctional economic and social problems and exacerbated by
the fraudulent presidential election of 2009 and subsequent repression; an appalling tolerance for human rights abuses, torture
and terrorism; an abiding desire to project regional influence
by stoking anti-Sunni, anti-Jewish and anti-Western sentiments,
harboring and supplying terrorists (not just from Hezbollah
and Hamas but also al Qaeda and other groups) and targeting US
forces in Iraq and Afghanistan; and a dogged pursuit of an
Iranian nuclear capacity that serves as the only moderately
unifying force in an otherwise deeply divided and fissiparous
society, one characterized by pervasive ethnic, religious and
socio-economic divisions.
Faced
by such intractable and unpropitious forces, the Obama administration's
attempts
to effect a post-American foreign policy through moves towards
normalizing bilateral relations were always likely to encounter
close to insurmountable obstacles. However commendable and sincere
the effort, by the fall of 2009 the weight of opinion within
the administration was shifting to a harder-line position, one
remarkably reminiscent of the Bush administration post-2004
but strengthened politically by the consistent Iranian rejection
of Washington's transparently clear wish for improved bilateral
relations.
Predictably enough, Obama's evolving positions – from outreach to sanctions
to a sotto voce endorsement of regime change from within married to covert operations
– encountered caustic opposition from both ends of the political spectrum. On the left, in a typically sober and balanced
castigation, veteran Marxist agitator Tariq Ali lamented that “From
Palestine through Iraq to Iran, Obama has acted as just another steward of the American empire, pursuing the same aims as
his predecessors, with the same means but with a more emollient rhetoric.”[279] In similarly
judicious and restrained commentary, the Iranian scholar Elaheh Rostami-Povey
asserted that “the US policy of asserting global control over strategic resources – especially oil – and
expanding its power militarily, economically and politically is continuing under Barack Obama,” as clearly demonstrated
in the president's continuing support for Israel and the lack of “substance” to his supposed outreach to Muslims
worldwide:
The Obama administration has seemingly not learned the lessons of the failure of these policies and of the death and destruction they have brought to the people of the Middle East as well as to the US military. Therefore, sanctions, “regime change” and democratization Iraq- and Afghanistan-style are on the agenda, and the threat of war with Iran persists. Although unilateralism is unlikely under Obama's administration, multilateralism is just a tactical adjustment, reflecting an accommodation to the limits of American power rather than a strategic reorientation.[280]
On
the right, Tehran remained an outpost of extremism that the US should
altogether
shun, recognizing that as far as engagement was concerned, that
dog was never going to hunt. Obama's outreach efforts represented
yet another instance of a naive and weak post-American foreign
policy – one which imagined that apologizing for American
arrogance and errors could somehow magically yield a
“forgive-and-forget” reciprocal gesture from a tyrannically
thuggish theocratic regime intent on stoking regional fires rather
than putting them out. Reflecting on the Undersecretary
(and latterly, Deputy Secretary) of State, William Burns's, testimony
on Iran
to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on December 1, 2010
– in which Burns noted US concerns about Iran before observing
that there was “still room for a renewed effort
to break down mistrust, and begin a careful, phased process of
building confidence between Iran and the international community”
and declaring that “The door is still open to serious negotiation,
if Iran is prepared to walk through it” –
Stephen Hayes and Thomas
Joscelyn argued:
Yet Burns said nothing about Iran's efforts to fund, train, and equip jihadists in Afghanistan. He said nothing about the extensive Iranian backing of radical Shiite groups in Iraq over the past seven years. He said nothing of Iran's ongoing support for al Qaeda – support that might have been particularly interesting to his audience of American lawmakers. In his remarks on Capitol Hill, Burns simply chose not to mention that the leaders of Iran have been fighting a stealth war against the United States, its soldiers, and its citizens. It is this fact that complicates the Obama administration's efforts to engage Iran. So it is simply set aside.[281]
Certainly, the Obama administration's approach reflected an important underlying
difference with his predecessor. Unlike the Bush administration, which took seriously the proposition that regime type had
an important effect on external behavior (at least until 2006[282]),
the Obama administration viewed
Tehran through a classical realist lens, as simply one among many
states with whom it could – potentially – do
constructive business, despite its more disagreeable practices,
internal repression and destabilizing regional policies. But
the central and inescapable feature of Iran's strategic
personality in the Middle East is that it views itself as the
pre-eminent
geo-strategic rival to Washington – not to mention Saudi Arabia
and Israel – rather than as a potential partner.
