Iran:
Trump’s Gift to the Hard-liners
By Trita Parsi
October 11,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- If Donald Trump decertifies the nuclear deal this
week, the political fallout within Iran will be no
different from earlier instances of Washington’s
punishing of Iran’s moderates. Voices against the
deal in Iran will strengthen, and those who favor a
more confrontational policy toward Washington will
once again have the wind in their sails. This help
to Iran’s hard-liners could not come at a more
opportune time.
While many
in Washington believed that conflict with America
constituted a pillar of the Iranian Revolution and
that Tehran would therefore never agree to direct
talks with the United States on the nuclear issue,
Iranian hard-liners were driven by a different
concern: that the nuclear negotiations would become
a stepping stone toward a broader US-Iran
rapprochement that could enable the US to regain a
foothold in the Iranian economy. Eventually, they
feared, the US presence inside Iran would shift the
domestic balance of power against the conservatives
and in favor of the more moderate factions.
The US, and
perhaps the West in general, may not appreciate how
far Iran shifted ground in the course of negotiating
the nuclear deal, and how much that agreement
bolstered the moderates in Tehran. In 2011, a
confidant of the Sultan of Oman conveyed to Iran’s
foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, a message from
Senator John Kerry that the US was open to a secret
bilateral dialogue with Iran. Salehi was confused:
Why was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee so involved in this, while Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton was not? Once he conveyed the
message to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, his confusion was replaced by skepticism.
The Supreme Leader rejected the offer on the grounds
that the Americans were not trustworthy and would
not fulfil their obligations.
But
Salehi countered that Iran would not end up in a
worse situation if it tried diplomacy and the US
betrayed its word. On the contrary, the clerical
regime could
demonstrate to the
Iranian public that it had “taken all measures to
solve things peacefully, and people will also know
that the establishment was ready for negotiations
and that it was the Americans who refused.”
Eventually, Ayatollah Khamenei came around. “He said
OK, but you have to be very vigilant because we do
not trust the Americans,” Salehi told me in an
interview.
The
Ayatollah’s distrust of the Americans was not based
on an irrational ideological obsession, but on
experience. Outreach by the Iranians to the US had
more often than not ended in misadventure or worse.
In 1995, the then president, Hashemi Rafsanjani,
offered the first post-revolution oil deal to the
American oil company Conoco Inc. He judged that a
political rapprochement between Washington and
Tehran would be more successful if it was built on
common economic interests. But President Bill
Clinton responded by adopting two executive orders
that effectively killed the Conoco deal and
eliminated all US trade with Iran.
Only weeks
after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,
moderate forces in Iran serving the reformist
President Mohammad Khatami offered the US their help
in defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan. The
Iranians had been arming and funding the
anti-Taliban coalition in Afghanistan for more than
a decade. If Tehran could show its strategic utility
to Washington, the Iranian government reasoned, then
the George W. Bush administration would reciprocate
and make possible a thaw in relations. According to
Ambassador Jim Dobbins, President Bush’s personal
envoy to Afghanistan, Iran played a critical part in
both defeating the Taliban and securing the
post-Taliban peace.
But only
weeks after the apex of US-Iran collaboration in
Afghanistan—the 2001 Bonn conference, where a new
leader was chosen for the Afghan Interim
Authority—Bush identified Iran as part of the “axis
of evil” that included Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Kim
Jong-il’s North Korea. Tehran was shocked. Once
again, its collaboration with the US had been
punished, rather than rewarded, by Washington.
In March
2003, the Iranians submitted to Washington a
comprehensive negotiation proposal through the Swiss
ambassador in Tehran. (The Swiss government had been
tasked by the US with serving as a channel of
communication between Washington and Tehran in the
absence of direct diplomatic relations.) Among other
things, the Iranians offered to open their nuclear
program up to full transparency, stabilize Iraq and
ensure its government would not be sectarian (a goal
the Iranians had helped achieve in Afghanistan), and
collaborate against terrorist organizations—above
all, al-Qaeda. In return, the Iranians wanted a
strategic dialogue with Washington, the lifting of
sanctions and a recognition of “Iran’s legitimate
security interests.”
But the
Bush administration never responded. Instead, it
reprimanded the Swiss ambassador for having
delivered the proposal in the first place. Within
the administration, any debate on the matter was
shut down by then Vice President Dick Cheney, who
simply asserted, “We don’t talk to evil.” Tehran was
befuddled. If Washington was uninterested in changes
to Iranian policies that it had itself identified as
problematic, then the US’s real problem with Iran
was not the country’s policies but its power, the
Iranians concluded. And while countries can give up
or amend policies, they cannot give up power.
