The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat

by Vali Nasr

  Nothing symbolized this dismal turn of events better than Admiral Mullen’s testimony. Mullen had been friendly with General Kayani. Their personal rapport had symbolized the close historical ties between the Pentagon and the GHQ (Pakistan’s military headquarters in Rawalpindi). The personal friendship was over, and so were the strategic ties between the two militaries.

  In time we will ask, “Who lost Pakistan?” We will also have to ask why. Holbrooke understood that Pakistan would change its foreign policy only if something more than America’s immediate counterterrorism needs bound us together. But after the U.S.-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue finally got going, Holbrooke passed away and, following the first crisis of 2011, Washington quickly froze the talks. Holbrooke’s successor, Marc Grossman, told an incredulous Pakistani press that America was looking for a “transactional relationship.” We have no common interests, he told his Pakistani counterparts, just common objectives. The Pakistanis read that as code for “American objectives, which Pakistan is expected to fulfill.”

  Pakistan was always going to be a hard case, a difficult problem. My point is that we made it harder than it had to be. We failed when it came to strategic vision and imagination, and we failed in our commitment to diplomacy. We further destabilized the world’s so-called most dangerous place—in effect compounding our own headaches. We have less influence in Pakistan in 2012 after a year of confrontation than we had in 2011 after two years of friendship. We acted as if we could walk away from Pakistan—which of course we cannot and will not do, and they knew it all along. Ours was not just an empty bluff, it was worse than that—it was folly we believed in and crafted our policy on, and all Pakistan had to do was wait for reality to set in.

  We could have managed Pakistan better. We did not have to break the relationship and put Pakistan’s stability at risk. That course of action has not gotten us any further than the more prudent course of greater engagement—in fact, it’s gotten us a lot less. We have not realized our immediate security goals there and have put our long-run strategic interests in jeopardy. Pakistan is a failure of American policy, a failure of the sort that comes from the president handing foreign policy over to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies.

  Looking back at how President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration decided to “Americanize” the Vietnam War by using air power against the North Vietnamese, Johnson’s national security adviser McGeorge Bundy reflected on what had surprised him most about that war. “The endurance of the enemy,” he concluded. His belief in the persuasive power of coercion had blinded him to the possibility that the North Vietnamese could withstand the full brunt of American military power. This failure of imagination, widespread throughout Johnson’s team, was singularly responsible for the calamity that followed.1 The road to foreign policy disasters is paved with false assumptions that, when repeated enough in America’s closed-circuit foreign policy discussions, can take on the quality of self-evident truths.

  His worst mistakes, thought Bundy long after the last U.S. helicopter had left Saigon, were never asking what the North Vietnamese would absolutely refuse to give up and failing “to examine what could be done to make the best of a bad business while not escalating.”2 War in the end had not been the best option, and not exploring other possibilities had proved America’s undoing.

  Decades after Vietnam, the George W. Bush administration repeated these mistakes in Iraq. There, too, a set of false assumptions, intelligence blunders, and overblown claims about Iraq’s nuclear and chemical-weapons capabilities led us into a futile and costly war. In Iraq, we discovered that we could create giants out of straw men and become prisoners of scary images we drew ourselves. This sort of bogeyman foreign policy has not served us well—we will still be counting the cost of the Iraq war long into the future.

  McGeorge Bundy’s ruminations were popular reading at the White House in early 2009. Everyone, President Obama included, seemed to be studying this cautionary tale in order to avert a similar disaster in Afghanistan.3 But Bundy’s warning was just as relevant to the fog of another conflict, the one with the other American bugbear, Iran. That was apparently lost on the administration.

  America’s approach to Iran’s nuclear challenge over the past decade has reprised too much of what led up to our two recent ill-fated wars. Exaggerated descriptions of the threat, false assumptions, and overly narrow reasoning have been resounding through the foreign policy punditry’s echo chamber.

