“The United States and Iran held their first official high-level, face-to-face talks in almost 30 years,” reported the Washington Post in 2007. The State Department celebrated the meeting between the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, and his Iranian counterpart; but in reality, diplomacy between the two sides was nothing new. Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979 did not end U.S.-Iranian engagement.1 The United States and Iran have never stopped talking. While the Obama administration sought to reinvent U.S. policy with outreach, there is little Obama proposed that did not have precedent.
How Diplomacy Prolonged the Hostage Crisis
Iran was an important Cold War ally for the United States—in Jimmy Carter’s words, “an island of stability in a sea of turmoil.”2 Iran’s linchpin status led successive American administrations to paper over differences with the shah. Carter, however, was unwilling to turn a blind eye to his human rights abuses.3 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had long been unpopular among diplomats,4 and as Iranians took to the streets to protest his dictatorial ways, many in the State Department counseled abandoning the pro-American leader. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor, explained that “the lower echelons at State, notably the head of the Iran Desk . . . were motivated by doctrinal dislike of the Shah and simply wanted him out of power altogether.”5 They got their wish.
On February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini arrived in Tehran on a chartered Air France flight and was greeted by three million Iranians. The Islamic Revolution was unprecedented in its scale: in an age before the Internet and Twitter, Khomeini mobilized fully 10 percent of the population. John Limbert, an eyewitness to the revolution, recalled how Iranians were possessed by “rage and the thirst for revenge for real or imagined grievances.”6 They projected upon Khomeini what they wished him to be. So too did Americans.
Richard Falk, a Princeton political scientist who was influential in the Carter administration, urged the White House to embrace Khomeini. “The depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false,” Falk asserted, adding that the ayatollah’s “entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals . . . who share a notable record of concern with human rights.”7 It was what Carter wanted to hear, and there was no shortage of experts to tell him the same story. Richard Cottam, a diplomat and Iran scholar, reported that the ayatollah’s inner circle was “afraid of the Soviet Union and desirous of relying on the U.S. for Iran’s defense.”8
Even as Khomeini launched a reign of terror, the State Department announced that it would maintain relations with the new government.9 The American embassy went into overdrive. Because jockeying for power among Iranians was so intense, American diplomats met with any Iranian official they could. There were several months of low-key diplomacy, but revolutionary leaders stymied Carter’s hope to engage at a senior level. When the president recalled William Sullivan, his ambassador in Tehran, in April 1979, Iran’s revolutionary government rejected Carter’s new nominee in pique over American criticism of its human rights violations.10
Protestors might chant anti-American slogans outside the U.S. embassy and revolutionary firing squads might work around the clock, but senior State Department officials reported that bilateral ties were improving.11 Steven Erlanger, a young journalist who would rise to become the chief diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, asserted that although the revolution was not over, “the religious phase is drawing to a close even as it is becoming formalized.”12 American diplomats in Tehran continued to speak hopefully of moderates within the revolutionary coalition.13 The way forward seemed clear to the diplomats: they wanted to meet with Khomeini. To sit publicly with the ayatollah, they believed, would signal that Washington respected his authority.14 L. Bruce Laingen, the senior American diplomat in Tehran, never got permission.
Brzezinski did not ask. Visiting Algiers on November 1, 1979, he met Mehdi Bazargan, revolutionary Iran’s prime minister, at a reception to celebrate the Algerian independence day.15 Brzezinski told Bazargan that the United States was open to any relationship and partnership the Islamic Republic wanted.16 Brzezinski may have been well-meaning, but his initiative was a case study in how ill-timed diplomacy worsens relationships. Instead of grasping an outstretched hand, adversaries can respond with provocation to reinforce their ideological credentials. This is what happened in Iran.
The day after newspapers published photographs of the Brzezinski-Bazargan handshake—and the day after Erlanger filed his optimistic dispatch—protests rocked Iran, culminating in the seizure of the American embassy by outraged students.17 Khomeini endorsed the hostage takers and their paranoid worldview, in which the United States would recruit Iranian traitors to collapse the revolution from within. “Our young people must foil these plots,” he blustered.18 Khomeini’s son embraced the captors, underscoring the regime’s contempt for international law.19
The hostage situation defined the Carter administration. Harold H. Saunders, assistant secretary of state for the Near East and South Asia, recalled internal debate about how the United States should respond:
The challenge facing members of the American crisis team . . . was how to bridge the gulf between the Iranian and American worlds. How could we deal with people like this? How could we make them see that it would best serve their revolutionary agenda to release our people instead of holding them? Should we hit them hard in a quick, sharp, punitive blow? Should we ignore them? Should we search out Iranian leaders who wanted the hostages freed for their own political reasons and try to find ways of maneuvering so as to make it more feasible for them to do what they wanted to do . . . ? What approach would the American people support?20
The Carter administration settled on a two-track policy. First, they would maximize communications and keep the door to negotiation open; second, they would raise the cost to Iran of holding hostages.21 Rather than keep American options open, however, the administration decided to limit them. Two days after the embassy takeover, Gary Sick, a National Security Council official, reportedly leaked word that there would be “no change in the status quo—no military alert, no movement of forces, no resort to military contingency plans.”22 Perhaps the White House believed that taking military action off the table would enable diplomacy; but by removing the threat of force, it forfeited its leverage.23 Carter’s assurances convinced the hostage takers they had nothing to fear.24
Carter’s desire to talk to rogues broke with tried-and-true strategy. During both the Black September hostage crisis in 1970 and the Khmer Rouge’s capture of the SS Mayaguez in 1975, the United States had quietly deployed forces to augment its leverage, even while muting its public rhetoric. Carter’s aides could easily have leaked word of military preparations, but the president chose not to—a choice that undercut both diplomacy and policy options.
Compounding the difficulty of resolving the crisis were the cross-purposes of Americans and Iranians. Carter saw the hostage crisis through an American lens and accepted the captors’ declared grievances at face value, even as he denounced the embassy takeover as a violation of international law. For Khomeini’s followers, however, capturing the “Den of Spies” could be a tool to prevent the reconciliation that they saw as the greater threat to their nascent Islamic Republic.25
The hostage takers proceeded to position themselves as arbiters of the revolution’s purity. The captors’ spokeswoman, Masoumeh Ebtekar, explained, “Every afternoon, I and several other students spent from four to six hours writing summaries of the documents [found in the embassy]. . . . The really important ones we would expose publicly, on television.”26 Khomeini and his revolutionary courts would purge those officials whom the students exposed as talking with the Americans, even if their interaction with the embassy was routine. Bazargan became the first victim.27
Not surprisingly, it became increasingly difficult for the Americans to find Iranians with whom to engage. Blinded by desperation, Carter’s aides hoped to find moderate revolutionaries who could sell a deal to Khomeini.28 They discounted signs that Iranian authorities were not interested in resolving conflict. Ignorance of where power lay in Tehran compounded the problem. Khomeini was in charge, but as Secretary of State Cyrus Vance recognized, even Khomeini “was not one to row upstream” against the flow of public opinion.29 Never mind that Khomeini helped shape public opinion. The mob mentality precluded traditional diplomacy; it is hard to negotiate with a regime that has gone rogue.
Instead of demanding that Khomeini end incitement and consolidate control as a precondition for diplomacy, Carter rushed to talk. This was understandable because of fears that the Iranians would execute hostages. Carter also believed that if he could get to Khomeini, he could temper the ayatollah’s hostility toward the United States. To this end, the president asked Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general, and William Miller, a retired diplomat, to carry a letter to Tehran to ask for the hostages’ release and to start a discussion about future bilateral relations. The duo were flag bearers for radicalism. Clark had met Khomeini during the ayatollah’s last day in Paris and had championed his cause,30 and Miller had described Khomeini as “a progressive force for human rights.”31 The two flew to Istanbul, but when Carter’s aides announced their mission, Khomeini refused them entry and forbade any negotiation before Washington extradited the shah.32 Clark and Miller returned to Washington, their letter undelivered. Had Carter kept his diplomacy quiet, perhaps Khomeini might have been willing to dial back the incitement and make a discreet deal to return the hostages within a month, instead of holding them for more than a year.
The administration would not take no for an answer. Soon, a delegation of congressmen left for Tehran. Rep. George Hansen, a Republican from Idaho, said that Congress might pass a resolution calling for Carter to extradite the shah in exchange for the release of some hostages. Again, the Iranians refused to negotiate. Each time Khomeini spurned Carter’s outreach, he could depict himself as strong and the Americans as weak. He won before the negotiations even began. Carter may have approached diplomacy enthusiastically, but goodwill is never enough in dealing with rogue regimes. It takes two to tango.
Not every aspect of Carter’s approach backfired. The president successfully rallied world opinion behind the United States. He won unanimous UN Security Council backing for a resolution seeking the hostages’ immediate release, and near-unanimous support for a resolution deploring Iran’s inaction.33 Sanctions failed only because of a Soviet veto.34 The International Court of Justice also declared the embassy seizure illegal.35 The revolutionaries simply ignored the ruling; rogue regimes by definition care little for international institutions or world opinion.
Carter’s aides justified multilateralism as a necessary precondition for successful diplomacy. Still, the seventeen days they spent courting the International Court were seventeen days in which Iranian revolutionaries could be confident that the United States would undertake no military strike that could prejudice the verdict. Rather than increase pressure on Iran, Carter’s diplomatic strategy relieved it.36 The debate over how to balance the benefit of international imprimatur with costs in terms of lost time continues to perplex diplomats. Nor did the international consensus that Carter marshaled sway Khomeini.
Carter continued to seek an intermediary even after Khomeini forbade all Iranian officials to negotiate with Americans.37 Vance explained, “Since we could not reach the ayatollah, we had no choice but to try to work through the Revolutionary Council,” even though he himself admitted that the hostage takers would not answer to the council.38
The Carter administration also attempted to use the United Nations to create back channels.39 Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim tried to arrange a meeting between Vance and Iran’s foreign minister, Abulhassan Bani Sadr, but failed before Bani Sadr lost his post after only two and a half weeks. Bani Sadr’s precarious position did not stop him from adding to Iran’s demands. In addition to the captors’ calls for the return of the shah, Bani Sadr also demanded the return of the shah’s assets, an end to interference in Iranian affairs, and an apology for injustices more imagined than real. No sooner did Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, a former trainer for Palestinian terrorists, assume the foreign minister’s post than the Carter team reached out to him as well. “He was a contact we had to pay attention to when routes to Khomeini were rare,” Harold Saunders explained.40
Carter considered dialogue to have no cost, but the price of desperation diplomacy was huge. Any Iranian partner had to bolster his revolutionary credentials, and so added fresh demands. The rush to engage the Iranians only deepened the crisis.
