The Race for Iran

This post also appears at The Washington Note.

One of the biggest challenges that those of us proposing strategic rapprochement as a solution to the United States’ diplomatic standoff with Iran face is the fact that many Americans cannot imagine how such a rapprochement would actually play out.

Fortunately Georgetown University Professor and Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Charles Kupchan has recently published a new book, How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace, and an accompanying article in Foreign Affairs that addresses exactly this question: how do enemies become friends?

The Foreign Affairs article provides some useful evidence to support the notion that engagement with the Islamic Republic could work, as well as historical lessons for how best to go about it.

According to Kupchan, reconciliations are normally the product of accommodation, rather than confrontation, and “are usually the product of necessity rather than altruism: facing strategic overcommitment, a state seeks to reduce its burdens by befriending an adversary.”

Strategic necessity was certainly the motivating factor for Nixon’s opening to China, and Kupchan shows that it was also the case in rapprochements between Norway and Sweden at the turn of the 20th century; Indonesia and Malaysia in the 1960s; and Argentina and Brazil during the 1980s.

The term “strategic overcommitment” could certainly be used to describe the United States position vis-a-vis the Islamic Republic today given Iran’s “spoiler” capability on a range of key issues for the United States in the Middle East including stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan and reaching an equilibrium on the Israeli-Palestinian track.

Next, Kupchan argues that “Washington should be prepared to exchange concessions that are timely and bold enough to send signals of benign intent; otherwise, each party will be unconvinced that the other is sincere in its quest for reconciliation.”

The sincerity problem is clearly a key impediment to the Obama administration’s engagement to date, and for good reason. President Obama’s promises of engagement have been more rhetorical than substantive.

As Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett have pointed out, formally announcing an end to support for opposition groups within Iran, as Nixon told the CIA to stand down in Tibet in the 1970s, would be a good place to start.

One key finding that I found somewhat surprising is that rapprochement is primarily about diplomacy, not economic interdependence. In most cases, it is the former that leads to the latter.

Kupchan includes much more in his article about how the Obama administration should sequence an opening and how to manage the domestic political backlash at home.

You can find Kupchan’s article here and the book here.

– Ben Katcher