The president has long been criticized for his lack of strategic vision. But what if a strategy, centered on Iran, has been in place from the start and consistently followed to this day?
ESSAY
About the author
Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a former senior director of the National Security Council. He is finishing a book on President Eisenhower and the Middle East. He tweets @doranimated.
President Barack Obama wishes the Islamic Republic of Iran every
success. Its leaders, he explained in a recent interview, stand at a
crossroads. They can choose to press ahead with their nuclear program, thereby
continuing to flout the will of the international community and further isolate
their country; or they can accept limitations on their nuclear ambitions and
enter an era of harmonious relations with the rest of the world. “They have a
path to break through that isolation and they should seize it,” the president
urged—because “if they do, there’s incredible talent and resources and
sophistication . . . inside of Iran, and it would be a very successful regional
power.”
How
eager is the president to see Iran break through its isolation and become a
very successful regional power? Very eager. A year ago, Benjamin Rhodes, deputy
national-security adviser for strategic communication and a key member of the
president’s inner circle, shared some good news with a friendly group of
Democratic-party activists. The November 2013 nuclear agreement between Tehran
and the “P5+1”—the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus
Germany—represented, he said, not only “the best opportunity we’ve had to
resolve the Iranian [nuclear] issue,” but “probably the biggest thing President
Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy.” For the administration,
Rhodes emphasized, “this is healthcare . . . , just to put it in context.”
Unaware that he was being recorded, he then confided to his guests that Obama
was planning to keep Congress in the dark and out of the picture: “We’re
already kind of thinking through, how do we structure a deal so we don’t
necessarily require legislative action right away.”
Why
the need to bypass Congress? Rhodes had little need to elaborate. As the
president himself once noted balefully, “[T]here is hostility and suspicion
toward Iran, not just among members of Congress but the American people”—and
besides, “members of Congress are very attentive to what Israel says on its
security issues.” And that “hostility and suspicion” still persist, prompting
the president in his latest State of the Union address to repeat his oft-stated
warning that he will veto “any new sanctions bill that threatens to undo [the]
progress” made so far toward a “comprehensive agreement” with the Islamic
Republic.
As
far as the president is concerned, the less we know about his Iran plans, the
better. Yet those plans, as Rhodes stressed, are not a minor or incidental
component of his foreign policy. To the contrary, they are central to his
administration’s strategic thinking about the role of the United States in the
world, and especially in the Middle East.
Moreover, that has been
true from the beginning. In the first year of Obama’s first term, a senior
administration official would later tell David Sanger of the New
York Times, “There were more [White House] meetings on Iran than
there were on Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. It was the thing we spent the most
time on and talked about the least in public [emphasis added].” All along,
Obama has regarded his hoped-for “comprehensive agreement” with Iran as an
urgent priority, and, with rare exceptions, has consistently wrapped his
approach to that priority in exceptional layers of secrecy.
From time to time, critics and even friends of the president have complained vocally
about the seeming disarray or fecklessness of the administration’s handling of
foreign policy. Words like amateurish, immature, and incompetent are bandied
about; what’s needed, we’re told, is less ad-hoc fumbling, more of a guiding
strategic vision. Most recently, Leslie Gelb, a former government official and
past president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has charged that “the Obama
team lacks the basic instincts and judgment necessary to conduct U.S.
national-security policy,” and has urged the president to replace the entire
inner core of his advisers with “strong and strategic people of proven . . .
experience.”
One
sympathizes with Gelb’s sense of alarm, but his premises are mistaken. Inexperience
is a problem in this administration, but there is no lack of strategic vision.
Quite the contrary: a strategy has been in place from the start, and however
clumsily it may on occasion have been implemented, and whatever resistance it
has generated abroad or at home, Obama has doggedly adhered to the policies
that have flowed from it.
In
what follows, we’ll trace the course of the most important of those policies
and their contribution to the president’s announced determination to encourage
and augment Iran’s potential as a successful regional power and as a friend and
partner to the United States.
2009-2010: Round One, Part I
In the giddy aftermath
of Obama’s electoral victory in 2008, anything seemed possible. The president
saw himself as a transformational leader, not just in domestic politics but
also in the international arena, where, as he believed, he had been elected to reverse
the legacy of his predecessor, George W. Bush. To say that Obama regarded
Bush’s foreign policy as anachronistic is an understatement. To him it was a
caricature of yesteryear, the foreign-policy equivalent of Leave
It to Beaver. Obama’s mission was to guide America out of Bushland,
an arena in which the United States assembled global military coalitions to
defeat enemies whom it depicted in terms like “Axis of Evil,” and into
Obamaworld, a place more attuned to the nuances, complexities, and contradictions—and
opportunities—of the 21st century. In today’s globalized environment, Obama
told the United Nations General Assembly in September 2009, “our destiny is
shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to
dominate another nation. . . . No balance of power among nations will hold.”
If, in Bushland, America
had behaved like a sheriff, assembling a posse to go in search of monsters, in
Obamaworld America would disarm its rivals by ensnaring them in a web of
cooperation.
For
the new president, nothing revealed the conceptual inadequacies of Bushland
more clearly than the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Before coming to Washington, Obama
had opposed the toppling of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein; once in the U.S.
Senate, he rejected Bush’s “surge” and introduced legislation to end the war.
Shortly after his inauguration in January 2009, he pledged to bring the troops
home quickly—a commitment that he would indeed honor. But if calling for
withdrawal from Iraq had been a relatively easy position to take for a senator,
for a president it raised a key practical question: beyond abstract nostrums
like “no nation can . . . dominate another nation,” what new order should
replace the American-led system that Bush had been building?
This
was, and remains, the fundamental strategic question that Obama has faced in
the Middle East, though one would search his speeches in vain for an answer to
it. But Obama does have a relatively concrete vision. When he arrived in
Washington in 2006, he absorbed a set of ideas that had incubated on Capitol
Hill during the previous three years—ideas that had received widespread
attention thanks to the final report of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan
congressional commission whose co-chairs, former secretary of state James Baker
and former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, interpreted their mission broadly,
offering advice on all key aspects of Middle East policy.
The
report, published in December 2006, urged then-President Bush to take four
major steps: withdraw American troops from Iraq; surge American troops in
Afghanistan; reinvigorate the Arab-Israeli “peace process”; and, last but far
from least, launch a diplomatic engagement of the Islamic Republic of Iran and
its junior partner, the Assad regime in Syria. Baker and Hamilton believed that
Bush stood in thrall to Israel and was therefore insufficiently alive to the
benefits of cooperating with Iran and Syria. Those two regimes, supposedly,
shared with Washington the twin goals of stabilizing Iraq and defeating
al-Qaeda and other Sunni jihadi groups. In turn, this shared interest would
provide a foundation for building a concert system of states—a club of stable
powers that could work together to contain the worst pathologies of the Middle
East and lead the way to a sunnier future.
Expressing
the ethos of an influential segment of the foreign-policy elite, the
Baker-Hamilton report became the blueprint for the foreign policy of the Obama
administration, and its spirit continues to pervade Obama’s inner circle. Denis
McDonough, now the president’s chief of staff, once worked as an aide to Lee
Hamilton; so did Benjamin Rhodes, who helped write the Iraq Study Group’s
report. Obama not only adopted the blueprint but took it one step further,
recruiting Vladimir Putin’s Russia as another candidate for membership in the
new club. The administration’s early “reset” with Russia and its policy of
reaching out to Iran and Syria formed two parts of a single vision. If, in
Bushland, America had behaved like a sheriff, assembling a posse (“a coalition
of the willing”) to go in search of monsters, in Obamaworld America would
disarm its rivals by ensnaring them in a web of cooperation. To rid the world
of rogues and tyrants, one must embrace and soften them.
Lee Hamilton, George W. Bush, and James Baker during a meeting
of the Iraq Study Group, Wednesday, Dec. 6. 2006. White
House Photo.
How would this work in the case of Iran? During the Bush years, an elaborate myth had
developed according to which the mullahs in Tehran had themselves reached out
in friendship to Washington, offering a “grand bargain”: a deal on everything
from regional security to nuclear weapons. The swaggering Bush, however, had
slapped away the outstretched Iranian hand, squandering the opportunity of a
lifetime to normalize U.S.-Iranian relations and thereby bring order to the
entire Middle East.
Obama
based his policy of outreach to Tehran on two key assumptions of the
grand-bargain myth: that Tehran and Washington were natural allies, and that
Washington itself was the primary cause of the enmity between the two. If only
the United States were to adopt a less belligerent posture, so the thinking
went, Iran would reciprocate. In his very first television interview from the
White House, Obama announced his desire to talk to the Iranians, to see “where
there are potential avenues for progress.” Echoing his inaugural address, he
said, “[I]f countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will
find an extended hand from us.”
Unfortunately,
the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, ignored the president’s invitation.
Five months later, in June 2009, when the Green Movement was born, his
autocratic fist was still clenched. As the streets of Tehran exploded in the
largest anti-government demonstrations the country had seen since the
revolution of 1979, he used that fist to beat down the protesters. For their
part, the protesters, hungry for democratic reform and enraged by government
rigging of the recent presidential election, appealed to Obama for help. He
responded meekly, issuing tepid statements of support while maintaining a
steady posture of neutrality. To alienate Khamenei, after all, might kill the
dream of a new era in U.S.-Iranian relations.
If
this show of deference was calculated to warm the dictator’s heart, it failed.
“What we intended as caution,” one of Obama’s aides would later tell a
reporter, “the Iranians saw as weakness.” Indeed, the president’s studied
“caution” may even have emboldened Tehran to push forward, in yet another in
the long series of blatant violations of its obligations under the nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), with its construction of a secret uranium
enrichment facility in an underground bunker at Fordow, near Qom.
When members of Iran’s
Green Movement appealed to Obama for help in 2009, he responded meekly—after
all, to alienate Khamenei might kill the dream of a new era in U.S.-Iranian
relations.
This
time, Obama reacted. Revealing the bunker’s existence, he placed Khamenei in a
tough spot. The Russians, who had been habitually more lenient toward the
Iranian nuclear program than the Americans, were irritated by the disclosure of
this clandestine activity; the French were moved to demand a strong Western
response.
But
when Khamenei finessed the situation by adopting a seemingly more flexible
attitude toward negotiations, Obama quickly obliged. Delighted to find a
receptive Iranian across the table, he dismissed the French call for toughness,
instead volunteering a plan that would meet Iran’s desire to keep most of its
nuclear infrastructure intact while proving to the world that it was not
stockpiling fissile material for a bomb. In keeping with his larger
aspirations, the president also placed Moscow at the center of the action,
proposing that the Iranians transfer their enriched uranium to Russia in
exchange for fuel rods capable of powering a nuclear reactor but not of being
used in a bomb. The Iranian negotiators, displaying their new spirit of
compromise, accepted the terms. Even President Ahmadinejad, the notorious
hardliner, pronounced himself on board.
Obama,
it seemed to some, had pulled off a major coup. Less than a year after taking
office, he was turning his vision of a new Middle East order into a reality. Or
was he? Once the heat was off, Khamenei reneged on the deal, throwing the
president back to square one and in the process weakening him politically at
home, where congressional skeptics of his engagement policy now began lobbying
for more stringent economic sanctions on Tehran. To protect his flank, Obama
tacked rightward, appropriating, if with visible reluctance, some of his
opponents’ rhetoric and bits of their playbook as well. In 2010, he signed into
law the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act
(CISADA), which eventually would prove more painful to Iran than any previous
measure of its kind.
