The Realist

Roger Cohen thinks he has a fourth option in how to deal with Iran.  First, here he  is agreeing that sanctions won’t work and accepting the same logic on likely outcomes as Eliot Cohen did:

Yes, it feels good to do something, but it doesn’t necessarily help. In this case, sanctions won’t for four reasons.

One: Iran is inured to sanctions after years of living with them and has in Dubai a sure-fire conduit for goods at a manageable surtax. Two: Russia and China will never pay more than lip-service to sanctions. Three: You don’t bring down a quasi-holy symbol — nuclear power — by cutting off gasoline sales. Four: sanctions feed the persecution complex on which the Iranian regime thrives.

A senior German Foreign Ministry official last week told an American Council on Germany delegation: “The efficiency of sanctions is not really discussed because if you do, you are left with only two options — a military strike or living with a nuclear Iran — and nobody wants to go there. So the answer is: Let’s impose further sanctions! It’s a dishonest debate.”

His answer?  A negotiated, regional settlement with the Iranians.

The choice is indeed between a military strike and living with a nuclear Iran. But what is a “nuclear Iran?” Is it an Iran that’s nuclear-armed — a very dangerous development — or an Iran with an I.A.E.A,-monitored enrichment facility?

I believe monitored enrichment on Iranian soil in the name of what Obama called Iran’s “right to peaceful nuclear power” remains a possible basis for an agreement that blocks weaponization. Zero enrichment is by now a non-starter.

For fruitless sanctions to be avoided, the mantra of William Burns, the U.S. under secretary for political affairs who will attend multilateral talks with Iran starting Thursday, must be: “Widen the canvas.”

The Iranian regime is weak. Its disarray was again evident last week; it actually feels threatened by George Soros. Significant factions now view an American breakthrough as needed. They have a favorable view of Burns.

Burns must seek to open a parallel bilateral U.S.-Iran negotiation covering at least these areas: Afghanistan and Iraq (where interests often converge); Hezbollah and Hamas (where they do not); human rights; blocked Iranian assets; diplomatic relations; regional security arrangements; drugs; the fight against Al Qaeda; visas and travel.

Isolated, nuclear negotiations will fail. Integrated, they may not. Iran’s sense of humiliation is rooted in its America complex; its nuclear program is above all about the restoration of pride. Settle the complex to contain the program. Triangulate. Think broad. Think E.U., not Versailles.

This is no more plausible than when Cohen has tried to sell the idea of a “grand bargain” with Iran in the past.  Cohen fails to understand that Iran sees no reason to offer us anything because it believes it has the upper hand.  As Cohen himself admits, sanctions – our one remaining policy option – won’t work.  Iran has very little reason to fear a muscular response from this president, who can’t even bring himself to properly-resource what he himself has described as a war of necessity in Afghanistan.  Tehran isn’t out to do anyone any favours.

The idea that we could block weaponization by allowing Iran to enrich uranium at an IAEA-monitored facility is ludicrous.  Iran has never shown any inclination to co-operate with international inspectors, and surely subordinating its nuclear programme to the control of the West would grievously harm the nationalistic pride that Cohen so frequently admits is behind the nuclear programme.  Iran has no reason to avoid weaponization, and certainly not merely in exchange for a peaceful, civilian nuclear power capability that it has no need for.

Cohen is right, then, to admit that we would have to provide Tehran with more for it to agree to halt weaponization; much, much more.  Yet there is no reason for the mullahs to agree to do this either, since there is virtually nothing we can give them at an acceptable cost to us that they could not take once they had a nuclear weapon anyway.  Their long-term influence over Iraq is already ensured, and American influence in Baghdad is waning rapidly anyway – setting aside even the morality or wisdom of us negotiating with Iran over the future of a free, sovereign, independent Iraq which thousands of Americans died to bring into being.

It is entirely unclear to me – and Cohen has never spelt it out – what could transpire in negotiations on Hamas and Hezbollah that would persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear programme.  Iran supports Hamas and Hezbollah as means of seeking the eventual destruction of Israel, as tools that allow it to exert enormous influence in Lebanon, among the Palestinians, and in the Middle East as a whole, and as Tehran’s greatest public relations triumph among the Arabs.  The United States opposes them for all of these reasons.

Interests here do not just lack convergence but are diametrically opposed.  It is hard to imagine how this could possibly cease to be the case unless the U.S. reversed decades of foreign policy objectives in the Middle East and abandoned Israel; this is, incidentally, precisely what the Iranians hope will happen once they can exert pressure with a nuclear weapon, and it’s not at all clear to me why it would be good policy to cede this to them earlier, or why it would persuade them that developing a nuclear weapon was a bad idea, given they would already have achieved many of their goals and could look forward to the achievement of many more.

The other issues he mentions are quite obviously not of significant moment to lead to a course correction on Tehran’s nuclear programme.  There is nothing the U.S. can give to the mullahs in terms of unblocking assets, restoring diplomatic relations, battling drugs, or battling al-Qaeda that would lead to it abandoning its nuclear programme.  If the mullahs wanted assets unblocked or diplomatic relations restored, they wouldn’t have begun a nuclear programme in the first place.  Nor would Iran have anything to gain from confronting al-Qaeda, which remains a minor irritant and sometimes ally of it while being a major and distracting strategic obsession of the United States.

Finally, Cohen is incorrect to say the Iranian regime is weak or scared.  Ahmadinejad and his clique have just stolen an election and seized unconstitutional power with virtually no ramifications.  They clearly face no organized or capable domestic opposition.  They have set themselves up for a possible military coup when the Supreme Leader finally dies.  Squabbling among the hard-liners about the distribution of power does not amount to a major weakness.  Besides, given their propensity to paint dissidents as allied with the West, it is unclear why the nuclear programme and the continued tension between Iran and the West that this brings serves to undermine the regime; indeed, it quite obviously serves to strengthen it and undermine the case of the reformists.

A negotiated settlement isn’t going to work.  You only negotiate from a position of strength, not weakness.  There’s nothing we can give the Iranians that they can’t take, along with more, later on.  Cohen and his supporters are a dangerous distraction from the two choices confronting us: war or a nuclear Iran.