Avoiding the temptation of fear
After Obama’s Iran deal, any Republican who gets elected will opt for isolation and re-imposed sanctions
Last week, the United States and Iran successfully negotiated the swift release of a group of United States sailors who (apparently) drifted into Iranian waters by accident. They also negotiated the release of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian and several other Iranian-Americans jailed in Iran. In exchange, the US freed several Iranian-Americans charged with violating US sanctions and dropped charges against several people the US was seeking.
All this happened as Washington, along with its partners in the P5+1 (US, Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany), the Iranians, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations celebrated last Saturday as “implementation day” — the day on which Iran fulfilled its initial obligations under last summer’s nuclear deal and would, in exchange, have billions of its dollars held in western banks released and all nuclear-related sanctions against it lifted (Washington’s extensive list of sanctions related to things other than the nuclear programme remains in place).
Most observers — those outside the US especially — would call all this an excellent week for diplomacy. The release of the American sailors in particular offered striking evidence of how much the Washington-Tehran relationship has changed over the last two-and-a-half years.
Imagine, for a moment, what would have happened if the American sailors had been taken prisoner by the Iranians four or five years ago. Actually, we do not have to imagine: A group of British sailors were captured by the Iranians in similar circumstances in 2007 and it took nearly two weeks and a lot of tension to negotiate their freedom. The release of the Americans, in contrast, took a little over 24 hours and seems to have been a pretty straightforward affair.
For many in the US, however, that is not how the events of the last few days looked. When the Republican presidential hopefuls met last Thursday for their next-to-last debate before voting actually begins, they struggled to outdo each other in expressing outrage at the Iranian capture of the US sailors and promised that under a GOP administration things would be very different.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and real estate developer/reality TV star Donald Trump all promised that if something like this happened with a Republican in the White House, the response would be swift and decisive.
“We are not the world’s policeman, but we have to stand up and be ready,” Christie said. “We need to rebuild the military. This president let it diminish to the point where tin pot dictators like [those] in Iran are taking our Navy ships. It is disgraceful, and, in a Christie administration, they would know much, much better than to do that.”
‘Bad deal’
Cruz criticised Obama for failing to mention the imprisoned sailors in his State of the Union address. It was a cheap (though arguably effective) political shot. At the time Obama spoke, a deal to release the sailors had been reached but not yet announced, let alone implemented. To say anything publicly at that point would have been irresponsible, as Cruz surely knows, but many other Americans don’t.
Trump said it was good that Americans held in Iran were coming home, but called the transaction a “bad deal”.
There was no sense on the GOP stage that the incident with the sailors or the prisoner exchanges could be viewed as examples of successful diplomacy. No one quite threatened war if something similar were to happen on their watch (though Christie came close), but the bigger question is why there seems to be something approaching a desire for war with Iran among some Republicans and a near across-the-board rejection of the idea that diplomacy and reduced tensions might be a good thing. The simple answer, of course, is that most Republicans (and, to be fair, quite a few Democrats) have accepted the most pessimistic interpretation of the Iran nuclear agreement. This includes the (basically false) ideas that it ‘allows’ Iran to obtain nuclear weapons in 15 years and in the meantime allows the Iranians to ‘inspect themselves’. It starts, however, from an even more basic fallacy: that by talking to Iran at all the Obama administration has demonstrated weakness.
In contrast, it is clear that Obama, who leaves office one year from now, views the nuclear agreement and the accompanying lessening of tensions with the Islamic Republic as perhaps the most significant foreign policy achievement of his time in office. Whether much — or any — of it will survive November’s election is an open question.
The danger is that any Republican who gets elected will opt for a policy of isolation and re-imposed sanctions as a way to appease his voters without actually launching another war. That may seem like a clever way to split the difference politically while keeping the base happy, but it is not a recipe for stability. At a time when the region is prone to deeper and more dangerous fractures with each passing month, staking out an uncompromising position is neither bold, nor reckless. The question for now is whether the GOP can avoid that temptation.
Gordon Robison, a longtime Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches Political Science at the University of Vermont.
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