In later years, whenever
Obama would stand accused of being soft on Iran, he would invariably point to
CISADA as evidence to the contrary. “[O]ver the course of several years,” he
stated in March 2014, “we were able to enforce an unprecedented sanctions
regime that so crippled the Iranian economy that they were willing to come to
the table.” The “table” in question was the negotiation resulting in the
November 2013 agreement, known as the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA), which we
shall come to in due course. But masked in the president’s boast was the fact
that he had actually opposed CISADA, which was rammed down his
throat by a Senate vote of 99 to zero.
Once
the bill became law, a cadre of talented and dedicated professionals in the
Treasury Department set to work implementing it. But the moment of presumed
“convergence” between Obama and his congressional skeptics proved temporary and
tactical; their fundamental difference in outlook would become much more
apparent in the president’s second term. For the skeptics, the way to change
Khamenei’s behavior was to place him before a stark choice: dismantle Iran’s
nuclear program—period—or face catastrophic consequences. For Obama, to force a
confrontation with Khamenei would destroy any chance of reaching an
accommodation on the nuclear front and put paid to his grand vision of a new
Middle East order.
2011-2012: Round One, Part II
“The
hardest cross I have to bear is the Cross of Lorraine,” Winston Churchill
supposedly cracked about managing his wartime relations with Charles de Gaulle.
As Obama sees it, his hardest cross to bear has been the Star of David,
represented by Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
To
the Israelis, who have long regarded Iran’s nuclear program as an existential
threat, Obama’s engagement policy was misguided from the start. Their
assessment mattered, because influential Americans listened to them. What was
more, American Jews constituted an important segment of the Democratic party’s
popular base and an even more important segment of its donors. In the election
year of 2012, for Obama to be perceived as indifferent to Israeli security
would jeopardize his prospects of a second term—and hardly among Jews alone.
When the Israelis
threatened to attack Iran, Obama responded by putting Israel in a bear hug.
From one angle, it looked like an expression of friendship. From another,
like an effort to break Netanyahu’s ribs.
The
Israelis did more than just criticize Obama; they also threatened to take
action against Iran that would place the president in an intolerable dilemma.
In 2011, Ehud Barak, the defense minister at the time, announced that Iran was
quickly approaching a “zone of immunity,” meaning that its nuclear program
would henceforth be impervious to Israeli attack. As Iran approached that zone,
Israel would have no choice but to strike. And what would America do then? The
Israeli warnings grew ever starker as the presidential election season heated
up. Netanyahu, it seemed, was using the threat of Israeli action as a way of
prodding Washington itself to take a harder line.
To
this challenge, Obama responded by putting Israel in a bear hug. From one
angle, it looked like an expression of profound friendship: the president
significantly increased military and intelligence cooperation, and he insisted,
fervently and loudly, that his policy was to prevent Iran from acquiring a
nuclear weapon by all means possible. With the aid of influential American Jews
and Israelis who testified to his sincerity, Obama successfully blunted the
force of the charge that he was hostile to Israel.
From
another angle, however, the bear hug looked like an effort to break Netanyahu’s
ribs. Even while expressing affection for Israel, Obama found ways to signal
his loathing for its prime minister. During one tense meeting at the White
House, for example, the president abruptly broke off to join his family for
dinner, leaving Netanyahu to wait for him alone. In mitigation, Obama
supporters would adduce ongoing friction between the two countries over West
Bank settlements and peace negotiations with the Palestinians. This was true
enough, but the two men differed on quite a number of issues, among which Iran
held by far the greatest strategic significance. In managing the anxieties of
his liberal Jewish supporters, Obama found it useful to explain the bad
atmosphere as a function of Netanyahu’s “extremism” rather than of his own
outreach to Iran—to suggest, in effect, that if only the hothead in the room
would sit down and shut up, the grownups could proceed to resolve the Iranian
nuclear problem along reasonable lines.
The
tactic proved effective. At least for the duration, Obama prevented Israel from
attacking Iran; preserved American freedom of action with regard to Iran’s
nuclear program; and kept his disagreements with the Israeli government within
the comfort zone of American Jewish Democrats.
If, however, Netanyahu
was Obama’s biggest regional headache, there was no lack of others. King Abdullah
of Saudi Arabia was certainly the most consequential. Obama had assumed that
the king would welcome his approach to the Middle East as a breath of fresh
air. After all, the Baker-Hamilton crowd regarded the Arab-Israeli conflict as the major irritant in relations
between the United States and the Arabs. Bush’s close alignment with Israel, so
the thinking went, had damaged those relations; by contrast, Obama, the moment
he took office, announced his goal of solving the Arab-Israeli conflict once
and for all, and followed up by picking a fight with Netanyahu over Jewish
settlements in the West Bank. How could the Saudis react with anything but
pleasure?
In
fact, they distanced themselves—bluntly and publicly. While meeting with
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the end of July 2009, Saudi Foreign
Minister Saud al-Faisal announced that Obama’s approach to solving the
Arab-Israeli conflict “has not and, we believe, will not lead to peace.” Behind
that statement lay a complex of attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict itself, but much more than that. At the end of the Bush
administration, King Abdullah had made his top regional priority abundantly
clear when, according to leaked State Department documents, he repeatedly urged
the United States to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and thereby “cut off the
head of the snake” in the Middle East.
When Obama strode into
office and announced his desire to kiss the snake, the Saudis lost no time in
making their displeasure felt. Three months later, the king responded gruffly
to an extensive presentation on Obama’s outreach program by Dennis Ross, then a
senior official in the State Department with responsibility for Iran. “I am a
man of action,” Abdullah said according to a New York Times report. “Unlike you, I prefer not to
talk a lot.” He then posed a series of pointed questions that Ross could not
answer. “What is your goal? What will you do if this does not work? What will
you do if the Chinese and the Russians are not with you? How will you deal with Iran’s
nuclear program if there is not a united response?” The questions added up
to a simple point: your Iran policy is based on wishful thinking.
