The Race for Iran

Today, Flynt appeared on Public Radio International’s To The Point, hosted by Warren Olney, to discuss U.S.-Iranian tensions.  The other guests on the segment, which starts 7:33 into the program, click here to listen,were Dennis Ross, recently separated from the Obama Administration, Barbara Slavin, and Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council.  Flynt’s major themes were that the Obama Administration was never serious about strategically-grounded rapprochement with the Islamic Republic, that it was fundamentally duplicitous in its approach to the Tehran Declaration, and that is now seems divided between those who believe a U.S.-Iranian military confrontation is inevitable and those who support regime change—even if they are not yet prepared to say so publicly—as the alternative to (overt) war against Iran. 

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Hillary Mann Leverett appeared on a panel broadcast today on CNN’s GPS, hosted by Fareed Zakaria; see video above or click here.  Besides Hillary, the panel included Hooman Majd, Vali Nasr, and Bret Stephens.  It was immediately prompted by the mounting “talk of war” between the United States and/or Israel, on the one hand, and the Islamic Republic, on the other, but it also provided an occasion to discuss bigger questions about U.S.-Iranian relations and U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic. 

The most telling exchange is between Hillary and Bret Stephens.  After Stephens argues that engaging Tehran is pointless, because the Iranian government demonstrated its manifest disinterest in improving relations with Washington by rejecting President Obama’s unprecedentedly generous offer of engagement, Hillary recites in detail how this assessment is fundamentally at odds with the historical record and how the Obama Administration was never serious about pursuing real rapprochement with the Islamic Republic. 

Stephens has no direct response to this.  He is reduced to “You are telling of a 30-year record of outreach to the United States that has been foolishly rebuffed by the United States; this is not a regime that supports terrorist groups or tried to kill the Saudi ambassador, perhaps has justly incurred the resentment and fear of its neighbors.”  In other words, he changes the subject. 

We will leave aside, for now, the utter lack of substantiation for the charge of Iranian government responsibility for an alleged plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the United States or the thorough politicization of the U.S. government’s state-sponsors of terrorism list.  As Hillary points out, before Richard Nixon made his historic opening to China in 1972, American political and policy elites routinely accused the People’s Republic of supporting terrorism and fomenting all sorts of dastardly deeds around the world.  This did not undermine the strategic logic of Sino-American rapprochement, either for Washington or Beijing.  But it took an American president capable of strategic leadership to act on that. 

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Phto by: Behrouz Mehri / AFP/Getty Images

A year ago, our colleague, Seyed Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran, published an extraordinarily prescient paper, “The Islamic Republic of Iran, the United States, and the Balance of Power in the Middle East,” see here. Writing before protests in Egypt had even broken out, Seyed Mohammad explained

“In Tehran, there is a strong belief that the region is changing dramatically in favor of Hezbollah, the Palestinians, and the Resistance.  The rise of an independent Turkey, whose government has a worldview very different from that of the U.S., German, British, and French governments, along with the relative decline of Saudi and Egyptian influence, signals a major shift in the regional balance of power.  Saudi military incompetence during the fighting with Yemeni tribes along the border between the two countries, the general decline of the Egyptian regime in all respects, and the almost universal contempt among Arabs as a whole for the leaders of these two countries and other pro-Western Arab regimes and their corrupt elites, are seen as signs that the center cannot hold.  The fact that the Iranian president and the Turkish prime minister are so popular in Arab countries, while most Arab leaders are deeply unpopular, is a sign that the region is changing.” 

We were bowled over when we first read those words a year ago, and are even more bowled over to re-read them now and see how well they have held up:  Mubarak is out of power and standing trial in a Cairo court, Saudi troops have shown that they are well-suited to repressing an unarmed civilian population in another country, and—contrary to conventional wisdom and social “facts” in the West—Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains one of the three most popular leaders in the Arab world, according to the most recent running of the Arab Public Opinion Poll, see here.   

Now Mohammad has come out with another richly insightful overview of the regional condition, “Tour d’horizon:  An Iranian Optic on the Middle East and Its Prospects”, which our friends at the Conflicts Forum have published, see here.  Perhaps our reaction is skewed because we live in Washington, DC, where sober, reality-based commentary on the region is a rare commodity, but we think it is brilliant, and recommend it highly. 

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett