Engaging Iran: Cuban, Chinese, and Soviet precedents
May 11th, 2009 by MESH
From Michael Mandelbaum
To engage or not to engage? That is the question hanging over American policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran—or at least it was the central question for the United States until the advent of the Obama administration, which appears to have settled on proceeding with engagement. That decision, however, raises another important question: what can engagement be expected to accomplish?
Stating the question that way leads immediately to two problems. First, the word “engagement” is a vague, slippery one. In the matrimonial context it refers to a promise (to marry) that may or may not be fulfilled—an apt description, it would seem, of American engagement with that other tyrannical regime that is ideologically hostile to the West and aspires to nuclear weapons, North Korea. Second, the United States has had, in the three decades since the mullahs came to power in Tehran, considerable informal, unofficial, and quasi-official contact with the regime and its supporters. Still, if engagement is taken to mean official diplomatic relations, there have been none since the overthrow of the Shah, and it is worth asking what pursuing such relations might now achieve.
Those who advocate engagement with Iran often invoke a particular kind of analogy in support of their preference: American relations with communist countries during the Cold War. The comparison is a fair one: Cuba, the People’s Republic of China, and the Soviet Union—like Iran—are or have been countries with rulers committed to a radical anti-western ideology. While analogies cannot, of course, prove anything, they can be suggestive. What, then, do the histories of American relations with these three countries suggest about the prospects for engagement with Iran?
The experience with Cuba is often cited as evidence of the futility of non-engagement. For five decades the United States has shunned formal ties with, and indeed has maintained an economic embargo on, Cuba. Yet the Castro brothers remain in power. As with Iran, the Obama administration apparently plans to expand contacts with Cuba, and while this may turn out to bring some benefit to the United States and the people of the island, the Cuban case does not demonstrate the general utility of engagement, because Cuba has not been isolated from the world, but only from the United States. Other Western countries have long maintained diplomatic and economic ties with the Castro regime—there has been, that is, plenty of engagement—without noticeably expanding the freedoms or enhancing the economic welfare of the average Cuban.
It is worth noting that despite what they publicly proclaim, neither the Castros nor the Iranian mullahs seem actually to want political and economic normalization with the United States. If this is, in fact, the case, it is the most persuasive argument for such normalization of which I am aware.
If Cuba is often cited to demonstrate the folly of avoiding official contact with a hostile communist country, American relations with China are just as frequently offered as evidence of the virtues of having such contacts. After two decades of estrangement following the communist conquest of the mainland in 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the United States launched a diplomatic initiative to Beijing that led, ultimately, to the Nixon visit of February 1972 and the establishment of formal diplomatic relations in 1978. The result was a strategic alignment helpful to both countries in containing the Soviet Union and the growth of economic ties to the point that China has become a major American trading partner.
Over the last three decades, moreover, China has undergone considerable liberalization in its economy and some, although far less, in its political system. Sino-American ties are not ideal, but they are far better than relations between the United States and Iran. If engagement can achieve with the mullahs in Tehran what Washington’s policies of nearly four decades have accomplished with the communists in Beijing, this would count as a substantial gain for American foreign policy.
The pattern of Sino-American relations does not, however, illustrate the virtues of engagement so much as it reflects the power of circumstances. Mao Zedong was willing to put aside his ideological aversion to the United States in the early 1970s because his country was severely threatened by the Soviet Union. The two communist giants fought a small-scale, two-stage border war in 1969 and in the second round China was the clear loser. Moscow proceeded to deploy a huge army on its border with China and suggested—to some members of the Nixon administration, at least—that it was seriously contemplating a strike on China’s then-small stockpile of nuclear weapons.
In these dire circumstances, China behaved the way classical international relations theory would predict: it moved closer to the United States to offset Soviet power on the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” If the mullahs were comparably threatened— by, say, a resurgent, neo-imperial Russia—they might well reach out to Washington as did the Chinese in the 1970s. But they are not so threatened and will not, in the foreseeable future, face any such threat. Even if they did, alliances of convenience often prove to be ephemeral. The American alliance with the Soviet Union during the Second World War did not, after all, prevent the Cold War after Germany had been defeated.
As for the close economic ties between the United States and China, these have their roots in economic decisions made by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, primarily for reasons of domestic politics rather than international security—decisions of a kind the rulers of the Islamic republic show no sign of making. The American experience with China has, therefore, little or nothing to teach us about the prospects with Iran.
That is not the case, however, for the history of Soviet-American relations. The United States remained aloof from the Bolshevik regime from its seizure of power in St. Petersburg in 1917 until 1933, when the newly installed Roosevelt administration established diplomatic relations with the communist government that had moved its capital to Moscow. The two countries were allies during the Second World War, but from the mid-1940s to the end of the 1980s they were as estranged and hostile as the United States and Iran are today.
Throughout the Cold War, however they maintained regular diplomatic contact, arranged cultural exchanges and athletic contests, staged summit meetings, and conducted elaborate and protracted negotiations about armaments, particularly nuclear weapons. All this contact comes under the general heading of engagement; in Soviet-American relations there was a good deal of it. I believed at the time and believe in retrospect that some of this engagement was useful; the end-of-Cold-War arms control agreements were, in my judgement, exceedingly useful. (Those interested in the reasons for this evaluation may wish to read Chapter 4 of my 2002 book The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century.)
Yet the cumulative impact of all that engagement on the overall relationship between the two nuclear superpowers was, while certainly not trivial, at best marginal. Two separate features were central to the relationship: post-1945 Soviet-American relations may be divided into two unequal parts, each with a single defining feature: from the mid-1940s to the late 1980s, deterrence; from the late 1980s to December, 1991, regime change.
So I suspect it will be with American relations with Iran, with or without engagement. The United States will have to rely mainly on deterrence in its relations with Tehran (and deterring a nuclear-armed Iran will be more difficult than deterring the Iran of today) unless and until the Islamic Republic falls and is succeeded by a regime less hostile to the United States and the West. This is not to say that establishing diplomatic relations with Iran is necessarily wrong, or removing the mullahs from power is feasible or that trying to do so is desirable. It is rather to say that what its advocates hope to achieve with engagement will probably only come about through regime change.
Michael Mandelbaum delivered these remarks at a symposium on “Iran: Threat, Challenge, or Opportunity?” convened by MESH at Harvard University on April 30.
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My old friend Michael Mandelbaum makes some fine points in his post, rising, as he usually does, above all the noise and chatter to see the essence of the situation. He makes three unassailable observations: all analogies limp, and some fall flat on their faces; context defines the character of “engagement” opportunities and hence their desirability; and in any event, process cannot trump the substance of what a regime believes to be its vital interests.
When it comes to Iran, it is my view that few if any historical cases of U.S. engagement or non-engagement with ideological hostile regimes offer us much insight. Iran is in many ways sui generis. Its decision system is a black box for the most part, even to those who study the regime most closely. It may well be that the Iranian regime, modeled as it seems to be on a clutch of Shi’a clerics discussing theological and other issues (I wish I knew more Safavid history), could not take “yes” for an answer even if its inner, closeted majority wanted to. It is very hard for U.S. decisionmakers to dope out a sequence of events that may issue from a U.S. initiative to engage, because we do not have a very good grasp of what Imam Khamenei thinks or how his relations with other senior clerics affect the decision process as a whole.
It’s not just a problem with a person or an inner sanctum of decisionmakers, either. In this case, I think it is even harder for us to anticipate where an initiative would end up because the strategic cultures of our two countries are substantially different. The streamlined historical narratives we all carry around in our heads, and which we use to assess the potential actions of others, are shaped by certain assumptions about human nature and history itself. If a person grows up believing that we are all conceived in sin and must rely on the strict religious instruction given by those who understand sacred texts in order to guide us away from our natural dispositions, his or her way of understanding history is going to differ from that of a person who believes that people are born free to construct their moral personalities in a world that is full of hope and possibility. Without belaboring the point, which some will accept and others reject (foolishly), most senior American decisionmakers know little of of how Iranian Shi’a clerics see the world. We had a vastly better idea of how an assortment of Communists did.
So in fact we don’t know if the Iranian leadership will read American actions as an indication of weakness, as some fear. Or whether they will view it as an act attempting to establish symbolic equality, the prerequisite in Arabo-Muslim culture for serious dealing. Or whether they will interpret it as a discrete act, or only in the context of what the United States does varyingly in the region and the world (very likely). We can, if we try hard, know a lot more about likelihoods in this regard, but we are unlikely ever to be sure how the Iranians are reading our intent. And that, of course, makes all the difference when it comes to judging if, and more important maybe, how, to pursue “engagement.” I think the Cuban, Chinese, Russian and, just by the way, the apartheid South African cases, have little of certain value to teach us in this case, but plenty of potential to mislead.