  It is taken for granted that Iran’s nuclear program is a national and global security concern—especially in light of that country’s fairly advanced missile-delivery system—and an existential threat to Israel, an unacceptable strategic game changer that will destabilize the Middle East by eventually placing nuclear material in the hands of terrorists or leading to a regional nuclear arms race and more broadly endangering world peace by fueling nuclear proliferation. In short, Iranian nukes are a red line that must not be crossed. America will “not countenance” Iran getting nuclear weapons, said President Obama as he insisted that an American policy of pressure and coercion would ensure that that would not be the case.4 Bending Iran’s will thus became a key test of U.S. power and effectiveness, in American minds as well as those of friends and foes alike. This approach came with a large downside risk, however, for it committed America to a path of increasing pressure, backed by military threats, to realize what was from the outset an improbable goal.

  Those who thought that perhaps the Iranian nuclear threat was not all it was made out to be, or who assumed that Iran could be talked out of its nuclear program, were viewed as no different from the “doves” of 1965, those who “labored under the weakened argument predicated on the ‘fancifully hopeful’ expectation that there existed a negotiated diplomatic settlement that could end the war in Vietnam and achieve a grand compromise with communist power.”5 As one veteran diplomat told me, “all this chest-beating on Iran” feels like Vietnam. “There is only one line of argument; anyone suggesting something different is dismissed as a ‘wimp.’ ”

  But unlike Johnson, Obama was not looking for war. In fact, he assumed that the Iran problem could be managed without resort to military action. When war talk rose in Washington in the spring of 2012, Obama pushed back, challenging his Republican critics and making the case to the American people that the nation did not need war at this time. That was a bold and deft maneuver.6

  Yet Obama’s own assumptions about resolving the crisis, which favored all manner of pressure short of war, were flawed from the outset. His administration succumbed to exaggerated Israeli and Arab fears of Iran and exaggerated promises of Arab support for American action against Iran. He did not pursue rigorous diplomacy and chose to rely on pressure alone, and so inevitably led America back to where it had been in 1965—on the slippery slope to war. The only alternative left would be to accept a nuclear Iran and adopt a strategy of containment to deal with it—which Obama promised he would not do. Over the course of his presidency, Obama’s position on Iran steadily moved to the right, its assumptions and strategy hardly distinguishable from those of the Bush White House. By 2012, Obama was compelled to run from a huge boulder he himself had started rolling downhill—trying to rescue American foreign policy from the path to confrontation upon which he had set it.

  The United States and Iran have been at loggerheads since an Islamic revolution toppled the pro-American Pahlavi monarchy in 1979. Many contentious issues and a plethora of clashes and recriminations have divided the onetime allies, but the plain truth is that anti-Americanism is embedded in the ideological fabric of the Islamic Republic. Iran is the last bastion of a sort of anti-imperialist Third Worldism that was once ubiquitous outside the West; its dictatorship sees power and glory in resistance, sheathing old-line anti-West nationalism in a thin veneer of Islamic extremism.

  For much of the past three decades, America has largely ignored Iran. A hostile stalemate has reigned, with both sides happy to eschew formal ties and meaningful relations. D
espite Iran’s truculent stance—menacing its neighbors and posturing against the international order—Washington has contemplated neither engagement nor military action. Washington has contained Iran when necessary, otherwise leaving it to stew in its own resentments as U.S. policy makers wait for the day when the rash Shia theocracy, burdened by a raft of internal inconsistencies, crumbles in the face of popular discontent.

  But Iran has always been hard to ignore. Its geostrategic location, vast oil and gas reserves, and significant influence on public opinion in the Muslim world, and especially the Shia part of it, all conspire against America being able to act as though the Islamic Republic does not exist. And if that were not enough, Iran has been a menace to its neighbors and a disrupter (along with its Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian allies) of Middle Eastern stability. Iran has continuously dabbled in terrorism. Its elite military intelligence unit, the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Brigade, enjoys an almost mythic reputation as the dark force behind all manner of rebellions and extremist attacks across the region. In Iraq, it waged a brazen campaign of violence against American forces, a veritable war, in General Petraeus’s estimation.7 Tehran has also—much to Washington’s as well as its Arab neighbors’ quiet annoyance—encouraged Palestinians to continue pushing back against Israel and refusing to make peace. Beyond encouragement, Iran has given radical Palestinian factions substantial material support.