Carter’s inner circle split when they heard the new demands. Some wanted to hold the revolutionaries’ feet to the fire, while those in the State Department prided themselves on their cultural sensitivity and argued that any solution would require allowing Iranian leaders to claim victory.41 Saunders explained the diplomats’ logic: Even though they believed the Iranian regime should be accountable under international law, the State Department worried that Khomeini might not have the power to control the anti-American wave he had unleashed. Nor was complying with international law Khomeini’s top priority; consolidating the revolution was. Any solution, Saunders and his team argued, would require the Iranians to conclude on their own that it was in their revolutionary interest to release the hostages.42 The cost of such an approach was high: American diplomats working to preserve rather than undermine Khomeini’s regime.
Circles around Khomeini took advantage of American desperation. As the hostages ended their first month in captivity, America’s Iranian contacts suggested that if only the White House would be conciliatory, Iranian pragmatists might convince Khomeini to act in the same spirit. It was a strategy that appealed to Carter and prefigured the incentive packages that would characterize Western diplomacy toward Iran for more than three decades.43
Carter signaled openness to dialogue and would not tie his actions to Tehran’s. Even with American diplomats held hostage, he refused to sever diplomatic relations. He hoped that allowing the Islamic Republic to keep its embassy in Washington would facilitate diplomacy.44 Before its closure in April 1980, Khomeini’s embassy helped plan the assassination of a former Iranian official in Bethesda, Maryland.
Carter refused to accept that incentives would not sway an ideological adversary. When his incentives failed to win Khomeini over, he augmented them, in effect making the bribery of adversaries the basis of American strategy. Thus, instead of defending a leader who stood staunchly by America during the Cold War, Carter sought to hasten the cancer-stricken shah’s departure for Panama after reluctantly allowing him into the United States for medical treatment; he may also have encouraged Panamanian authorities to return the shah to Iran.45 The gesture did not assuage Khomeini. As Peter Rodman, a former aide to Henry Kissinger, noted, “The eagerness to prove goodwill to an intransigent opponent paradoxically makes a settlement less likely.”46
There is a logic to offering carrots rather than sticks, but there is also a drawback: the incentivizing of rogue behavior. The cost went far behind Iran, too. A willingness to reverse course under pressure and betray allies may have convinced Soviet leaders who already perceived Carter as weak and indecisive that American reaction to an invasion of Afghanistan would be slight.47
When the Swiss ambassador in Tehran reported that the Iranian government would assume control over the hostages so long as the U.S. government refrained from any measures to pressure Tehran, Carter played along. He delayed sanctions, alleviating pressure on a regime that was struggling to consolidate control. Khomeini took no action.48 Even when Carter finally imposed some sanctions in April 1980, these were weak and simply confirmed the state of affairs: limiting travel to Iran for all but journalists and officials, and restricting financial transfers. His ban on importing Iranian goods was meaningless, since war and revolution had ground Iran’s economy to a halt.
As the months progressed, there was one constant: Carter grasped at straws. Even though Bani Sadr had violated earlier promises, he raised White House hopes with a secret approach through a German law firm.49 Carter maintained an almost religious belief that diplomacy could work. His diplomats counseled against any nondiplomatic strategy for fear that it would undermine diplomacy’s prospects. They were more willing to condemn American actions for hindering diplomacy than to blame Iranian insincerity.50 When Carter agreed to attempt a rescue of the hostages, Vance resigned in protest.51
Ten months after the embassy seizure, German intermediaries reported that a senior Iranian official was ready to talk.52 The official was able to convince the White House that he truly represented Khomeini by foretelling demands that Khomeini would make in a speech. The speech consolidated and formalized the Iranian position: demanding noninterference by the United States in Iran’s internal affairs, release of frozen assets and a return of the shah’s assets, and cancellation of all U.S. claims against Iran.
The Carter administration agreed to bargain for the hostages. “It was in the national interest of the United States to negotiate with Iran for the release of the hostages, rather than to refuse to negotiate at all,” wrote the legal advisor to Edmund Muskie, the secretary of state.53 Politicians across the aisle uniformly held that there should be no negotiation with terrorists in principle, although there was no consensus when it came to the problem of rogue regimes. Alexander Haig, Reagan’s first secretary of state, considered Carter’s willingness to talk a bad idea.54 Carter’s decision to negotiate with Khomeini was eased by moral equivalence; many of his advisors saw merit to Iranian accusations against the United States.55 Muskie’s legal advisor went so far as to equate U.S. freezing of Iranian assets with Iran’s taking of hostages.56
On September 13, 1980, Warren Christopher, deputy secretary of state, traveled to Bonn with his handpicked team to meet Sadegh Tabatabai, the Iranian intermediary who was also the brother of Khomeini’s daughter-in-law. The State Department believed the meetings productive—when the metric is merely sitting down to talk, it is easy to claim success—but the channel soon dried up. Tabatabai stopped traveling to Bonn, and the Iranian parliament started issuing new demands. The State Department was willing to give the regime the benefit of the doubt and blamed the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War for Tabatabai’s abrupt withdrawal from talks.57 It should not have. The Iranians frequently switch negotiators. After accepting concessions, the Iranian leadership annuls the process, reiterates its demands, and begins negotiations anew with the adversaries’ concessions as the opening position.
Rather than see the war as an impediment, the State Department should have recognized it as an opportunity, for indeed that is what it was. “The blow that broke the logjam came from Saddam Hussein, not Jimmy Carter,” Rodman observed.58 Ronald Reagan’s election also helped. The Iranian leadership understood Carter and knew how to exploit his weakness, but Reagan was a different matter. Iran’s traditional game of increasing demands would no longer work. Events, rather than Carter’s outreach, reversed the dynamic. Khomeini finally decided that further delays might cost Iran and that it was time to make a deal.
The Iranian government then cast aside the agreement reached between Christopher and Tabatabai to let international courts determine the value of the shah’s assets, and instead demanded $24 billion.59 With the costs of war piled onto the turmoil of revolution, Tehran faced financial ruin. Khomeini wanted money. The Iranian demand was blackmail; but if Carter refused to pay, Khomeini might condemn the hostages to revolutionary courts in which justice was no concern and death sentences the norm. Although American leverage was at its weakest, Carter ordered negotiations to proceed.
The price of negotiating under fire was high. Carter agreed not only to the ransom, but also to an American pledge “not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.” Even though this agreement was not a treaty and not technically binding, diplomats have cited it as reason not to pressure Iran.60 There were also peripheral costs as a result of relying on Algeria to play the middleman. This reactionary, pro-Soviet regime was locked in a fierce border dispute with Morocco, an important American ally, and Carter’s wooing of Algeria came at Morocco’s expense.61
When the Iranian government released the hostages just minutes after Ronald Reagan took his oath of office on January 20, 1981, Carter’s team trumpeted the success of their diplomacy.62 They bragged that they had persevered, avoiding the use of force except for the failed rescue mission, and rallying the international community against Iran. Most importantly, they won the release of the hostages. Diplomacy had triumphed, they concluded.
This is debatable, however. Diplomacy prolonged the crisis to 444 days and allowed radical factions to consolidate around Khomeini. Iranian officials toyed with their American counterparts and drove up the cost of the bargain before abruptly disengaging. Carter’s desperation empowered a series of anti-American intermediaries, ranging from the PLO and the Syrians, to Libyans, Cubans, and Algerians.63 The perception of powerlessness to free the hostages eroded America’s international standing and encouraged adversaries. While Carter might once have defined his brokering of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty as the central pillar of his legacy, his handling of the hostage crisis leads historians to remember his presidency as bumbling and ineffectual.64 It was events outside the negotiating room that won the hostages their freedom.
What should Carter have done differently? Iran’s negotiating behavior provides clues. Since the revolutionaries responded more to pressure than to nicety, Carter might have done more to build leverage. “Diplomacy divorced from power is futile,” as Rodman observed. When Iraq invaded Iran, “suddenly the stubborn lethargy of the Iranian political system, all the internal feuding and procrastinating and jockeying for position, jelled under the pressure of force majeure; suddenly the economic sanctions took on a new bite as the threat of protracted war impended.”65 Carter need not have invaded Iran, but had he quietly sent troops and battle groups to the Persian Gulf, Khomeini would have noticed. At the very least, Carter might then have negotiated from a position of strength.
Carter’s obsession with his own re-election also undercut diplomacy. While it was admirable that he wanted Reagan to begin with a clean slate, the more Carter’s team telegraphed desperation to conclude an agreement before they left office, the more they strengthened the Iranian hand.
In the annals of the twentieth century, Carter’s handling of Iran presents a paradox. Few if any U.S. presidents have been more committed to diplomacy in a crisis, and yet, by his single-minded pursuit of diplomacy, Carter froze U.S. relations with postrevolutionary Iran for nearly three decades. Hindsight is always 20/20, but had Brzezinski not pushed forward so enthusiastically in his handshake with Mehdi Bazargan, and had Carter’s decisions not extended a two- or three-day crisis into a fourteen-month event, the United States and Iran might enjoy normal relations today.
The Iran-Contra Affair
The hostages’ homecoming was the end of a chapter, but not the final story. The crisis left Carter’s legacy in tatters, but the damage it did to Iran’s image was worse. The Islamic Republic had, in world opinion, become a pariah state. Khomeini promised paradise, but he brought misery and isolation. Whereas Iranians had once seen themselves as being on track to acquire economic power and a European standard of life, it was clear by the early 1980s that Iran’s trajectory had reversed.
With the hostages home, President Ronald Reagan turned his attention to the economy and to rebuilding America’s military capability. Crises that define presidencies, however, are almost always unforeseen. In 1982, with terrorism resurgent, Israel invaded Lebanon to push out Palestinian guerillas. The U.S. special envoy Philip Habib brokered a deal in which Israeli forces would leave Beirut while the Palestine Liberation Organization would leave Lebanon altogether.
When Lebanon’s government faltered, chaos again threatened the country. Reagan ordered U.S. Marines to join French paratroopers and Italian soldiers in the capital to shore up the government. It was a fateful decision. On October 23, 1983, an Iranian-sponsored suicide bomber drove a truck bomb into the U.S. Marine barracks, killing 241 American servicemen.