All that said, I would make only three other brief points about the Iranian “engagement” debate. First, just as the Bush administration wanted to be the un-Clinton, the Obama administration wants to be the un-Bush. This is silly but politically natural, and it happens all the time. In this case, it adds a certain carrying-capacity globally since, rightly or wrongly, the Bush foreign policy is marked low by most national elites. So here is a case where “change” buys the administration some chits and perhaps prolongs its honeymoon. This is regardless of the actual efficacy of any initiative, of course.
Second, any such engagement initiative will cause laundry problems among several of our Sunni Arab associates. It already has, and that’s why Secretary Gates went to the region carrying the diplomatic equivalent of “fresh wipes.” They don’t believe him, and they don’t trust the new President. So while an engagement initiative might or might not yield benefits, it will certainly exact some costs (which, however, can sometimes themselves be put to good uses).
And third, for all I know (and I don’t know), Obama administration principals are pretty damned determined to take a hard line on Iranian proliferation dangers, up to and including using force if the Iranians cross the red-line, which I would define as actually moving to a test. If so, they may read the timeline in such a way as to move them to show the world —the so-called non-existent international community—that they have done all they could, gone the extra mile, done the multilateralist drill, and been oh so slow to anger, before they lower the boom on the mullahs. They may think, too, that all this “optical” preparation work will deter the Israelis from acting prematurely on their own, but that depends on what gets said in private on this score, and I am not privy to it. In my case, then, not only do I strain to imagine what the Iranians may understand by an American engagement initiative, I am not even sure what my own government intends by it.
Adam Garfinkle is a member of MESH.
In his May 1 sermon, Tehran Friday prayer leader Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami proclaimed, “You do not want talks!” Khatami was addressing the United States, but the remark would have more appropriately been directed to his own leaders in the Iranian regime. If one thing is clear about the Obama administration’s Iran policy, it is that the United States does indeed want talks. However, as Michael Mandelbaum suggests, it is very likely that Iran’s rulers do not.
Prof. Mandelbaum’s examination of the Cuban, Chinese, and Russian analogies casts doubt on the prospects for U.S.-Iran engagement. Further doubt is raised by an examination of the extensive record of such engagement already logged by U.S. administrations since 1979. Every U.S. president has reached out to the Iranian regime, to no avail.
This outreach has failed, in my view, not because of insufficient U.S. effort; to take one example, the Clinton administration made nearly one dozen unilateral concessions despite receiving no reciprocation from the government of Mohammad Khatami. Nor is it, as is often claimed, due to historical grievances or mistrust. In response to President Obama’s Nowruz message to Iran, Majles Speaker Ali Larijani scoffed, stating that the U.S.-Iran dispute was not an “emotional issue” that could be solved with “fine words.” The frequent citation of these two explanations for the lack of progress in U.S.-Iran relations reflects a certain solipsism—a belief that Iranian policy is a function of U.S. policy, and that changes to U.S. policy would therefore bring corresponding changes by Iran.
In fact, at the heart of the U.S.-Iran dispute are divergent interests. Tehran does not desire reconciliation with the United States. There are two reasons for this, both of which stem from the fact that the Iranian regime values its own survival above all. First, anti-Americanism is a pillar of the Revolution, and any acknowledgment by Iran’s rulers that one facet of Revolutionary ideology is anachronistic risks challenging the entire system. Second, as Prof. Mandelbaum notes, autocratic regimes such as Iran’s thrive on closure and are threatened by openness.
While the regime may not desire reconciliation with the United States, it does desire talks with the United States. For Tehran, these talks are not a means to an end, but an end in themselves. They confer upon the regime a greater legitimacy and prestige than they would otherwise enjoy, and bolster Iran’s hegemonic aspirations. Talks carry other benefits for the regime, and dangers for the United States; they risk disheartening advocates of reform in Iran and U.S. allies in the region, they may convey weakness to Iran’s leaders and embolden rather than temper their nuclear ambitions, and, most practically, may give the regime the time it needs to perfect its nuclear capabilities.
Put together, this paints a rather bleak picture for engagement: poor prospects for success, and significant risks to even trying. Yet every U.S. president has tried, for a simple reason: the alternatives are grim. Faced with the possibilities of a nuclear-armed Iran or a war with Iran, it is tempting to grasp at even the smallest chance of success in negotiations. This leads me to the conclusion that the Obama administration’s efforts must be concentrated on increasing that chance of success. Doing this will require pressure, and lots of it, in order to convince Iran’s rulers that a negotiated agreement, despite the threat it poses to the regime, will be less costly than either the status quo or further progress down the nuclear weapons path. War and peace in the Middle East hang on this simple geopolitical arithmetic.
Michael Singh is an associate fellow of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and former senior director for Middle East affairs on the National Security Council.