As
it happens, one traditional American ally in the region was—at least at
first—untroubled by Obama’s policy of Iran engagement: the Turkish leader Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan. Indeed, Erdoğan found much to extol in the new American
initiative, which dovetailed perfectly with his own foreign policy of “zero
problems with [Arab and Muslim] neighbors.” Among other things, Erdoğan meant
to establish Ankara as the middleman between the United States and Iran and
Syria, Turkey’s traditional adversaries. This vision nested so comfortably
within Obama’s planned concert system that Erdoğan quickly became one of the
few international personalities with whom Obama developed a close personal
rapport.
Contrary to what
observers have long assumed, Obama does connect his Iran policy and his
Syria policy: just as he showed deference to Iran on the nuclear front, he has
deferred to the Iranian interest in Syria.
Soon,
however, serious tensions arose. By the summer of 2012, one problem
overshadowed all others: Syria—and behind Syria, Iran. Erdoğan watched in
horror as the Iranians together with their proxies, Hizballah and Iraqi Shiite
militias, intervened in the Syrian civil war. Iranian-directed units were not
only training and equipping Bashar Assad’s forces in his battle for survival,
but also engaging in direct combat. At the same time, within the Syrian
opposition to Assad, a radical Sunni jihadi element was growing at an alarming
rate. In short order, the Turks were adding their voice to a powerful
chorus—including Saudi Arabia, the Gulf sheikhdoms, and the Jordanians—urgently
requesting that Washington take action to build up the moderate Sunni
opposition to both Assad and Iran.
The
director of the CIA, David Petraeus, responded to this request by America’s
regional allies with a plan to train and equip Syrian rebels in Jordan and to
assist them once back in Syria. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, and General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, all supported the Petraeus plan. But Obama rejected it.
Why?
Undoubtedly the president had a mix of reasons and possible motives, which were
the objects of extensive speculation in the media. But one motive was never
included in the list: namely, his fear of antagonizing Iran. For the longest
time, it was simply assumed that Obama drew no connection between his Iran
policy and his Syria policy. This, however, was not the case. In fact—as we
shall see below—just as, from the beginning, he showed deference to Iran on the
nuclear front, he showed the same deference to the Iranian interest in Syria.
Islamic State fighters in Aleppo, Syria on July 4, 2013. Photo
by Daniel Leal-Olivas/Corbis.
2013-2014: Round Two, The Secret Backchannel
An ostensible thaw in
American-Iranian relations occurred early in the president’s second term. To
hear him tell it today, what precipitated the thaw was a strategic shift by
Tehran on the nuclear
front. In his version of the story—let’s call it the “official version”—two
factors account for the Iranian change of heart. One of them was American
coercive diplomacy; the other was a new spirit of reform in Tehran. And the two
were interrelated. The first, as Obama himself explained in the March 2014
interview cited earlier, had taken the form of “an unprecedented sanctions
regime that so crippled the Iranian economy that [the Iranians] were willing to
come to the table.” The second was a corollary of the first. The same sanctions
regime had also helped bring to power the new government of Hassan Rouhani,
whose moderate approach would in turn culminate in the November 2013 signing of
the interim nuclear deal, which “for the first time in a decade halts their
nuclear program.”
Obama’s
version is an after-the-fact cocktail of misdirection and half-truths, stirred
by him and his aides and served up with a clear goal in mind: to conceal Round
Two of his Iran outreach.
The turning point in the
American-Iranian relationship was not, as the official version would have it,
the election of Hassan Rouhani in June 2013. It was the reelection of Barack
Obama in November 2012.
In
early 2013, at the outset of his second term, Obama developed a secret
bilateral channel to Ahmadinejad’s regime. When the full impact of this is taken
into account, a surprising fact comes to light. The turning point in the
American-Iranian relationship was not, as the official version would have it,
the election of Hassan Rouhani in June 2013. It was the reelection of Barack
Obama in November 2012.
Indeed,
the first secret meeting with the Iranians (that is, the first we know of) took
place even earlier, in early July 2012, eleven months before Rouhani came to
power. Jake Sullivan, who at the time was the director of policy planning in
Hillary Clinton’s State Department, traveled secretly to Oman to meet with
Iranian officials. The Obama administration has told us next to nothing about
Sullivan’s meeting, so we are forced to speculate about the message that he
delivered.
Most
pertinent is the timing. At that moment, pressure was mounting on the president
to intervene in Syria. Sullivan probably briefed the Iranians on Obama’s strong
desire to stay out of that conflict, and may have sought Tehran’s help in
moderating Assad’s behavior. But summer 2012 was also the height of the
American presidential campaign. Perhaps Sullivan told the Iranians that the
president was keen to restart serious nuclear negotiations after the election.
Recall that this meeting took place shortly after a hot microphone had caught Obama
saying to Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, “On all these issues, but
particularly missile defense, this can be solved, but it’s important . . . to
give me space. This is my last election. After my election, I have more
flexibility.”
Did
Sullivan give the Iranians a similar message? Did he tell Ahmadinejad’s
officials that Obama’s need to secure the pro-Israel vote had forced him to
take a deceptively belligerent line toward Iran? That Iran had nothing to fear
from an Israeli attack? That after the election Obama would demonstrate even
greater flexibility on the nuclear issue?
Whatever
the answers to these questions, it is a matter of record that Obama opened his
second term with a campaign of outreach to Tehran—a campaign that was as intensive
as it was secret. By February 2013, a month after his inauguration, the
backchannel was crowded with American officials. Not just Sullivan, but Deputy
Secretary of State William Burns, National Security Council staffer Puneet
Talwar, State Department non-proliferation adviser Robert Einhorn, and
Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice were all engaging their Iranian
counterparts.
According
to the official version, this stampede toward Tehran had no impact on
Iranian-American relations. Nothing notable occurred in that realm, we are
told, until the arrival on the scene of Rouhani. In fact, however, it was
during this earlier period that Obama laid the basis for the November 2013
Joint Plan of Action. And that agreement was the product of three American
concessions—two of which, and possibly the third as well, were made long before
Rouhani ever came to power.