For Americans, it was the beginning of a Lebanese nightmare. Between 1984 and 1992, Iranian-backed terrorists in Lebanon kidnapped twenty-four Americans. They killed several, including William Francis Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, and William R. Higgins, a Marine colonel snatched while on a UN peacekeeping mission. Most of the captives languished, while Reagan obsessively peppered his staff with questions about their condition and the possibilities for their release.66
It was déjà vu all over again as a hostage crisis brought relations with Iran front and center. On January 20, 1984, Secretary of State George P. Shultz designated Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism and lobbied allies to embargo arms sales to Iran, a measure designed to bite the Islamic Republic as its war with Iraq dragged on.67
Reagan wanted to punish Iran for its terror sponsorship, but his aides, like Carter, aimed to engage moderate regime officials. On August 31, 1984, the national security advisor, Robert McFarlane, initiated a review of U.S. policy toward Iran and asked how Washington might influence succession in Iran once the eighty-two-year-old Khomeini died. Broad strategic concerns motivated McFarlane. The original hostage crisis may have sent U.S.-Iran relations to their nadir, but the two countries’ interests remained intertwined. Both Tehran and Washington wanted to support the Afghan resistance in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The shah’s death had rendered many Iranian demands moot, while the Algiers Accord had established an arbitration process to address other disputes.
Both the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency informed McFarlane that they lacked influence inside Iran, so McFarlane proposed a plan to rectify this. He suggested that the United States use its allies to sell arms to Iran. The process would create relationships and, given Iran’s war needs, might also develop leverage. Both the Pentagon and the State Department objected to the proposal even before Oliver North, a National Security Council aide, amended it to link the arms to the release of American hostages held by Iranian-backed groups. The proposal gained new life toward the end of 1985, soon after John Poindexter became the national security advisor. Today, the Iran-Contra affair might be remembered for the illegalities arising from its circumvention of congressional prohibitions on funding anticommunist insurgents in Nicaragua, but at its inception the initiative was about reaching out to a rogue regime.
The Reagan administration may have criticized Carter for negotiating under fire, but Reagan’s team learned the difficulty of maintaining a Manichaean approach to terrorism when it faced its own hostage crisis. Whereas Reagan had faulted Carter for offering inducements to the Iranians,68 his administration now did just that. On January 17, 1986, Reagan signed an order authorizing the sale of guided missiles to Iran through Israeli middlemen. Once Iran received the missiles, it would order Hezbollah and other proxy groups to release American hostages.
On May 15, 1986, Reagan authorized McFarlane, who had since retired, to travel to Iran for further dialogue. Ten days later, McFarlane arrived in Tehran with a few aides, carrying a Bible and a cake shaped like a key.
McFarlane’s good intentions fell flat. In an intentional slight, no senior Iranian official met his plane. Years later, Hashemi Rafsanjani gloated, “Have you forgotten that Irishman McFarlane came here and our authorities were not willing to talk to him; he was stuck with our second and third rate authorities?”69 Not only did Iranian-backed groups refuse to release any hostages, but Iranian officials piled on additional demands.70 McFarlane’s Iranian intermediaries had reverted to the same strategy they had earlier employed with Carter: they shunted responsibility to midlevel officials and then augmented their demands.
Even so, the outreach to Iran appeared successful at first glance. For fifteen months beginning in June 1985, no Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon.71 After the release of Father Lawrence Jenco, who had been in captivity for 564 days, the Reagan administration delivered additional spare parts to Iran; but no sooner had American officials offloaded the last shipment of military equipment than kidnappers seized three more Americans.72 The arms trade gave Iran an incentive to seize hostages.73
Meanwhile, neither Washington nor Tehran wanted their discussions to become public. To the Americans, ransoming hostages was anathema; to the Islamic Republic, the United States remained the Great Satan.74
Politics in Tehran doomed the diplomacy. Rafsanjani wanted to retain plausible deniability about his involvement in the talks so as not to fall victim to hardliners who opposed any outreach to Washington.75 The internal Iranian debate between ideologues and pragmatists remained unresolved. The ideologues believed that export of the revolution should be Iran’s key goal regardless of the international antagonism it caused and the isolation it created. Pragmatists wanted to scale back Iranian terror sponsorship in order to break Iran’s isolation. Mehdi Hashemi, the head of the Office of Liberation Movements—the precursor to the Qods Force—clashed repeatedly with Rafsanjani. A week after McFarlane’s secret 1986 trip to Tehran, Hashemi, the son-in-law of Khomeini’s deputy Hossein Ali Montazeri, leaked word of secret talks in pamphlets distributed at the University of Tehran. Six months later, Hashemi or his immediate aides leaked word of McFarlane’s meetings to a Lebanese magazine.76 On November 4, 1986, the seventh anniversary of the embassy seizure, Rafsanjani confirmed the secret talks to the international press.77
Regardless of the wisdom of the arms-for-hostages scheme, the accompanying talks represented a serious attempt to reach out to Tehran. U.S. authorities trusted the Iranians to keep their silence, but Iranian officials broke their word. The resulting crisis paralyzed Reagan’s second term. Whereas Reagan had a 62 percent approval rating at the start of the term, it dropped to just 46 percent with the disclosure of the Iran-Contra affair.78 Outreach to Tehran when Iranian politics remains in flux is costly.
U.S.-Iran Engagement under George H. W. Bush
When Reagan’s vice president began his own presidency, pro-Iranian terrorists held nine Americans hostage in Lebanon and tensions remained high. George H. W. Bush, a former diplomat and a realist, offered Iran an olive branch. “There are today Americans who are held against their will,” he noted in his inaugural speech. “Assistance can be shown here, and will be long remembered. Goodwill begets goodwill. Good faith can be a spiral that endlessly moves on.”79 Over subsequent days, he reaffirmed his desire to improve relations. “I don’t want to . . . think that the status quo has to go on forever,” he said. “There was a period of time when we had excellent relations with Iran.”80
Khomeini was blunt in response. “Iran does not need America,” he declared.81 Unlike Carter or Reagan, Bush took no for an answer and did not rush engagement; rather, he waited for the Iranian leadership to change its mind.
Change came in an unexpected way just six months into Bush’s term, on June 3, 1989, when Khomeini died. The ayatollah had always seen himself as the deputy of the messiah on earth. The messiah was not yet ready to return, however, and so he needed a new deputy. Ali Khamenei, the titular president, filled the role of Supreme Leader. Journalists and diplomats saw Khamenei as a moderate, at least in comparison with Khomeini.82 Then, on August 3, Rafsanjani became president. Speaking the next day, he suggested that “reasonable, prudent solutions” could free the hostages, and privately he told Pakistani intermediaries that U.S. gestures might grease the process.83 Bush felt that Rafsanjani’s statement “offers hope,” and State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler voiced her belief that “Iran is genuinely engaged” and that there was no reason not to expect positive results.
Bush’s willingness to engage was real. He issued a national security directive saying that the United States should prepare for “a normal relationship with Iran on the basis of strict reciprocity,”84 and he asked UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar to serve as an intermediary between the national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, and Rafsanjani.85 Pérez de Cuéllar used Giandomenico Picco, an Italian career UN bureaucrat, as his representative.
Picco flew to Tehran and met Rafsanjani, who dismissed the idea out of hand: to talk would be to admit culpability in the hostage seizures.86 While diplomats often embrace the notion of quiet diplomacy, the contrast between Iran’s public and private postures is instructive. Rogues may express moderation publicly, but when push comes to shove, they remain rogues. Rafsanjani spoke publicly of pragmatism, and he found no shortage of useful idiots to accept his public statements uncritically.87 Privately, he revived Iran’s covert nuclear program and played a crucial role in ordering the assassinations of dissidents.
Bush was more cautious than many of diplomacy’s cheerleaders in Congress who suggested that the United States offer unilateral concessions.88 Still, Bush’s engagement was not without cost. It was after Bush began his proxy talks with Tehran that Iranian officials supplied terrorists in Europe with weaponry to target Western interests, and also formed a hit squad to kill Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses.89 Such actions show that engagement did nothing to ameliorate Iran’s rogue behavior and may actually have made it worse. Only after he fell out of favor with his own regime did Rafsanjani acknowledge that he had responded to American goodwill with bad, on the orders of Khamenei.90
Just as Iraq’s invasion of Iran forced Khomeini to resolve the first hostage crisis, it was Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 that would spark a resolution of the second. Although Iranian officials had begun to negotiate more seriously in February 1990, and even had their proxy terrorist groups release two American hostages, it was not a change of heart about their revolutionary principles that made the difference. Instead, it was the fact that the United States, by defeating Saddam Hussein’s army, had achieved in one hundred hours what Iran could not do in eight years. Hezbollah quickly began releasing its Western hostages, and the last American hostage was on his way home weeks before Christmas. Sometimes, the best-intentioned and most careful diplomacy is ineffectual without a demonstration of military might.
It is possible that Bush would have pressed his advantage had he won re-election, but the electorate’s anxiety about the economy changed the plot, and Bush retired to Maine. If there was going to be any resolution to the Iran problem, it would have to come on Bill Clinton’s watch.
Clinton’s Containment
President Clinton inherited a cold peace. Bilateral relations remained frozen. As much as the Oslo Accords raised hope for Arab-Israeli peace, Tehran’s attempts to disrupt the peace process focused increasing attention on Iranian terror sponsorship.91 It was in this context that Martin Indyk, Clinton’s lead Middle East advisor on the National Security Council, unveiled the dual containment policy. Because the Iranian and Iraqi regimes were both inimical to the United States, Clinton would isolate both. Still, the White House kept a foot in the door even as it promised to slam it on Iran. “We do not seek confrontation but we will not normalize relations with Iran until and unless Iran’s policies change across the board,” Indyk said. He welcomed dialogue. “We are willing to listen to what Iran has to say, provided that this comes through authoritative channels,” he explained. The Clinton administration had at least learned from Carter’s and Reagan’s mistakes.92
Iran was not interested in dialogue, though. As Tehran’s terror sponsorship and nuclear program accelerated, Clinton ratcheted up sanctions. He issued two executive orders in 1995, the first targeting Iran’s oil industry, and the second banning most American trade with and investment in Iran.93 The following year, he signed the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, which empowered the United States to act against private companies investing in Iran, much to the annoyance of European states, where many of the targeted companies were based. In 1997, Clinton tightened financial restrictions to close loopholes in which companies exported American goods to Iran through third countries.94
The diplomacy-first crowd balked. “There seems little justification for the treatment the United States currently accords Iran because of its nuclear program,” argued Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, both former national security advisors. They proposed swapping sanctions with incentives and even suggested offering preferential trade to Iran.95 The idea of flipping rogues with trade may sound good in theory, but there is very little precedent to suggest that it has a basis in reality. Proponents of a moneyed embrace often cite China, but ignore the fact that China remains a one-party dictatorship whose military advances are increasingly challenging the United States. For all of America’s diplomatic efforts, it has simply become a wealthier, more threatening dictatorship.