Moreover, while the priority for the Obama administration was the
Iranian nuclear program, too myopic a focus on cutting a
deal on that alone – while a very desirable outcome, without doubt
– would neglect the multiple ways in which
Iranian interests and ambitions pervade the region and
run directly against those of the US. As the leading British scholar of Iran,
Ali Ansari, wrote:
... the nuclear impasse is a consequence of a far wider problem between Iran and the United States, not its cause. A solution to the nuclear issue will only defer and not solve the Iranian question. That question, which has been inherited by the United States, can trace its roots further back than 1979 or 1953, to the humiliation of Turkmenchai in 1828 and the gradual realization that Iran has suffered an imperial fall from grace. Our current preoccupation with the nuclear issue should not deflect us from the fundamentals of this historic situation and the political myths it provides.[283]
Or, to put it another way, as one former Iranian president explained, Ayatollah Khamenei's position is, “Ma doshmani ba
Amrika ra lazem dareem”: “We need enmity with the United States.”[284]
By the latter
stages of his first term, Obama appeared to finally be reconciled
to the notion that no amount of bridge-building or strategic
engagement could alter that fundamental feature of Iranian statecraft:
in turn, isolating Iran as far as feasibly possible became the central
goal of American statecraft.
Where to go from there, however, remained highly problematic. The New York Times reported in January 2010 that a
memo from Bob Gates to the White House claimed the administration
lacked an effective strategy to counter Iran in the event that
existing policies failed. While the Secretary subsequently
claimed the memo had been “mischaracterized,” it was widely seen
as a prelude for a resigned acceptance of a nuclear-capable
Iran and a nascent shift to a Cold War-style strategy of
containment and deterrence, rather than a military confrontation
damaging to America's regional position. Although other members of
the administration repeated the familiar mantra of “all
options” still being on the table, Secretary Clinton had seemingly
given the strategic game away when she stated in
Thailand on July 22, 2009 that, “If the US extends a defensive
umbrella over the region, it's unlikely that Iran will
be any stronger or safer, because they won't be able to intimidate
and dominate, as they apparently believe they can, once
they have a nuclear weapon.”[285]
Gates, too, made clear on a number of occasions his strongly sceptical
view of
the utility or efficacy of military action. Such positions won
modest international relief at the price of substantially undercutting
the credibility of the military option within the overall US
posture towards Iran, while simultaneously unnerving America's
Arab allies in the region and Israel.
Moreover,
the brute reality remains that Iran is already nuclear capable –
it possesses the technology to produce fissile material. Its
leaders must judge how close to crossing the red line to nuclear
weapons production and how large a stockpile of LEU it can
accumulate before it provokes a large-scale military response from
– if not the US under Obama – Israel. Facing what Tel Aviv
perceives as the genuine threat of another Shoah, how far Israeli tolerance of
Iran's efforts would last remained to be seen, since the Israelis themselves are clearly divided on how much of a threat a
nuclear Iran would pose and on the merits of a military attack to prevent such an outcome. Moreover, in terms of domestic
American opinion, Iran is one of the relatively few global issues where bipartisanship still prevails, with Democrats and
Republicans overwhelmingly agreed on a tough line – a position likely to intensify even further in the absence of an
American diplomatic breakthrough or economic sanctions working (during the Republican Party presidential debate in Iowa of
August 11, 2011, for example, only the neo-isolationist Ron Paul [R-TX] departed from a strongly anti-Iranian line). As Andrew Parasiliti presciently observed in October 2010:
There seems to be only a fragile and largely unenthusiastic congressional constituency for engagement with Iran, and no constituency for living with an Iranian nuclear weapon. Congressional pressure on Iran will likely increase mid-2011 and into the 2012 US presidential campaign, especially if Republicans enjoy substantial gains in the November 2010 congressional elections. Republicans may seek to portray President Obama as naive or misguided for seeking to engage Iran.[286]
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