In April 2013, the
Americans and their P5+1 partners met with Iranian negotiators in Almaty,
Kazakhstan, where they offered to relieve the sanctions regime in exchange for
the elimination of Iran’s stockpiles of uranium that had already been enriched
to 20 percent. This was concession number one, bowing to the longstanding
Iranian demand for economic compensation immediately, before a final agreement
could be reached. Even more important was concession number two, which
permitted the Iranians to continue enriching uranium to levels of 5
percent—this, despite the fact that six United Nations Security Council
resolutions had ordered Iran to cease all enrichment and reprocessing
activities.
Iranian negotiators
rejected these two gifts—or, rather, they pocketed them and demanded a third,
the one they coveted the most. Hailing the proposals by their counterparts as a
step in the right direction, they criticized them for failing to stipulate the
Iranian “right to enrich.” There was a difference, they argued, between
temporarily permitting Iran to enrich uranium to 5 percent
and recognizing its inalienable right to do so. If Obama wanted a deal, he
would have to agree to shred the Security Council resolutions by offering, up
front, an arrangement that would end the economic sanctions on Iran entirely
and that would allow the Iranians to enrich uranium in perpetuity.
By exaggerating the
spirit of reform in Tehran, the White House was able to suggest that Iran, and
not America, had compromised.
Obama’s acceptance of
this condition, the third and most important American gift, is what made the
Joint Plan of Action possible. The American negotiators transmitted the
president’s acceptance to the Iranians in the backchannel, and then John Kerry
sprang it on his hapless negotiating partners in November. We do not know when,
precisely, Obama made this offer, but the Iranians set their three conditions before Rouhani took office.
In
brief, the Iranian election was hardly the key factor that made the interim
deal possible. But it did supply window dressing at home when it came to
selling the deal to Congress and the American public. By exaggerating the
spirit of reform in Tehran, the White House was able to suggest that Rouhani’s
embrace of the deal represented an Iranian, not an American, compromise. In
truth, Obama neither coerced nor manipulated; he capitulated, and he
acquiesced.
Round Two: Iran, Syria, and Islamic State
The
nuclear issue wasn’t the only tender spot in U.S.-Iran relations in this
period. Before returning to it, let’s look briefly at two other regional
fronts.
Obama’s second term has
also included efforts to accommodate Iran over Syria. Susan Rice, by now the
president’s national-security adviser, inadvertently admitted as much in an
address she delivered on September 9, 2013, a few weeks after Bashar Assad had
conducted a sarin-gas attack on Ghouta, a suburb outside Damascus, that killed
approximately 1,500 civilians. Reviewing past American efforts to restrain the
Syrian dictator, Rice blithely depicted Tehran as Washington’s partner.
“At our urging, over months, Russia and Iran repeatedly reinforced our warning
to Assad,” she explained.
“We all sent the same message again and again: don’t do it.”
Why did Obama back off on
strikes against Syria? Could it have been fear of scuttling the biggest—and
still secret—foreign-policy initiative of his entire presidency?
Rice’s
remarks were disingenuous. In reality, the Islamic Republic was then precisely
what it remains today, namely, the prime enabler of Assad’s murder machine. But
Rice’s intention was not to describe Iranian behavior accurately. In addition
to accustoming the American press and foreign-policy elite to the idea that
Iran was at least a potential partner, her speech was aimed at influencing
Congress’s deliberation of air strikes against Syria—strikes that Obama had
abruptly delayed a week and a half earlier in what will certainly be remembered
as one of the oddest moments of his presidency.
The
oddity began shortly after Obama sent Secretary of State John Kerry out to
deliver a Churchillian exhortation on the theme of an impending American
attack. While that speech was still reverberating, the president convened a
meeting of his inner circle in the Oval Office, where he expressed misgivings
about the policy that his Secretary of State had just announced. Curiously, the
meeting did not include either Kerry or Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, the
principal members of his senior national-security staff. Obama then invited
Denis McDonough to break away from the others and join him for a private walk
around the White House grounds. On his return, Obama stunned the waiting group
with the news that he had decided to delay the strikes on Assad in order to
seek congressional approval.
What
thoughts did Obama share with McDonough? We can dispense with the official
explanation, which stresses the president’s principled belief in the need to
consult the legislative branch on matters of war and peace. That belief had
played no part in previous decisions, like the one to intervene in Libya.
Clearly, Obama was hiding behind Congress in order either to delay action or to
kill it altogether. The true reasons for the delay were evidently too sensitive
even for the ears of his closest national-security aides. Could they have
included fear of scuttling the biggest—and still secret—foreign-policy
initiative of his second term, possibly of his entire presidency?
In
the event, the punt to Congress bought Obama some time, but at a significant
political cost. At home the decision made him appear dithering and weak; on
Capitol Hill, Democrats quietly fumed over the way the White House was abruptly
ordering them out on a limb. In Syria, Assad crowed with delight as his opponents
crumpled in despair. Elsewhere, American allies felt exposed and vulnerable,
wondering whether Obama would ever truly come to their aid in a pinch.
As
we know, Obama’s quandary would become Moscow’s opportunity. Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov offered the president a way to regain his balance. Russia and the
United States, Lavrov proposed, would cooperate to strip Assad of his sarin
gas. From the sidelines, the Iranians publicly applauded the proposal, and
Obama jumped to accept it.
But
the deal was a quid pro quo. In return for a minor (though highly visible)
concession from Assad, Obama tacitly agreed not to enter the Syrian
battlefield. In effect, the Russians, Assad, and the Iranians were offering
him, and he was accepting, surrender with honor, enabling him to say later,
with a straight face, that the episode was a successful example of his coercive
diplomacy. “Let’s be very clear about what happened,” he bragged in his March
2014 interview. “I threatened [sic] kinetic strikes on Syria unless they got
rid of their chemical weapons.” In reality, Assad only gained—and gained big.