Mohammad Khatami’s election in 1997 provided hope to diplomacy’s proponents. Upon taking office, Khatami announced, “We are in favor of a dialogue between civilizations and a détente in our relations with the outside world.”96 To encourage Khatami, Clinton chose not to respond to evidence of Iranian complicity in the attack on Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen American servicemen in June 1996.97 Accountability became a casualty of hope.
Proponents of dialogue were euphoric. Gary Sick, a Carter aide, described Khatami as “a reformer with an outspoken commitment to civil society, social justice, the rule of law and expanded freedom.” He added, “Khatami’s stated goals are consistent with our interests, and there are cost-free gestures we can take to acknowledge the changed political climate and to encourage more of the same.”98 This, of course, was nonsense. In his previous incarnation as minister of culture, Khatami had censored hundreds of books. He also remained committed to anti-Israel terrorism and to Iran’s nuclear program.
Khatami’s call for dialogue led to a proliferation of study group reports, each urging Washington to engage Tehran with few if any preconditions. Most of these reports were naïve. The Atlantic Council, for example, recommended that Clinton might partially lift trade restrictions as “a key gesture of good faith.”99 Many Iran experts subordinated analysis to advocacy and refused to recognize Khatami’s inability or unwillingness to change Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons or its terror sponsorship.100
Clinton, for his part, jumped at the chance to bring Iran in from the cold. This was the stuff of which legacies were made. The secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, sent a letter to Khatami expressing a desire for dialogue. Khatami did not reply directly, but American officials interpreted subsequent statements to signal his willingness to engage.101 In December 1997, for example, he expressed “great respect” for the “great people of the United States” and called for “a thoughtful dialogue.”102 In an interview with CNN in January 1998, he asserted, “Not only do we not harbor any ill wishes for the American people, but in fact we consider them to be a great nation.” He then outlined his desire for a “dialogue of civilizations.”103
It was music to Clinton’s ears. Secretary Albright “welcomed” Khatami’s call and, to show good faith, she streamlined visa procedures and offered to facilitate academic and cultural exchange.104
Rapprochement floundered, however; for despite Khatami’s lofty rhetoric, Iranian officials refused to talk. Martin Indyk and two colleagues sought to meet the foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, after his speech at the Asia Society, but as soon as Kharrazi realized the American officials were waiting for him, he left.105 If America hoped to talk, Iranian thinking went, it should first “pay the right price,” which in effect was capitulation to all Iranian demands.106 The Iranian government hinted that they would not engage in dialogue so long as sanctions and trade bans remained in place.107 Hardline papers equated “talks and relations” with “compromise and surrender.”108 Khamenei was blunt: “We shall not show any flexibility . . . and we shall not relent.” As for Khatami’s idea of dialogue, the Supreme Leader clarified that “the phrase dialogue among civilizations does not mean holding talks with representatives of foreign states.”109
Clinton refused to lift sanctions preventing investment in Iran’s oil infrastructure and trade restrictions on dual-use goods. While Scowcroft criticized his obstinacy, the president’s caution was prudent. Years later, Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, the Khatami government spokesman, acknowledged Tehran’s insincerity. “We had one overt policy, which was one of negotiation and confidence building,” he explained, “and a covert policy, which was continuation of the activities.”110 The influential Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi elaborated in his memoirs: “The most advanced weapons must be produced inside our country even if our enemies don’t like it.”111
Proponents of dialogue kept trying. The State Department proposed sending a consular officer to Tehran, but the Iranian government rejected the idea, and then characterized its rebuff as a “diplomatic blow” to the Americans.112 The State Department never created metrics by which to judge its outreach. It was easier to project goodwill onto the adversary.
Albright pursued diplomacy with Iran through the waning days of the Clinton administration. On March 17, 2000, she spoke to the American Iranian Council. After, in effect, apologizing for the American role in the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, she announced a number of unilateral American concessions: ending the import ban on Persian rugs, pistachios and caviar, three of Iran’s most lucrative non-oil industries; a further relaxation of visa restrictions; and progress on releasing assets frozen during the hostage crisis. The pistachio import ban pumped tens of millions of dollars into Rafsanjani’s pocket, as he had long since cornered the Iranian market.
As always, the Iranians hinted they would react positively. Hadi Nejad-Hosseinian, Iran’s ambassador at the United Nations, said that Iran would be “prepared to adopt proportionate and positive measures in return.”113 But no Iranian goodwill was forthcoming. Quite the contrary: in July, the Iranian government tested a new, enhanced missile. The Supreme Leader then declared negotiations with Washington to be “an insult and treason to the Iranian people.”114 In his mind, negotiations would only boost American influence, something to be avoided at all costs.115 Khatami asserted that the United States had not offered enough to merit a response.116
Ultimately, Albright’s concessions did more harm than good. Kharrazi seized upon her “confessions” of regret about the overthrow of Mosaddeq to issue a demand for more apologies and also for reparations.117 But rather than talk further, he stood Albright up during a planned one-on-one meeting at the United Nations.
As always, American cheerleaders for talks refused to take no for an answer. Instead, they echoed the Iranians’ argument that Clinton had not offered enough. According to Scowcroft and Lee H. Hamilton, for example, “The U.S. sanctions are the main obstacle preventing the United States from pursuing its complete range of interests with Iran.” Given the internal political squabbles in Tehran, they counseled dispensing to issue demands for a “quid pro quo form of reciprocity.”118 In effect, they suggested a free pass for the Islamic Republic to avoid making any concessions, and changed diplomacy from a game of chess into one of solitaire.
Proponents of engagement elevated imagery over substance. Thus, Albright announced that the United States would no longer speak of rogue regimes, but would henceforth refer to Iran, North Korea, and Libya as “states of concern.”119 Richard Haass, a prominent Republican realist, applauded Albright’s new lexicon, arguing that the term “rogue” served only to limit policy options.120 While American analysts navel-gazed, however, the Iranian press ridiculed the debate over terminology.121
Europe Takes the Lead
America was not alone in its dance with Khomeini. The European relationship with Iran was centuries longer and would grow to become just as traumatic. Still, Europe was not the United States. While the Carter administration debated whether to engage Khomeini in the months before the shah fell, the French government was hosting the ayatollah in Neauphle-le-Château, a small suburb of Paris. The French hoped to curry favor with the opposition that was poised to take power, but soon found their hospitality won them little consideration. Khomeini’s antipathy toward the West was ideological.122 No amount of obsequiousness would sway him.
Soon after Khomeini returned to Iran, the revolutionary authorities unleashed a wave of assassinations on French soil. The revolutionary court leader, Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, vowed that the murders would “continue until all these dirty pawns of the decadent regime have been purged.”123 Iranian authorities did their best to keep their word.124
Subsequent events showed just how little the French government had gained through engagement. Iranian-backed terrorists bombed the French marine barracks in Beirut and the French embassy in Kuwait in 1983, and hijacked an Air France plane the following year. A Hezbollah bombing wave in Paris killed thirteen and wounded almost 250.125 After pro-Iranian terrorists in Lebanon seized five French hostages, Prime Minister Jacques Chirac paid for their release.126 When the French government objected to an Iranian terrorist sheltering in Iran’s embassy in Paris, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gunboats sprayed a French-flagged vessel with gunfire,127 and Lebanese Hezbollah seized new French hostages. Chirac and President François Mitterrand responded by caving to every single Iranian demand, leading the Economist to describe the French negotiating position as “Anything else, Mr. Khomeini?”128 Even fulfilling all Khomeini’s demands was not enough. Just over a year later, Iranian assassins cut down a prominent Iranian dissident in his suburban Paris home.
Great Britain took another tack. Khomeini hated Britain deeply and infused his speeches with paranoid ravings about British malfeasance.129 For these he found a ready audience: many Iranians shared his antipathy as a result of the British humiliation of Iran during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After Khomeini came to power, revolutionary mobs set upon British property and even priests, and the Foreign Office evacuated the British embassy. Only at the end of the Iran-Iraq War did the United Kingdom again opened its embassy in Tehran. For the next several months, the two countries were content to ignore each other—until February 14, 1989, when Khomeini issued a public call for Salman Rushdie’s death in response to The Satanic Verses, a novel which, although he never read it, Khomeini pronounced blasphemous. The Iranian government demanded that Rushdie apologize if he wanted the death sentence lifted. Rushdie complied, and Iran’s leadership then declared the apology to be a confession of guilt, just as they would when Albright apologized over Mosaddeq.
The British broke diplomatic relations after Khomeini ordered Rushdie’s murder, and swore not to restore them until the Iranian regime promised not to harm the novelist. But Khatami’s charm offensive blinded the British just as it did the Americans. No sooner had Iranian officials promised to revoke the death sentence—thereby reaping British goodwill and a lifting of European sanctions—than Iranian security services reaffirmed the sentence. Hence, a day after the United Kingdom and Iran agreed to exchange ambassadors once again, Iranian state media labeled Rushdie an apostate, subject to death. Simply put, Iranian officials played British diplomats for fools.
While Tehran rebuffed American, French, and British attempts at rapprochement, Germany’s guiding principle was trade unencumbered by politics, and so German-Iranian ties thrived. By 1987, the West German share of the Iranian market was over 25 percent.130 In 1992, the German foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, argued that the German approach might serve as a model. Rather than isolate Iran as the Clinton team aimed to do, the Europeans might instead try “critical dialogue,”131 in which Europe would correlate trade with Iranian behavior on human rights and terrorism.
In practice, the critical dialogue consisted of regular meetings, but not much else. It quickly became apparent that human rights were no more than a rhetorical concern for Germany or for Europe generally. Iranian diplomats meanwhile signaled Tehran’s belief that criticism of its actions was inappropriate.