  Iran’s rulers seem bent on maintaining their regime’s revolutionary vigor. To that end, they are wedded to anti-Americanism. In a region where angst about the long historical decline of the once-glorious Muslim civilization cuts deep, defiance of the West and vows to reverse the writ of history have a certain appeal. And herein lies the big difference between Iran and its economically successful and diplomatically astute Muslim neighbor, Turkey. Turkey looks to a robust GDP to satiate its longing for international influence, Iran to anti-Westernism backed by nuclear capability. The ruling Turkish party grew out of a similar yearning to make political Islam ascendant but now sees power and glory in joining, and doing well in, the world order and the global economy.

  Iran has decided to make its mark in a region that sets great store by muscular shows of power through a strategy of defying America and challenging Israel. For generations now, toughness against Israel has been the mark of power in the Middle East. There is deep sympathy for Palestinians across the Muslim world, but its relative intensity from country to country tells of a different dynamic at play: The Palestinian drama has become something of a gladiator game for reigning and aspiring regional players, one in which Iran has done exceedingly well. But with Islamism (seasoned with anti-Americanism) washing over the Arab world, the returns on anti-Israeli posturing will likely diminish.

  It seems as if Iran will not or cannot get past the 1979 revolution. It is determined to keep alive the reign of rigid ideology the world thought had died when jubilant Germans tore down the Berlin Wall. Iran basks in the image of the outsider challenging the status quo, the inconvenient spoiler that keeps the region on the edge. In the parlance of international relations “realism,” Iran is the epitome of an “insurgent” regional power arranged against the “status quo” forces in its vicinity.

  In 2003, when America was getting ready to topple an Arab nationalist dictatorship in Iraq, there were those who thought that the battle for liberal values in the region would be won only when the theocracy in Iran was laid low as well. After all, it was in Iran that Islamic fundamentalism first rose to challenge the West; that challenge would end only when the Islamic Republic ended too. The disastrous Iraq war tempered enthusiasm for carrying the fight to Iran. But Iran’s leaders fully understand that their country is a trough in the otherwise ever-flattening world of growing democratic expectations, global trade, and liberal international institutions. Iran’s leaders know in their bones that their system of government and view of the world are anomalies in a global order that reflects the American imagination far more than it does their own. The world cannot, in the long run, tolerate troughs. A confrontation is inevitable. As Henry Kissinger put it, Iran will have to decide “whether it is a nation or a cause.”8

  But Iran refuses to decide. One reason Iran covets nuclear capability is that it will allow it to retain this in-between position. A nuclear shield will mean neither war nor peace. America will never go to war with a nuclear Iran to remove this last remnant of yesteryear’s ideological defiance and disruptive revolutionary activism. In turn, Iran will not have to make peace with America, compromise on its ideology, and come in from the cold to avert war or isolation.

  In the last decade U.S.-Iran relations have gone from a high point of cooperation on the war in Afghanistan to today’s low point of incessant talk of incipient war. In late 2001, Iranian diplomats and even some in the Revolutionary Guards made the case for cooperating with the United States in toppling the Taliban and bringing a new political order to Afghanistan. Supreme Leader Khamenei conceded, and Iran offered air bases, search-and-rescue missions for downed American pilots, help in tracking and killing al-Qaeda leaders, and assistance in building ties with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.9 As we have seen, Iran was also an important reason for the success of the Bonn Conference that was convened in 2001 to decide Afghanistan’s future. When the dickering over who would get what ministry in the new Afghan government hit a dead end, it was Iran’s ambassador to the UN, Javad Zarif, who saved the day, persuading Yunus Qanuni, the head of the Afghan delegation, to compromise.10