Every time
Iran’s outreach was rejected, voices for moderation
and collaboration within Iran’s elite were weakened
and silenced, while conservative factions favoring a
more confrontational approach rose in influence. The
rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his combative
policies in 2005 was directly related to the US’s
rejection of the 2003 proposal. If Washington
refused dialogue with Tehran when Iran adopted a
collaborative approach, the Iranians reasoned, then
the clerical regime had no choice but to make that
American policy as costly as possible by undermining
US interests in the region. The result was that the
moderates within Iran’s foreign policy elite were
deeply marginalized for eight years.
Today, more
than two years after the nuclear agreement was
signed, the conservatives in Tehran can live with
the deal and even contemplate security collaboration
with Washington in the region. But their fear is
that they simply cannot survive the political
consequences of American penetration of the Iranian
economy. This is why, immediately before and after
the nuclear deal, there was a severe clampdown in
Iran on dual nationals who either had planned, or
were suspected of planning, to use the opening of
the nuclear accord to lay the groundwork for an
attempted expansion of economic relations with the
West. The signal was clear: the nuclear deal
notwithstanding, Iran was not open for American
businesses.
Even in the
absence of American involvement in the Iranian
economy, the nuclear deal has clearly shifted the
domestic balance of power in the direction of the
moderates. President Hassan Rouhani and his
coalition have won three major elections since the
deal: the parliament fell into the hands of his
coalition; the Assembly of Experts elections saw
some of the most hard-line clergy lose their seats;
and Rouhani won a crushing victory in the
presidential election earlier this year. In
addition, reformists swept the board in most of
Iran’s major city council elections, leaving their
conservative rivals with no seats at all.
This series
of political defeats had spread panic in the
conservative ranks. But now Trump is coming to their
aid. Rather than Rouhani and the moderates’
benefiting politically from the nuclear deal,
Trump’s decertification, together with American
moves to escalate tensions with Iran in the region,
will vindicate Ayatollah Khamenei’s narrative of
American untrustworthiness—especially among groups
in Iran that have long resisted the Supreme Leader’s
antipathy for the US. When Iran is solidly adhering
to the nuclear accord, as the International Atomic
Energy Agency has verified eight times since January
2016, yet Trump still wants to kill the deal, then
the problem doesn’t lie in Tehran. It lies in
Washington.
By having
so naively entrusted Iran’s future to the
untrustworthy Americans, Iranian conservatives will
argue, President Rouhani and his moderates have put
the country at risk. The more aggressive Trump’s
posture in the Middle East becomes, the stronger the
hard-liners’ argument against Rouhani’s
administration will be. Besides this, Rouhani’s
plans to reinvigorate the Iranian economy will
certainly suffer from the collapse of the nuclear
deal. If America’s European partners cave to US
pressure and either reimpose European Union
sanctions on Iran or advise their companies to
withdraw from the Iranian market, the economic hit
to Iran will be significant. Even if the EU
continues trading with Iran, the uncertainty around
the durability of the nuclear agreement will be
enough to scare off many foreign investors. In that
case, Rouhani’s economic program, on which the
political future of Iran’s moderates hinges, will be
severely hampered.
This will
put Iran’s conservatives in a good position to win
back the parliament in the 2020 elections, in what
is, arguably, a do-or-die moment for the
conservatives. It will also strengthen their hand
ahead of the ultimate factional showdown: the
selection of the next Supreme Leader when Ayatollah
Khamenei, who is nearing eighty and suffers from
prostate cancer, passes away.
This is not
just about what the Iranian conservatives will win
if Trump kills the nuclear deal, but what America
will lose. The blow to Iran’s moderate forces will
be far more consequential than Bush’s “axis of evil”
declaration and the rejection of the 2003 grand
bargain proposal. It will take years, perhaps
decades, before anyone in the Iranian political
elite will dare to suggest any accommodation with
Washington. Just as important, it will be a tragedy
for an entire generation of young Iranians who
strongly favor the deal because they want to be on
better terms with the US and who have blamed Tehran
more than Washington for the US-Iran enmity. For
President Trump to renege on the nuclear agreement
will push them to accept the hard-liners’
anti-American narrative and silence the voices of
those in Iran who want to meet America halfway.
Trita
Parsi is the author of
Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran,
and the Triumph of Diplomacy
and president of the
National Iranian American Council.
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