“Critical dialogue,” as it turned out, only encouraged Iran’s rogue behavior. On September 17, 1992, soon after Germany launched its diplomatic initiative, an Iranian cell murdered four Kurdish dissidents at the Mykonos Restaurant in Berlin. Although German police suspected that the Iranian intelligence minister, Ali Fallahian, had ordered the hit, German officials intervened to prevent his questioning during a subsequent trip to Germany, for fear that raising the topic would sabotage dialogue.132 Instead, German officials pretended that the Iranian hit had not occurred. They even transferred high-technology computers to the Iranian intelligence service.133
While Berlin tried to curry favor with Tehran, it could not quash its own judiciary, which proceeded with a trial of those captured fleeing the Mykonos hit. On April 10, 1997, after hearing from 176 witnesses and reading intelligence files, a German court found a captured Iranian intelligence agent, Kazem Darrabi, as well as a Hezbollah accomplice guilty of murder, and two colleagues guilty as accessories. More importantly, the court also concluded that a committee headed by the Supreme Leader and including Rafsanjani, Fallahian, and Ali Akbar Velayati, the foreign minister, had ordered the hit.134
After the verdict was read, Rafsanjani threatened Germany, swearing, “They are going to suffer for it.” The head of a pro-government vigilante group threatened to blow up the German embassy.135 The European Union suspended its critical dialogue and all EU members with the exception of Greece withdrew their ambassadors from Tehran.136 Kinkel, the German foreign minister, refused to admit defeat. “We must not break off all contact with Iran, not least because we on our part have clear demands to make,” he said.137
Italy’s prime minister, Romano Prodi, took that advice to heart and sent a trade delegation to Tehran, defying the European suspension of relations with Iran. Two months later, a consortium led by the French company Total signed a $2 billion agreement to develop Iran’s oil resources. Tehran considered the deal a “moral victory” and celebrated the European slight to America.138 For all Europe’s talk about unity in foreign policy, there was always at least one European state that would break the consensus in order to profit from Iranian trade.
When critics noted that the policy of critical dialogue had not improved Iran’s human rights outlook, Kinkel said that it brought Iran into compliance with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regulations, a claim which in hindsight was naïve.139 Khatami’s election breathed new life into Europe’s negotiation attempts, just as it did the American efforts. “We believe that you need to talk to people if you are to influence them,” Kinkel reasoned. “If you are to influence Iran, you need to talk to them on the points where there is disagreement.”140 Like American proponents of engagement, Kinkel could never accept that dialogue might fail. Perhaps, however, he understood the perception of failure surrounding his critical dialogue initiative, for he rebranded it “comprehensive dialogue.”
The Mykonos verdict was, for all intents and purposes, forgotten while the Iranian leaders who ordered the hit at the heart of Germany remained in their posts. The expansion of relations continued unabated, even after the European Parliament reported that Khatami’s election, contrary to expectations, “did not bring about substantial democratic and political change.”141 Trade increased as political freedoms in Iran diminished.
European officials claimed their strategy was working even as the Iranian regime pushed ahead with its covert nuclear program.142 Despite the IAEA’s finding that Iran had been developing a centrifuge uranium enrichment program for eighteen years and a laser enrichment program for twelve years, Germany’s foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, corralled his European Union colleagues into giving Tehran another chance.143 The more Iran’s nuclear development progressed, the more desperate the European Union grew to engage. Indeed, in the face of Iranian cheating, the foreign ministers of Germany, France, and Britain, the so-called EU3, stated that the European Union was prepared to defy U.S. pressure to isolate Tehran, continue its dialogue with Iranian authorities, and perhaps even enhance trade and access to technology.144 So long as the Iranian regime promised to talk, European officials assumed that their strategy was effective. By making empty promises, Iranian leaders played Europe like a fiddle.
On October 21, 2003, the EU3 foreign ministers visited Tehran. They returned with an Iranian promise to suspend uranium enrichment, detail its nuclear program, list its suppliers, and sign and ratify the IAEA’s additional protocol.145 The day after the Europeans claimed victory, Iranian authorities began to backtrack. “As long as Iran thinks this suspension is beneficial, it will continue, and whenever we don’t want it, we will end it,” said Hassan Rouhani, the head of Iran’s negotiating team.146 Years later, Rouhani bragged that he used diplomacy with the West to run out the clock to Iranian nuclear capability. “When I was entrusted with this portfolio, we had no production in Isfahan,” he noted. By the time negotiations broke off, Iran had completed not only its uranium enrichment facility, but also a heavy-water plant in Arak that could produce plutonium. Rouhani bluntly said that Tehran had offered talks to European leaders as a way of delaying UN sanctions. “The Islamic Republic acted very wisely in my view and did not allow the United States to succeed,” he crowed.147
The European Union, however, believed their diplomacy had succeeded. When Tehran signed the Additional Protocol on December 18, 2003, European diplomats and the IAEA were ecstatic. “It’s a beginning of a mainstreaming of Iran with Europe,” one official said. Just as important to European officials, they believed they had proved the American approach wrong.148
European triumphalism was too quick. Iran signed the Additional Protocol, but refused to ratify it. Here, the devil is in the details. The IAEA enacted the Additional Protocol to close loopholes that had enabled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to develop a sophisticated covert nuclear program despite eleven clean bills of health. To entice states to sign the Additional Protocol, the IAEA offered enhanced access to nuclear technology. Once they ratified the agreement, they allowed the IAEA to conduct more robust and intrusive inspections. By signing but refusing to ratify, the Iranian government grabbed all the carrots and ignored the sticks.
Nor did it turn out that the European concept of enrichment suspension accorded with Iran’s understanding. The Iranian government argued that agreement to suspend uranium enrichment did not mean agreement to suspend all “enrichment-related activities.” Iranian authorities continued secretly importing nuclear equipment, even though there would have been no reason for secrecy if the equipment were for civilian purposes as they claimed when caught red-handed. It is probable that with George W. Bush in the White House, the Iranians realized they might face consequences more serious than chiding by European diplomats.149 Only then did Rouhani agree to a full suspension.150 Soon, however, Iran reneged on its pledge. It was typical rogue behavior. For every one step forward, Iran took two steps back. Western officials marked forward progress with concessions, and they met backsliding with a click of the tongue. Diplomats focused only on the next deal and not the bigger picture.
Meanwhile, the regime’s nuclear defiance and human rights abuses both worsened. By 2004, Iranian hardline factions had rebounded. European engagement never correlated to reform. It had no impact on Iranian domestic politics except to hurt the reformists. Europeans declined to re-examine their policy: if reconciliation failed, the problem was not diplomacy but rather some outside force. Instead of blaming itself for naïveté, or blaming Iran for its insincerity, the European Union blamed the United States.151 The mantra of diplomacy had become so strong that European leaders were unwilling to consider the possibility that offering carrots may not work.
An Axis of Evil?
Although conventional wisdom condemns Bush as hostile to diplomacy, he embraced diplomacy with the Islamic Republic more than any president since Jimmy Carter. When Bush took office, President Khatami’s charm offensive was still going strong. “I want to say that the nation of Iran has no problem with the people and the nation of America,” Khatami told the UN, even as he complained about American policy.152
When Palestinians, Egyptians, and Syrians celebrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks, ordinary Iranians held candlelight vigils. Pro-engagement politicians like Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, seized upon the show of solidarity as evidence that Iran was ripe for diplomacy after more than three decades of enmity.153 Never mind that the 9/11 hijackers had received Iranian assistance.154 More important, while the Iranian people mourned, Iran’s leaders gloated. Mehdi Karrubi, a reformist politician, blamed “Zionists in Israel” for the attacks, and the state-controlled press promoted wild conspiracy theories.155 According to Kayhan, widely seen as the voice of the Supreme Leader, “The super-terrorist had a taste of its own bitter medicine.”156
Like many U.S. politicians, Biden assumed that he could triumph over Iranian recalcitrance with his powers of persuasion. “I am prepared to receive members of the Iranian Majlis whenever its members would like to visit. If Iranian parliamentarians believe that’s too sensitive, I’m prepared to meet them elsewhere,” he told the American Iranian Council, adding, “We must also be willing to hold discussions with Iran to develop creative solutions as we did in North Korea.”157 Biden lacked the perspective to understand that engagement with North Korea had failed.
Tehran had already closed its door to such overtures. Iranian parliamentarians ruled out engagement until Congress first dropped all sanctions.158 “We shall put in his place anyone who would try . . . to extend the hand of friendship to the most blood-thirsty enemy of this land,” a Kayhan editorial declared.159
Both Democrats and Republicans sought to transform the 9/11 tragedy into an opportunity to renew diplomacy. When Bush decided to oust the Taliban regime, a mutual enemy to the United States and Iran, Tehran agreed to assist. Iranian diplomats worked closely with their American counterparts to form the new Afghan government during the 2001 Bonn Conference. Some American diplomats hailed this as a sign that Tehran had changed course.160 More likely, Tehran aimed to extend its influence throughout all of Afghanistan.
Proponents of engagement accepted Iranian altruism on faith and criticized the White House for not sharing their own goodwill. James Dobbins, a U.S. diplomat serving in Afghanistan, blasted the White House for turning down Iran’s offer to help train Afghan security forces. Dobbins simply could not conceive the insincerity of Iranian diplomats with whom he had established friendly rapport.161 Like the proverbial blind man describing an elephant, the diplomat did not see the whole picture. Dobbins counseled cooperation even as Tehran dispatched an officer of the Qods Force, an elite Revolutionary Guards unit specializing in the export of revolution, to be its consul in Herat.162
Rather than bolster Afghanistan’s central government, the Iranian regime worked to weaken it.163 Tehran sent operatives under the cover of schoolteachers and aid workers. In March 2002, Afghan commanders intercepted twelve Iranian agents organizing armed insurrection.164 Tehran also facilitated the escape of al-Qaeda terrorists from Afghanistan.165 The Iranian government was glad to reap the benefits of conference participation, but its actions were diametrically opposed to its commitments.
Within the Bush administration, the top Middle East aides, Zalmay Khalilzad and William Burns, favored engagement and, like Biden, suggested that diplomats might sit down with reformists even if hardliners were recalcitrant.166 Both replicated the mistakes of their predecessors by conflating rhetoric with sincerity. Most Iranians had already given up on Khatami, but the president—like Mikhail Gorbachev in the waning days of the Soviet Union—retained the admiration of diplomats even as his domestic popularity hemorrhaged.
