CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
– FOREIGN POLICY
March 16, 2009 – 5:15 p.m.
Administration Seeks ‘Just Right’ Approach to Iran Engagement
By Adam Graham-Silverman, CQ Staff
Last fall, seasoned Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross laid out a Goldilocks-like set of diplomatic strategies for dealing with Iran: Tighten the noose of sanctions, engage without conditions, or pursue a hybrid option that combines negotiation and pressure.
The first, he suggested in a report for the Center for a New American Security, would strengthen the hardline Iranian regime, the second would put the United States in a position of weakness.
But the third might strike an effective balance: “The hybrid option is designed to concentrate the minds of Iranian leaders on what they stand to lose without humiliating them,” Ross wrote.
Now that President Obama’s pledge to talk to Iran appears to be coming closer to reality, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ’s special adviser on the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia will have the chance to try what he calls “a serious approach to diplomacy” to see if anything he suggests is just right.
The administration’s review of U.S. policy toward Iran could be completed this week and will have to provide answers to some pressing questions, from what concessions and pressure the United States can bring to the table to what kind of Iranian nuclear program it can accept.
Once at the table, what will the first points of discussion between the United States and Iran be?
Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace suggested the countries focus on less-controversial items that would allow them to work together, such as efforts to limit the drug trade, aid refugees, and fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. Former high-ranking State Department official Frank Wisner pointed out that the countries could negotiate waterway rights in the Persian Gulf or flights between the two countries as precursor to more difficult issues.
Meanwhile, Congress could act after the April recess on a bill that would promote divestment from Iran’s energy industry.
International Support
To boost the odds of successful negotiations, experts say, the international community must show that concrete consequences await an unsuccessful outcome.
“If there is an effective road to Tehran, it is most certainly through such places as Moscow, London, Paris, Berlin, and Beijing,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former director of policy planning at the State Department.
That road could take an unconventional route, however. Ross and others suggested the U.N. Security Council, the previous venue for sanctions, is a likely dead end for further action. Security Council members Russia and China have blocked strong U.N. action, and their support would be required to apply meaningful pressure.
As part of his hybrid approach, Ross suggested enlisting Europe to strengthen its sanctions against Iran as a condition for the United States to join European Union-Iranian negotiations. To marshal European as well as Chinese support, Ross suggested asking the Saudis, whose oil gives them influence and who fear a nuclear Iran, to make the argument.
Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry , D-Mass., argued that Arab states would be willing to help because they now are more worried about Iranian meddling than fighting with Israel. Others have said Arabs and Israelis alike are uneager to see the United States and Iran expand their ties, which could shift power in the region.
As for Russia, Ross said Moscow’s support for pressuring Iran might be gained by offering to cancel missile defense deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic — an offer Obama reportedly suggested in a letter to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. Ross also said the Russians could be coaxed by an offer to make them the leading supplier of nuclear fuel to an expanding and lucrative international market or to let them lead the negotiations with Iran.
Possible Concessions
While most experts agree the United States will have to make concessions, opinions vary on what is needed.
On one end of the spectrum, former national security adviser Zbignew Brzezinski argued against preconditions or time lines for negotiation, threats of sanctions, mentions of the use of force or regime change, or accusations of terrorism.
“It seems to me that we run the risk of . . . wanting to have our cake and eating it too at the same time, of engaging in polemics and diatribes with the Iranians while at the same time engaging seemingly in a negotiating process,” he said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing earlier this month. “The first is not conducive to the second.”
Haass and others said Iranian enrichment is inevitable and the United States should focus on incentives to compel transparency and inspections instead of trying to shut down Iran’s nuclear program, which Tehran says is for peaceful purposes and which operates within the bounds of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
“I also believe a zero-enrichment insistence would make it very difficult for us to build a requisite degree of multilateral, international support for the kind of sanctions escalation we’re thinking of,” Haass said.
Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to President George Bush, said nuclear proliferation is a greater threat than the Iranians’ use of a weapon and necessitates international, not Iranian, control of the country’s nuclear fuel cycle.
“Anything that allows Iran to enrich uranium is a deadly peril to the goal of containing proliferation capabilities in the world,” he said, arguing that Tehran knows that the use of a nuclear weapon would guarantee its swift destruction.
According to Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, as many as 15 Middle Eastern countries have developed plans to explore nuclear technology since 2006.
Timing Issues
Whatever form the negotiations take, timing will be an important consideration.
Some experts have argued that the United States should wait to engage Iran until after its election in June, when hardline President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad could be defeated. Others say holding out would hand Ahmedinejad a campaign weapon, allowing him to keep up anti-U.S. rhetoric while accusing his more moderate opponents of being too cozy with the United States. For his part, Ross has suggested using secret back channels, which could already be under way.
Congress, however, could seek to apply pressures fairly soon.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank , D-Mass., has introduced a bill (
But Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said further sanctions would be unlikely to succeed, in part because they penalize friendly companies and countries, not the Iranians directly.
“[Congressional action] would only reduce the prospects of diplomacy by further poisoning the atmosphere, which in turn lessens America’s ability to tap into its reservoir of leverage with Iran in the first place,” Parsi told the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic and International Monetary Policy, Trade, and Technology last week.
“After a decade-and-a-half of failed economic pressure and three decades of hostility, it is not sanctions or divestments that deserve another chance,” Parsi said. “It’s diplomacy and the opportunity to use the leverage that existing sanctions provide in the context of a negotiation that should be given the space and time to succeed.”
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