Obama immediately muted his calls for Assad to step down from power, and his
behavior thoroughly demoralized the Syrian opposition. Nor did the deal stop
Assad from launching further chemical attacks. Once deprived of his sarin
stockpiles, he simply switched to chlorine.
During
an interview on primetime television shortly after Lavrov offered his country’s
help, Obama pointed to Russian and Iranian cooperation with Washington as one
of the bargain’s greatest benefits. The “good news,” he said, “is that Assad’s
allies, both Russia and Iran, recognize that this [use of sarin] was—this was a
breach, that this was a problem. And for them to potentially put pressure on
Assad to say, ‘Let’s figure out a way that the international community gets
control of . . . these weapons in a verifiable and forcible way’—I think it’s
something that we will run to ground.”
This was fictive. Obama
made it sound as if Tehran was eager to punish Assad for his use of chemical
weapons, but nothing could have been farther from the truth. Even as he was
speaking, Iran was publicly blaming the Syrian rebels,
not Assad, for the Ghouta attack. Nor was stopping the slaughter ever the
president’s true goal. From his perspective, he did not have the power to
prevent Assad’s atrocities. He did, however, have the sense to recognize a good
thing when he saw it. The opportunity to join with Iran in an ostensibly
cooperative venture was too good to let slip away—and so he seized it.
That Obama has treated
Syria as an Iranian sphere of interest all along has been brought home in a
recent report in the Wall Street Journal. In August 2014, according to
the Journal, the president wrote a letter to
Ali Khamenei, acknowledging the obstacle to their cooperation presented by the
nuclear impasse but taking pains to reassure Khamenei regarding the fate of
Assad, his closest ally. American military operations inside Syria, he wrote,
would target neither the Syrian dictator nor his forces.
This element of the
president’s thinking has received remarkably little attention, even though
Obama himself pointed to it directly in a January 2014 interview with David
Remnick, the editor of theNew
Yorker. The Arab states and Israel, Obama said then, wanted
Washington to be their proxy in the contest with Iran; but he adamantly refused
to play that role. Instead, he envisioned, in Remnick’s words, “a new
geostrategic equilibrium, one less turbulent than the current landscape of
civil war, terror, and sectarian battle.” Who would help him develop the
strategy to achieve this equilibrium? “I don’t really even need George Kennan
right now,” the president responded, alluding to the acknowledged godfather of
the cold-war strategy of containment. What he truly needed instead were
strategic partners, and a prime candidate for that role was—he explained—Iran.
Obama
was here revealing his main rationale in 2012 for rejecting the Petraeus plan
to arm the Syrian opposition that we examined earlier. Clearly, the president
viewed the anti-Assad movement in Syria just as he had viewed the Green
Movement in Iran three years earlier: as an impediment to realizing the
strategic priority of guiding Iran to the path of success. Was the Middle East
in fact polarized between the Iranian-led alliance and just about everyone
else? Yes. Were all traditional allies of the United States calling for him to
stand up to Iran? Yes. Did the principal members of his National Security
Council recommend as one that the United States heed the call of the allies?
Again, yes. But Obama’s eyes were still locked on the main prize: the grand
bargain with Tehran.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, left, talks to his Foreign
Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at Davos in 2014. AP Photo/Michel Euler.
The same desire to accommodate Iran has tailored Obama’s strategy toward the
terrorist group Islamic State. That, too, has not received the attention it
deserves.
Last June, when Islamic
State warriors captured Mosul in northern Iraq, the foreign-policy approval
ratings of the president plummeted, and Obama’s critics claimed, not for the
first time, that he had no strategy at all. Ben Rhodes sprang to his defense,
suggesting that despite appearances to the contrary, the administration
actually had a plan, if a hitherto unannounced one. “We have longer-run plays
that we’re running,” he said.
“Part of this is keeping your eye on the long game even as you go through
tumultuous periods.”
The administration has
subtly exploited the rise of the Islamic State to elevate Obama’s outreach to
Iran. Behind the scenes, coordination and consultation have reached new
heights.
Rhodes
offered no details, and subsequent events seemed to confirm the impression that
Obama actually had no long game. In addition to being caught flat-footed by
Islamic State, moreover, he was reversing himself on other major issues:
sending troops back to Iraq after having celebrated their homecoming, ordering
military operations in Syria that he had opposed for years. How could such
reversals be consistent with a long game?
The
answer is that the reversals, although real, involved much less than met the
eye, and the long game remained in place. In August, it seemed as if the
American military was preparing to mount a sustained intervention in both Iraq
and Syria; today, however, it is increasingly apparent that Obama has at best a
semi-coherent containment plan for Iraq and no plan at all for Syria—a
deficiency that was obvious from the start. At a hearing of the Senate Foreign
Relations committee, Senator Marco Rubio pointed to the obvious weaknesses in
the administration’s approach, and asked John Kerry how to fix them. Kerry
stunningly suggested that the gaps would be filled by . . . Iran and Assad.
“[Y]ou’re presuming that Iran and Syria don’t have any capacity to take on”
Islamic State, Kerry said. “If we are failing and failing miserably, who
knows what choice they might make.”
Here,
giving the game away, Kerry provided a glimpse at the mental map of the
president and his top advisers. The administration has indeed subtly exploited
the rise of terrorist enclaves to elevate Obama’s outreach to Iran. Behind the
scenes, coordination and consultation have reached new heights.
Meanwhile,
so have expressions of dissatisfaction with traditional allies for taking
positions hostile to Iran. Our “biggest problem” in Syria is our own
regional allies, Vice President Joseph Biden complained to students at Harvard
University in early October. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates
were “so determined to take down Assad” that they were
pouring “hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of
weapons” into the Syrian opposition. A few weeks later, a senior Obama
administration official cuttingly described another ally, Israel’s prime
minister, as “a chickenshit,” and a second official, similarly on the record,
bragged about the success of the United States in shielding the Islamic Republic
from Israel. “[U]ltimately [Netanyahu] couldn’t bring himself to pull the
trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do
anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.”
Of course,
administration officials routinely insist that the United States is not working
with Tehran. The coordination, however, is impossible to disguise. Thus, when
Iranian jets recently appeared in Iraqi skies, they professed ignorance.
Reporters, noting that the jets were flying sorties in the same air space as
American jets and striking related targets, asked the Pentagon spokesman how
the American and Iranian air forces could work in the same space without
colliding. “We are flying missions over Iraq, [and] we coordinate with the
Iraqi government as we conduct those,” said the spokesman. “It’s up to the
Iraqi government to de-conflict that airspace.” When Kerry was asked about the
news that the Iranian air force was operating in Iraq, he responded that this was a “net positive.”
A
positive? With American acquiescence, Iran is steadily taking control of the
security sector of the Iraqi state. Soon it will dominate the energy sector as
well, giving it effective control over the fifth largest oil reserves in the
world. When the announced goal of the United States is to build up a moderate
Sunni bloc capable of driving a wedge between Islamic State and the Sunni
communities, aligning with Iran is politically self-defeating. In both Iraq and
Syria, Iran projects its power through sectarian militias that slaughter Sunni
Muslims with abandon. Are there any Sunni powers in the region that see
American outreach to Tehran as a good thing? Are there any military-aged Sunni
men in Iraq and Syria who now see the United States as a friendly power?
There are none.
In
theory, one might argue that although an association with Iran is politically
toxic and militarily dangerous, the capabilities it brings to the fight against
the Islamic State more than compensate. But they don’t. Over the last three
years, Obama has given Iran a free hand in Syria and Iraq, on the simplistic
assumption that Tehran would combat al-Qaeda and like-minded groups in a manner
serving American interests. The result, in both countries, has been the
near-total alienation of all Sunnis and the development of an extremist safe
haven that now stretches from the outskirts of Baghdad all the way to Damascus.
America is now applying to the disease a larger dose of the snake oil that
helped cause the malady in the first place.
The
approach is detrimental to American interests in other arenas as well. We
received a portent of things to come on January 18 of this year, when the
Israel Defense Forces struck a convoy of senior Hizballah and Iranian officers,
including a general in the Revolutionary Guards, in the Golan Heights. Ten days
later, Hizballah and Iran retaliated. In other words, by treating Syria as an Iranian
sphere of interest, Obama is allowing the shock troops of Iran to dig in on the
border of Israel—not to mention the border of Jordan. The president’s policy
assumes that Israel and America’s other allies will hang back quietly while
Iran takes southern Syria firmly in its grip. They will not; to assume
otherwise is folly.
Round Three: 2015-
In
November 2013, when Obama purchased the participation of Iran in the Joint Plan
of Action, he established a basic asymmetry that has remained a key feature of
the negotiations ever since. He traded permanent American concessions for
Iranian gestures of temporary restraint.
The
most significant such gestures by Iran were to dilute its stockpiles of uranium
enriched to 20 percent; to refrain from installing new centrifuges; and to
place a hold on further construction of the Arak plutonium reactor. All three,
however, can be easily reversed. By contrast, the Americans recognized the
Iranian right to enrich and agreed to the principle that all restrictions on Iran’s
program would be of a limited character and for a defined period of time. These
two concessions are major, and because they are not just the policy of the
United States government but now the collective position of the permanent
members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany, they will likely
never be reversed.
In his negotiations with
Iran, the president has traded major American concessions for Iranian
gestures of temporary restraint. These concessions will likely never be
reversed.
Obama
has repeatedly stated, most recently in his 2015 State of the Union address,
that the interim agreement “halted” the Iranian nuclear program. Or, as he put
it in his March 2014 interview, the “logic” of the JPOA was “to freeze the
situation for a certain period of time to allow the negotiators to work.” But
the agreement froze only American actions; it hardly stopped the Iranians from
moving forward.
For
one thing, the JPOA restricts the program only with respect to enrichment
capacity and stockpiles; it is entirely silent about the military components:
ballistic missiles, procurement, warhead production. For another, to call what
the JPOA achieved even in these limited domains “a freeze” is a gross
exaggeration. Iranian nuclear scientists have continued to perfect their craft.
They are learning how to operate old centrifuges with greater efficiency. And
thanks to a loophole in the JPOA permitting work on “research and development,”
they are also mastering the use of new, more effective centrifuges.
Therefore,
the Iranian nuclear program is poised to surge ahead. The moment the JPOA
lapses—a date first scheduled for July 2014, then rescheduled to November 2014,
then re-rescheduled to June 30 of this year, possibly to be re-re-rescheduled
yet again—Iran will be in a stronger position than before the negotiations
began. This fact gives Tehran considerable leverage over Washington during the
next rounds.
We can say with
certainty that Obama has had no illusions about this asymmetry—that he
conducted the negotiations with his eyes wide open—because the White House took
pains to hide the truth from the American public. In 2013, instead of
publishing the text of the JPOA, it issued a highly misleading fact sheet.
Peppered with terms like “halt,” “roll back,” and “dismantle,” the document left the impression that the Iranians
had agreed to destroy their nuclear program.
The Iranian foreign
minister, however, refused to play along. He protested—loudly and publicly.
“The White House version both underplays the [American] concessions and overplays
Iranian commitments,” Javad Zarif correctly told a television interviewer. “The White
House tries to portray it as basically a dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program.
That is the word they use time and again.” He defied the interviewer to “find a
. . . single word that even closely resembles dismantling or could be defined
as dismantling in the entire text.”
President
Rouhani went even further. In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, he
emphasized not just that Iran had refused to destroy centrifuges within the
terms of the JPOA, but that it would never destroy them “under any
circumstances.” Currently Iran has approximately 9,000 centrifuges installed
and spinning, and roughly 10,000 more installed but inactive. Until Rouhani
made his statement, the Obama administration had led journalists to believe
that the final agreement would force the Iranians to dismantle some 15,000
centrifuges.Rouhani disabused the world of those expectations.