Placing a bet on the reformers was never wise. While women and students may have wanted serious change in Iranian society, reformists like Khatami were in fact wedded to the system. As Laura Secor observed in the New Yorker, “Iran’s reform movement, for all its courage, was the loyal opposition in a fascist state. It sought not to dismantle or secularize the Islamic Republic . . . but to improve it.”167
Within the White House, a new strategy took shape. Rather than rely on official talks, the administration would reach out to the Iranian people.168 Simultaneously, Bush would criticize the regime. This strategy reached its peak on January 29, 2002, when Bush, during his State of the Union address, placed Iran along with Iraq, North Korea, and their “terrorist allies” in an “axis of evil.” He explained, “By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.”169
Bush described Iran as he saw it and refused to paper over its behavior to facilitate talks. Former officials chided him for having a diplomatic tin ear. In doing so, they played into Iranian hands, as the regime seized upon American criticisms of Bush to deflect responsibility from their own nuclear research and terror sponsorship.170 Bush merely shrugged off the diplomats’ objections. After revelations surfaced about Iran’s secret enrichment program, he quipped, “all of the sudden, there weren’t so many complaints about including Iran in the axis of evil.”171
While the Western press criticized Bush for alleged hostility toward diplomacy with Iran, the opposite was actually true. In fact, the United States sought secret talks with Iran as war with Iraq became imminent.172 The Supreme Leader forced Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Sadegh Kharazi, to resign after secret talks in Cyprus were revealed.173 It is unlikely that Kharazi had gone rogue, as the Iranian press suggested.174 The excuse, however, would enable the Iranian regime to walk away after determining what was in the American hand and then pocketing the proffered concessions. In its enthusiasm to engage, the Bush team had replicated Carter’s mistakes.
Meanwhile, the State Department objected to White House efforts to emphasize outreach to the Iranian people over direct diplomacy. Secretary Colin Powell argued that Khatami’s election had bestowed democratic credentials upon Iran,175 a point his deputy Richard Armitage reinforced. “I would note there’s one dramatic difference between Iran and the other two axes of evil, and that would be its democracy,” Armitage said.176
Unable to win White House blessing for a strategy that would legitimize the regime, proponents of normalizing relations between Washington and Tehran heaped opprobrium upon those who urged caution.177 Some opponents of the White House strategy alleged that Bush, arrogant against the backdrop of the Iraq War, rejected an Iranian grand bargain in 2003 to settle everything from terror sponsorship to nuclear ambitions. The offer was a fraud, crafted by a Swiss ambassador frustrated at the U.S.-Iran stalemate, and was privately dismissed as nonsense by Iranian officials.178 Advocates of diplomacy, however, took the bait.179 John Limbert, a former hostage and author of a book about how to negotiate with Iran, embraced the fake memo to argue that the United States and Iran were equally insincere.180 Few mentioned the fact that Bush made his own offer the following year.181
In truth, when the Swiss ambassador presented the fraudulent offer to Washington, American and Iranian officials were already at the table. As the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, met his Iranian counterpart in Paris, Khalilzad sat down in Geneva with Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s UN ambassador.
Not all talks build confidence; sometimes they do the opposite. American officials quickly learned that Iran would not honor its agreements. Iranian diplomats, for example, promised noninterference in Iraq, yet the Revolutionary Guards smuggled money, men, and weapons into Iraq.182 After the Iranian foreign ministry publicized a U.S. request for cooperation in Iraq, an Iranian newspaper asserted that Iran “can make this country [Iraq] a devouring swamp for the States in the region” and suggested that American outreach proved Iranian strength. “They have been obliged to accept the reality that Iran is one of the undeniable powers, and a country which has an important role in the political calculations of the region.”183
That was strike one for diplomacy’s advocates. Strike two was Iran’s accelerating nuclear program. While diplomats counseled lifting sanctions to ease diplomacy, Iran designed a facility to house 50,000 centrifuges and hid from the IAEA a ton of uranium hexafluoride imported from China.184 What Tehran had done with the uranium it processed, it refused to say.
Strike three was Iran’s bad faith on terrorism. In the wake of 9/11, the Islamic Republic protected and assisted several hundred al-Qaeda operatives, even as it sought credit for turning over low-level functionaries.185 Tehran suggested a trade of al-Qaeda operatives for Mujahedin al-Khalq members in Iraq, but the latter, as persons protected by the Geneva Convention, were not America’s to trade. The Bush administration informed Iran that the White House would hold it responsible for any terrorism planned by al-Qaeda on Iranian soil.
Even for diplomacy’s cheerleaders, evidence of the regime’s insincerity was too obvious to miss. Either the reformers were treating their American counterparts as useful idiots, or the reformers did not have enough power to commit the regime to agreements. It was not in the State Department’s nature to consider the first possibility, but it could not ignore the second. In a July 2003 radio interview, Powell admitted, “The best thing we can do right now is not get in the middle of this family fight too deeply.”186 The Bush team had repeated the mistakes of the Carter and Reagan administrations, but it had not yet learned the lesson.
Military commanders conduct endless studies of past battles and work for several weeks alongside those they will replace, but America’s senior diplomats have no such mechanism to transmit accumulated knowledge. American diplomacy is Sisyphean, as new secretaries endlessly repeat the missteps of their predecessors. If during his first term Bush had welcomed broad debate within his administration about diplomacy’s wisdom, by 2005 the debate had ended and skeptics of outreach were purged or retired. The State Department doubled down on negotiations even as the stakes skyrocketed.
Whereas Powell stumbled over whom to engage, Condoleezza Rice’s team swept such concerns aside. In order to support Europe’s diplomacy toward Iran, she added new incentives to their pot. “This is most assuredly giving the Europeans a stronger hand, not rewarding the Iranians,” she explained.187 Someone should have told that to the Iranians. They scoffed at Rice’s offer to provide them with much-needed spare parts for their civilian air fleet as well as World Trade Organization membership to entice them to the table.188
Tehran then announced it would end its moratorium on uranium enrichment. In response, rather than show Tehran that its backtracking would cost the Islamic Republic dearly, the European Union offered a deal modeled on the one that Bill Clinton offered to North Korea a decade earlier: The West would assist Iran’s peaceful nuclear program in exchange for Tehran’s commitment to cease enrichment and halt construction of its plutonium-producing heavy-water reactor.
Unfortunately for Europe, Iran replicated North Korea’s strategy: blackmail for cash and technology. Like the North Koreans, Iranian officials had learned to ignore threats, knowing that rewards were just around the corner. The IAEA, after months of foot dragging to give diplomats time to head off a crisis, found the Islamic Republic in violation of its nuclear safeguards agreement. Iran responded with defiance, breaking seals that international monitors had placed on its once-secret Natanz enrichment facility.
The Iranian gamble paid off: European diplomats offered even more incentives. The European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, promised Iran “a generous package, a bold package” including nuclear technology, economic concessions, and possibly even security cooperation. In exchange, he demanded only that Iran once again halt sensitive nuclear activities.189 Again, Iran resisted.
European officials blamed America. They could not imagine that their outreach would not work.190 Diplomats were more willing to believe Iran’s manufactured grievances than consider for a moment that the regime might be insincere. European officials lobbied their American counterparts furiously, arguing that it was Bush’s intransigence, and not the assumptions underlying European diplomacy, that had caused engagement to fail.
For the State Department, revitalizing its partnership with Europe became a higher priority than holding firm on issues that caused the rift in the first place. Accordingly, it counseled surrender, at least to Europe. On May 31, 2006, Rice announced that the United States would not only talk with Tehran, but also enhance its incentive package. All she asked was that Iran suspend enrichment for the duration of talks.191 Rice insisted that she would be no pushover. Should Iran refuse, she promised severe consequences.192 In a conference call accompanying the announcement, however, her advisors could name none of those consequences. The Iranians noticed. The olive branch convinced them that America was a paper tiger.
The Iranian government responded with defiance. After months of silence, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inaugurated a facility capable of producing plutonium for weaponry in the western city of Arak. Coming less than a month after the Security Council demanded a one-month suspension of Iran’s uranium enrichment, this action was deliberately provocative. The fact that Iran had spent two years building the plant while diplomats scurried to engage was even more telling.
On September 15, 2006, the European Union dropped its demand that Iran comply with IAEA and Security Council demands for enrichment suspension. Javier Solana commented, “We are really making progress: never before have we had a level of engagement, and a level of discussions . . . as we have now.” In hindsight, the Islamic Republic was increasing its centrifuge capacity from 164 to 3,000.193 For diplomats, getting Iran to the table had become the top objective, more important even than holding Iran to its commitments. Talking trumped behavior as the metric of progress.194 In Pentagon terms, this would be the equivalent of judging battle by focusing on the shooting rather than victory.
Iranian officials reverted to tactics harking back to the hostage crisis. Talks proceeded, even though Iran’s top negotiator could not confirm the Supreme Leader’s compliance with the Iranian team’s commitments.195
Not surprisingly, talks failed.196 The following spring, Ahmadinejad stood at Natanz and announced, “Our country joined the club of nuclear nations.” Two years later, the State Department’s Iran point man lamented that “Iran walked away and missed a rare opportunity to pursue a better relationship with the United States.”197 From an Iranian perspective, there was no failure. Iran’s leadership had engaged insincerely as a diversion while pressing forward in its nuclear ambitions. Finally, on November 30, 2007, its negotiator announced that Iran would take all past proposals for compromise off the table.198 Iran had refined its nuclear abilities during its engagement with the European Union and had created a new reality.
Western officials responded like a drunk who concludes from a hangover that he needs more beer: by loosening demands and adding more incentives. Germany freed Kazem Darrabi, the mastermind of the Mykonos murders.199 Rice joined other Security Council foreign ministers to offer Iran a nuclear reactor, nuclear fuel, normalization of trade, and civil aircraft upgrades.200
Rice meanwhile sought to move ahead with bilateral talks. Conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan provided ready topics, but efforts to win Iranian cooperation were costly. Rice’s outreach led Tehran to believe that America was on the ropes, so Iranian authorities not only increased their support for militias operating in Iraq, but also began to ship weaponry to the Taliban.201 In the same year that Rice offered incentives, explosively formed projectile attacks by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq increased 150 percent. Tehran clearly wanted to see if it might receive a higher reward for ending more violence.202 Diplomats deny it hurts to talk, but hundreds of American servicemen paid the price.
While journalists and diplomats celebrated Americans and Iranians sitting together openly after so many years, they missed the symbolism inherent in the choice of envoys: Ryan Crocker, a career diplomat, represented the United States, while Hassan Kazemi Qomi, a Qods Force operative, represented Tehran. For the United States, dialogue was a means to resolve conflict, but for Iran, it provided cover for the export of revolutionary goals and support of terrorism.