  Still, even then Khamenei told his diplomats and military commanders that they should approach cooperation with the United States with eyes wide open. A stable Afghanistan no longer under Taliban rule would be good for Iran, but they should not see cooperation with the United States as a stepping-stone to better relations. “America will not embrace a cooperative Iran with open arms,” he warned them. “America is also not ready to talk to Iran about regional security issues because that would mean recognizing Iran’s role in the region. In short, America is not ready to accept and live with the Iranian revolution.”11 Khamenei should have added that the Iranian revolution was not ready or willing to live with American influence in the Middle East either. Iran’s continued support for terrorism and constant challenging of U.S.-backed policies across the region could not be read any other way.

  So the close cooperation in toppling the Taliban and putting Karzai in its place proved to be of no great consequence. Shortly thereafter, the Bush administration let it be known what it really thought of Iran by including it in its exclusive “Axis of Evil.” And just in case there was a misunderstanding and the Axis of Evil designation was not Washington’s final word, in 2003 Iran offered comprehensive negotiations on all outstanding issues between the two countries, only to be decisively rejected. Iran even put in writing that it was prepared to discuss an end to its support for radical Palestinian groups, having Hezbollah lay down its weapons, signing on to Saudi Arabia’s 2002 plan for a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab states, cooperating in fighting al-Qaeda and building a new state in Iraq, and finally, signing the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

  Iran may have hoped that the momentum Bonn had created for improved relations would continue, or perhaps Iran was frightened by America’s determination to bring about regime change through force of arms in neighboring Iraq. Either way, Tehran seemed to be doing something that it had never done before—reach out to America with the offer of a breakthrough in relations.

  The Supreme Leader gave his blessing to this ambitious offer, but with a caveat. Khamenei told Iran’s reformist president Mohammad Khatami, “I am not going to object to your plan, but mark my words: America will not agree to this offer. They will see it as a sign of our weakness.”12 He was right. The Bush administration saw no value in the offer, never replied to it, and admonished the Swiss government for even bringing it to Washington.

  Administration hawks calculated that Iran was weak and vulnerable. Why th
row it a lifeline by talking to it? But they misjudged the situation. As Iraq turned into a quagmire, the balance of power shifted; Iran grew stronger and, rebuffed by America, took its offer off the table.

  Iraq did not turn out as America had expected. Quick victory proved to be a mirage, and America found itself facing an insurgency and escalating violence bordering on full-fledged civil war. And Iran had a hand in that, supporting radical Shia factions who resorted to violence to end the American presence in Iraq. Meanwhile, Washington’s expectation that regime change in Iraq would undo clerical rule in Iran proved untrue. With its economic and political influence spreading in Baghdad and across the Iraqi south, Iran actually looked to be the winner in the Iraq war.13 That provided another opening for talks.

  Senior Iraqi Shia leader Abdul Aziz Hakim, who had close ties with Khamenei, made common cause with influential Iranian conservative leader Ali Larijani for the purpose of getting Tehran to talk to the United States about Iraq. Khamenei agreed, and the Iranians approached Iraq’s president Jalal Talabani to carry a message to the Americans in Baghdad. He came back from a trip to Iran with the news that Tehran “was ready for an understanding with America from Afghanistan to Lebanon. They are ready for discussions in order to reach results that please both sides.”14 But the talks never happened. By one account, the United States scuttled the meeting shortly before it was supposed to take place because Iran was sending Larijani and Revolutionary Guard commander Yahya Rahim-Safavi—the United States was then angry over Iran’s deadly support for Shia militias, but also Washington did not want to deal with Iran seriously and at the highest level. In the end, American and Iranian ambassadors met in Baghdad but never got beyond reading aloud charge sheets in which each side lamented the other’s bad behavior.