“This
strikes me as a train wreck,” a distraught Zakaria exclaimed after the
interview. “This strikes me as potentially a huge obstacle because the Iranian
conception of what the deal is going to look like and the American conception
now look like they are miles apart.” Not long thereafter, as if to confirm the
point, Ali Khamenei called for an outcome that will permit the development of
an industrial-sized nuclear program over the next decade.
Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visits a uranium
enrichment facility in Natanz, Iran, in 2008. Office of the
Presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Khamenei’s hard line no doubt came as a surprise to Obama. When the president first
approved the JPOA, he failed to recognize a key fact: his twin goals of
liberating Iran from its international isolation and stripping the Islamic
Republic of its nuclear capabilities were completely at odds with each other.
From Obama’s perspective, he was offering Khamenei an irresistible deal: a
strategic accommodation with the United States. Iran analysts had led the
president to believe that Khamenei was desperate for just such an accommodation,
and to achieve that prize he was searching only for a “face-saving” nuclear
program—one that would give him a symbolic enrichment capability, nothing more.
What soon became clear, however, was that Khamenei was betting that Obama would
accommodate Iran even if it insisted on, and aggressively
pursued, an industrial-scale program.
In
theory, Khamenei’s intransigence could have handed Obama an opportunity. He
could admit the “train wreck”—namely, that Round Two of his Iran engagement had
followed the disastrous pattern set by Round One—and begin working with
Congress and our despairing allies to regain lost leverage. This he obviously
declined to do. Instead, he has chosen to keep the negotiating process alive by
retreating further. Rather than leaving the table, he has paid Iran to keep
negotiating—paid literally, in the form of sanctions relief, which provides
Iran with $700,000,000 per month in revenue; and figuratively, with further
concessions on the nuclear front.
Over
the last year, Obama has reportedly allowed Iran to retain, in one form or
another, its facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and Arak—sites that Iran built in
flagrant violation of the NPT to which it is a signatory. This is the same
Obama who declared at the outset of negotiations that the Iranians “don’t need
to have an underground, fortified facility like Fordow in order to have a
peaceful nuclear program. They certainly don’t need a heavy-water reactor
at Arak in order to have a peaceful nuclear program. . . . And so the question
ultimately is going to be, are they prepared to roll back some of the
advancements that they’ve made.” The answer to his question, by now, is clear:
the Iranians will not roll back anything.
The
president believes that globalization and economic integration will induce
Tehran to forgo its nuclear ambitions. Meanwhile Iran’s rulers are growing
stronger, bolder, and ever closer to nuclear breakout capacity.
For
a majority in Congress, and for all of America’s allies in the Middle East,
this fact is obvious, and it leads to an equally obvious conclusion: the only
way to salvage the West’s position in the nuclear negotiations is to regain the
leverage that the president’s deferential approach has ceded to Iran. With this
thought in mind, a large group of Senators is currently supporting legislation
that will make the re-imposition of sanctions mandatory and immediate if the
Iranians fail to make a deal by the time the current term of the JPOA lapses.
In an effort to bolster
that initiative, Speaker of the House John Boehner invited Benjamin Netanyahu
to Washington to address Congress on Iran. Netanyahu accepted the invitation
without first consulting the White House, which reacted in a storm of
indignation, describing the move as an egregious break in protocol and an insult
to the president. Instead of trying to paper over the disagreement, Obama has
done everything in his power to advertise it. In making his personal rift with
Netanyahu the subject of intense public debate, the White House means to direct
attention away from the strategic rift between them—and from the fact
that the entire Israeli elite, regardless of political orientation, as well as
much of the U.S. Congress, regards the president’s conciliatory approach to
Iran as profoundly misguided.
Meanwhile, the president
is depicting his congressional critics as irresponsible warmongers. He would
have us believe that there are only two options: his undeclared détente with
Iran and yet another war in the Middle East. This is a false choice. It ignores
the one policy that every president since Jimmy Carter has pursued till now:
vigorous containment on all fronts, not just in the nuclear arena.
Obama, however, is intent on obscuring this option, and for a simple reason: an
honest debate about it would force him to come clean with the American people
and admit the depth of his commitment to the strategy whose grim results are
multiplying by the day.
As
a matter of ideology as much as strategy, Obama believes that integrating Iran
into the international diplomatic and economic system is a much more effective
method of moderating its aggressive behavior than applying more pressure.
Contrary to logic, and to all the accumulated evidence before and since the
November 2013 interim agreement, he appears also to believe that his method is
working. In his March 2014 interview, he argued that his approach was actually
strengthening reformers and reformist trends in Tehran: “[I]f as a consequence
of a deal on their nuclear program,” he said, “those voices and trends inside
of Iran are strengthened, and their economy becomes more integrated into the
international community, and there’s more travel and greater openness, even if
that takes a decade or 15 years or 20 years, then that’s very much an outcome
we should desire.”
Perhaps the president is
correct. Perhaps globalization will remove the roughness from the Islamic
Republic just as ocean waves polish the jagged edges of shells. If so, however,
it will happen on much the same, oceanic schedule. In the meantime, the
seasoned thugs in Tehran whom the president has appointed as his strategic
partners in a new world order grow stronger and bolder: ever closer to nuclear
breakout capacity, ever more confident in their hegemonic objectives. On
condition that they forgo their nuclear ambitions, the president has offered
them “a path to break through [their] isolation” and become “a very successful
regional power.” They, for their part, at minuscule and temporary inconvenience
to themselves, have not only reaped the economic and diplomatic rewards
pursuant to participation in the JPOA but also fully preserved those nuclear
ambitions and the means of achieving them. Having bested the most powerful
country on earth in their drive for success on their terms, they have good reason to be
confident.