American diplomats saw dialogue as a breakthrough, but it was a mirage. Qomi waved off evidence and denied Iranian complicity in Iraqi militia attacks. Dialogue did far less to reduce violence than to diminish the U.S. military’s willingness to capture Iranian personnel involved in training terrorists. With almost religious zeal, proponents of dialogue denied Iranian wrongdoing, for admitting it would acknowledge the shortcomings of diplomacy and could delay talks for years.203 Ironically, Iranian analysts were less dismissive of the notion that their military was in cahoots with the Taliban. “It is better for Iran if America is entangled in Afghanistan with the Taliban,” wrote an analyst in Iran’s largest-circulation daily.204
The dialogue over Iraq may have backfired—with reverberations felt in Afghanistan as well—but diplomats refused to admit defeat. In July 2008, Rice voided her own red line of May 31, 2006, by dispatching Under Secretary William Burns to meet Iran’s nuclear negotiator even without an Iranian commitment to suspend uranium enrichment. The willingness to issue and then ignore frameworks and conditions hemorrhaged American credibility. Even with Burns present, Iran rejected any enrichment freeze.
Bush left the White House with Iran’s nuclear program far more advanced than when he took office. By any metric, he failed to resolve the challenge posed by Iran to American national interests. While proponents of engagement attribute Bush’s failures to a neglect of diplomacy, the opposite is true. Bush, like Clinton and Carter before him, would not acknowledge that rogue regimes engaged insincerely.
The Outstretched Hand
For those who insisted that the failure to bring Iran in from the cold resulted from insufficient diplomacy, Barack Obama’s election offered a chance to test their strategy. Before he took office, Obama had become diplomats’ favorite candidate when he promised to meet the leaders of Iran “without preconditions.”205 Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary for policy at the State Department, explained the logic, saying, “An unconditional offer deprives Iran’s leaders of the excuse not to negotiate.”206 For many of Obama’s supporters, the key to success was easy: simply remove any bone of contention from the agenda. Thus Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist, urged Obama not to “obsess” over the nuclear issue.207
Iranian officials recognized that the American press “was in favor of talks . . . without preconditions,”208 and they were willing to encourage the idea. Ahmadinejad sent Obama a congratulatory letter upon his election.209 Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, also welcomed a broad dialogue with Obama.210
Obama was a man of his word regarding outreach to the Islamic Republic, which became his marquee foreign policy issue. The State Department sent a letter to Ahmadinejad to pave the way for face-to-face talks. Then, less than a week after taking office, Obama told Al Arabiya’s satellite network, “If countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.”211
Soon there were signs that Iran’s embrace of dialogue was merely tactical. The speaker of Iran’s parliament, Ali Larijani, rebuffed a request from Howard Berman, a prominent Democrat chairing the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, to meet in Bahrain.212 Then, Khamenei waved off Obama’s outreach as “bogus gestures.”213
Iranian culture is subtle, and its diplomacy is a reflection of its culture. The White House did not pick up on the hints. Instead, Obama called a news conference and again called for face-to-face talks.214 William Perry, a former defense secretary and an influential figure for the Obama White House, met a high-level Iranian delegation led by a senior Ahmadinejad advisor, Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi, to emphasize the point. The Associated Press reported, “Not since before the 1979 Iranian revolution are U.S. officials believed to have conducted wide-ranging direct diplomacy with Iranian officials.” If talking to a brick wall was diplomacy, then the press report was true.
As diplomats cycled through excuses for why diplomacy had yet to work, one theory became prominent: insufficiently respectful language. Just as Madeleine Albright tried to bypass the problem of rogue regimes by renaming them “states of concern,” Obama tried to revamp American rhetoric in order to conjure up diplomacy. To Obama and his aides, Iran’s inclusion in the axis of evil was original sin—never mind that Americans seemed to object to the phrase more than Iranians did.
The vocabulary makeover soon turned from the sublime to the ridiculous. For example, William Luers, Thomas Pickering, and Jim Walsh warned that Iranians “bristle at the use of the phrase ‘carrots and sticks,’” because it depicted them as donkeys and because it implied a threat to beat Iran into submission if they could not be bought.215 That Iranians would raise such manufactured grievances suggests that they saw elder statesmen like Pickering as useful idiots, willing to accept any reason short of Iranian insincerity to explain the failure of U.S.-Iranian engagement. After all, the phrase “carrots and sticks” had long been used in the Iranian press.216
Obama continued his efforts to set a new tone when he offered Iranians the traditional Persian New Year’s greeting on March 20. Whereas Bush had taken care to differentiate between the Iranian people and the regime, Obama broke precedent and paid homage to the Islamic Republic rather than the Iranian nation. His attempt to ingratiate himself with the regime came to naught. Ali Akbar Javanfekr, an aide to Ahmadinejad, responded by calling on the United States to compensate Iran for previous American mistakes. If Americans believed that dialogue would lead to compromise, Iranians saw the process leading to American surrender. The Supreme Leader ridiculed the idea of diplomacy with the United States.217
Meanwhile, the Iranian nuclear program kept moving forward. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that “the Iranians are on a path to building nuclear weapons.”218
To jumpstart diplomacy, Obama offered a unilateral concession: recognizing the Islamic Republic’s right to enrich uranium. With a single statement, he voided three Security Council resolutions forbidding further uranium enrichment by Iran. Rather than enable diplomacy, he poisoned it. Iranian strategists concluded that defiance pays.219 It was around this time that a revolutionary court lodged espionage charges against Roxana Saberi, an Iranian American freelance journalist and former Miss North Dakota.
Persistent American outreach efforts, each coupled with new incentives, also eroded regional allies’ faith in America’s commitment to them. Arab allies worried that Obama might sacrifice their security for the sake of U.S.-Iran rapprochement. Israeli officials worried that the Iranian government aimed only to run out the clock.220 Perhaps this is why Obama signaled that his patience was not infinite. “We do want to make sure that, by the end of this year, we’ve actually seen a serious process move forward,” he declared.221
The American preconditions lifted, Ahmadinejad responded with his own.222 The United States offered concessions to get Iran to the table, but from the Iranian perspective, the dance had long since begun. Iranian negotiating behavior represented a culturally different understanding of diplomacy: everything was about position. Formal dialogue was not the beginning of the process, but its middle. By playing hard to get, Tehran could win objectives even before the horse trading started. By offering concessions without demanding anything in return, Obama played into Iranian hands and encouraged Tehran to shift the goalposts and stake out more extreme positions.
The State Department operated as if it were in a vacuum, pursuing diplomacy with little regard to the Iranian response. Hence, American diplomats would pounce on the feeblest hints that Iran was willing to talk, even as Khamenei vetoed that possibility.223 Embracing hot dog diplomacy, the State Department instructed American embassies to invite their Iranian counterparts to Fourth of July celebrations.224 Reality intruded when Iranians took to the streets in outrage after blatant fraud in the June 2009 presidential elections. With Iranian security forces firing on crowds in the streets, Secretary Hillary Clinton reluctantly rescinded the July 4 invitations. Otherwise, the administration remained largely silent. “We respect Iran’s sovereignty,” Obama explained.225 To speak publicly, the administration feared, would hinder efforts to engage. Shortly before the botched election, Obama had sent a second letter to the Supreme Leader seeking dialogue, but received no reply.226
In 1986, Ronald Reagan stood in solidarity with the people of the Philippines after the dictator Ferdinand Marcos had tried to throw an election. In 2000, Bill Clinton stood with Serbs who were troubled over Slobodan Milosevic. By contrast, George H. W. Bush, in his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech, elevated engagement with the Soviet Union above hastening its collapse. Obama likewise lost perspective, effectively favoring the preservation of the Islamic Republic out of a desire to engage the regime. Protestors’ chants of “Obama, ya una ya ba ma” (Obama, you’re either with us or against us) underscored the point. Silence born from the desire to talk had a cost.
As the protests over the Iranian election were about to enter their fourth week, Obama again proposed talks with the regime. Speaking at the conclusion of the Group of Eight summit in L’Aquila, Italy, he said the world’s main powers would “take further steps” if Tehran failed to make good-faith efforts to resolve concern about its nuclear program by the time of the G20 summit two months later. He refused to elaborate on what steps he had in mind, and instead merely said, “Our planning is how to prevent us from getting too close to that point.”227 If Iran’s leadership believed Obama had any remaining credibility, he soon disabused them of the notion as the deadline passed without immediate consequence.
That the Iranians would test Obama’s ultimatum was a certainty. Iranian diplomats regularly allow deadlines to grow close if not pass before responding, in order to derail the Western response. Only a day before Security Council diplomats were to discuss new sanctions did Iranian officials signal their readiness to engage.228 Any Iranian hint that they would negotiate in good faith was enough for diplomats to delay punitive action. With sanctions pushed back and pressure relieved, Ahmadinejad pivoted and again ruled out any Iranian compromise. “Iran’s nuclear issue is over,” he said. “We will never negotiate Iran’s undeniable rights.”229
The State Department did not regard Ahmadinejad’s statement as sufficiently official, since it had not come through proper channels. This complaint was symptomatic of a mindset in which American diplomats judge rogue regimes by norms they do not accept. Accordingly, Secretary Clinton dispatched William Burns, the number-three State Department official, to meet his Iranian counterpart.230
Iranian authorities, meanwhile, quietly informed the IAEA of plans to build twenty nuclear reactors and ten new uranium enrichment plants.231 As Condoleezza Rice had struggled to get the Iranians to the table, they were secretly breaking ground on a new enrichment facility at Fordo, near Qom. As Obama extended his hand, Iranian engineers were finishing their new underground facility. Iranian diplomacy was undertaken in bad faith, meant to buy time.232 Nor was Tehran’s acknowledgment of the Fordo facility made in good faith; it was only to preempt a Western announcement of its discovery.233 Unbelievably, the White House rewarded Iran by allowing its foreign minister to visit Washington for the first time in a decade, a step that Iran remained unwilling to reciprocate.234
After months of angry posturing capped off with test-firing of new missiles, Iranian authorities hinted that they might return to the table only when new sanctions loomed.235 This was completely typical Iranian behavior, yet Western officials breathed sighs of relief. “Iran has told us that it plans to cooperate fully and immediately with the International Atomic Energy Agency on the new enrichment facility near Qom,” said Javier Solana at a press conference. In exchange, the Europeans and Americans “agreed to intensify dialogue.”236 Cheerleaders for Obama’s outreach celebrated. “Barack Obama pwned Bush-Cheney in one day and got more concessions from Iran in 7½ hours than the former administration got in 8 years of saber-rattling,” wrote Juan Cole, a fiercely partisan professor at the University of Michigan.237
Obama himself was more cautious. “We’re not going to talk for the sake of talking,” he said, adding, “we are prepared to move towards increased pressure.” Over the next weeks, he gave his imprimatur to an IAEA proposal that would see Iran ship its enriched nuclear fuel to Russia, which would enrich it further and return it to Iran for use in medical research. An Iranian delegation in Geneva said they would accept the compromise, and Iran’s foreign ministry called the deal “a national success.” All the international community needed was Iran’s formal acceptance. This never came. Rather, the Iranian regime tore up its agreement and demanded the right to enrich all uranium inside Iran. Such a scenario would have replicated the North Korea fiasco: After the Bush administration had acquiesced to Pyongyang’s demands to continue enrichment domestically, Kim Jong Il’s regime expelled inspectors and enriched its uranium to weapons grade.238 Even short of gaining consent to its demand, Tehran had already achieved its goal: derailing sanctions, while spinning its centrifuges without pause.
In the face of Iranian intransigence, Obama once again signaled weakness. He postponed punitive measures to give Iran time to reconsider.239 Then, Clinton appointed John Limbert to be her point man on Iran policy. A former hostage, Limbert worked as an advisor to an anti-sanctions lobby group and was dismissive of concerns about a nuclear Iran.240 The Iranian government had even celebrated his comments in its official press.241 In effect, Limbert counseled surrender.
At a speech commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the U.S. embassy seizure, Khamenei disparaged Obama’s efforts at engagement. “The Iranian nation will not be deceived by the US government’s apparently conciliatory words,” he told university students in Tehran.242 Obama ignored the Supreme Leader’s remarks. To do otherwise would have required him to choose between accepting Iran’s nuclear breakout and implementing a more forceful strategy. Obama’s worldview did not allow him to admit that he had no Iranian partner, so instead he made excuses for the Iranians to explain why diplomacy floundered. “Part of the challenge that we face is that neither North Korea nor Iran seem to be settled enough politically to make quick decisions on these issues,” the president explained.243 This excuse assumed that the Great Leader in Pyongyang and the Supreme Leader in Tehran took public opinion into account when making decisions.
With the White House refusing to observe its own red lines, the head of Iran’s atomic organization, Ali Akbar Salehi, announced plans for five more reactors.244 The following week, the foreign ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, acknowledged that Tehran had never had negotiations with Washington on its agenda.245 The Iranian parliament disclosed a request by Senator John Kerry to visit Tehran, which it refused. Less than a month later, Iran’s military launched a rocket capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
The White House condemned the missile launch as “provocative,”246 but Clinton still backtracked, saying, “We’ve avoided using the term ‘deadline’ ourselves . . . because we want to keep the door to dialogue open.”247 In effect, the Obama administration preferred to change its metrics rather than admit failure. Clinton’s flexibility reinforced Iranian intransigence. “We share the same idea with her,” said Mehmanparast. “Deadlines are meaningless.”248
As the State Department and its European partners began discussing how to augment sanctions, Turkey and Brazil, both nonpermanent members of the UN Security Council, began negotiating their own nuclear deal with Iran. Turkey took the lead, motivated less by a desire to end the standoff—Turkey’s prime minister had endorsed Iran’s nuclear program, after all—than by a desire to raise its own prestige. Iranian officials embraced such efforts, consistent with a long pattern of deferring sanctions while seeking to exploit divisions in the international community. On May 17, the three countries agreed to a deal similar to the one Iran had walked away from the previous year in Geneva. The new agreement did not take account of enrichment done over the previous half year, and so it left Iran with sufficient uranium to build a bomb.249 Nor did it bring Iran into compliance with UN resolutions.
What had begun as a confidence-building measure turned into the opposite. Not only the United States, but also the European Union, Russia, and China dismissed the deal. Turkey’s diplomacy had transformed Iran from a culprit into a victim of supposed U.S. diplomatic persecution.250 For the West and its partners, patience had run out. Almost nine months after the G8 leaders promised to punish Iranian defiance, the United Nations passed sanctions.251 Even then, Iran could count on Russia and China to water down the results. The United States and Europe, along with Japan and Korea, augmented the multilateral sanctions with their own unilateral measures.
The Iranian response was bluster and defiance. “What have they achieved today after passing four resolutions?” Ahmadinejad asked. “They thought if they pass a harsh resolution, they can usurp the rights of the Iranian nation and now they say, ‘We want to negotiate.’” Ahmadinejad made the Iranian position clear: “If you want to negotiate, you should abandon the behavior of those who rebel against God.”252 The Iranian foreign minister publicly rebuffed two attempts by Clinton to greet him at a security conference in Bahrain, and rejected her offer of diplomatic relations the following year.253
While Clinton renewed her outreach attempts, Iranian authorities intensified their crackdown on civil society.254 They understood that they need not fear accountability when Washington wanted them at the table. A round of talks in Geneva in December 2010 went nowhere when Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalali, refused to discuss any agreement that would have Iran forfeit its right to enrich uranium. In response, the West offered Iran more concessions.255 Proponents of engagement worried that Ahmadinejad might fall, and then Washington would have to find a new partner for diplomacy. For all his “messianic fantasies” and Holocaust denial, Ahmadinejad was still the Islamic Republic’s “most ardent advocate of direct nuclear negotiations with Washington,” observed Ray Takeyh, a former advisor in Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and his wife, Suzanne Maloney, a former Bush administration official.256 Diplomacy advocates in Washington kept tilting at windmills in a quixotic quest to engage. The Supreme Leader’s rejection of Obama’s overtures, reiterated ad nauseam by underlings, fell on deaf ears.257
If Ahmadinejad was Iran’s “most ardent advocate” of direct diplomacy, he would soon meet his match in Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s former nuclear negotiator. Voters hoping for reform propelled Rouhani to a first-round victory in the elections of June 2013. Many American proponents of engagement saw Rouhani as a man with whom they could deal, and Rouhani did not disappoint. Shortly before his visit to the United Nations in September 2013, he published an op-ed in the Washington Post urging world leaders “to make the most of the mandate for prudent engagement that my people have given me and to respond genuinely to my government’s efforts to engage in constructive dialogue.”258
When he arrived in New York, the press treated Rouhani like a rock star. The Iranian president demurred on a direct meeting, so Obama settled for a phone conversation, after which he reported triumphantly:
Just now, I spoke on the phone with President Rouhani of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The two of us discussed our ongoing efforts to reach an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program. I reiterated to President Rouhani what I said in New York—while there will surely be important obstacles to moving forward, and success is by no means guaranteed, I believe we can reach a comprehensive solution. . . . The very fact that this was the first communication between an American and Iranian President since 1979 underscores the deep mistrust between our countries, but it also indicates the prospect of moving beyond that difficult history. I do believe that there is a basis for a resolution. Iran’s Supreme Leader has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons. President Rouhani has indicated that Iran will never develop nuclear weapons.259
Although the fatwa, or religious declaration, that Obama cited has been the subject of diplomatic banter, it does not appear to exist. It is not listed in the Supreme Leader’s list of fatwas, and Iranian officials who mention it are not consistent on the text or even the date of issue. In his eagerness for a deal, Obama simply put trust before verify.
Some context for Rouhani’s assurances could have been provided by a speech he gave in 2005 to clerics in Mashhad, titled “Iran’s Measures Rob the Americans of Foresight.” Here, Rouhani endorsed a strategy of unpredictability and misdirection. “An important factor in the defeat of the plots of the enemies of Islam and the victory of the Islamic revolution was the principle of surprise,” he explained. “We always had another plan, which was both victorious and unpredictable for them as to exactly what direction we might take.”260 Obama assumed the best, never considering what, if anything, might have led Rouhani to a change of heart.
Obama used his press conference after the telephone call to celebrate a new opportunity, while Rouhani assured his domestic audience that he had not changed his position at all.261 The Western press reported that Rouhani was prepared to shutter the underground nuclear facility at Fordo, but Rouhani’s cabinet flatly ruled it out.262 The same held true for the Supreme Leader. While Western officials interpreted Khamenei’s talk of the need for “heroic flexibility” as a sign that he endorsed Rouhani’s outreach, the Supreme Leader’s advisors and aides explained that he had approved only a change in tactics, not in policy.263 Because so many Western reporters cherry-picked the facts, Western officials began to base their policies on a false perception of Iranian flexibility.
That may have been Rouhani’s goal all along. In his first television interview as president, Rouhani had announced that Iran’s economy had shrunk 5.4 percent over the previous year.264 Soon after he returned home from his appearance at the United Nations, the State Department dutifully requested that Congress delay new sanctions and roll back those already in place, in order to encourage diplomacy.265 It released more than $7 billion in frozen Iranian assets, which, together with new investment, may have won Tehran a windfall in excess of $20 billion. That cash infusion may have been Tehran’s priority, but for the United States to fulfill the Iranian agenda before talks even began did not make their success more likely.
Negotiations continued through much of 2014, but American negotiators responded to every Iranian red line by diluting demands and increasing concessions in order to keep the Iranian team at the table. For example, American diplomats now appear willing to allow an expiration date on intrusive inspections and to accept an enrichment program far beyond what a civilian nuclear program would need. In response, the Iranian government blocked IAEA investigation into its nuclear trigger work, an activity clearly connected with a nuclear bomb.266 Khamenei, meanwhile, tweeted out a series of eleven Iranian red lines, most of which related to key American concerns.267 From the Iranian perspective, the willingness of the United States to keep diluting its demands was a sign of weakness. Thus, “Americans witnessed their greatest defeats in Obama’s era,” crowed Ali Yunesi, a Rouhani advisor and former intelligence minister.268
* * *
“Cultivation of goodwill for goodwill’s sake is a waste of effort,”269 advised Bruce Laingen, the senior U.S. diplomat in Tehran, just weeks before the hostage crisis. More than three decades after Iran’s revolution, diplomacy has failed to resolve disputes between the United States and the Islamic Republic, let alone restore trust. Quite the contrary, the American rush to talk has backfired, reinforcing Iranian radicalism and recalcitrance at the expense of American national interest. It is telling that the three U.S. administrations that pushed most persistently for diplomatic engagement—those of Carter, George W. Bush, and Obama—suffered the greatest Iranian violence as a reward for their efforts.
Under Carter, an ill-conceived handshake and a willingness to take military action off the table transformed a hiccup at the embassy into a 444-day standoff. Persistent diplomacy empowered radicals. Under George W. Bush, the gap between rhetoric and policy reality was huge. Once Iranian leaders saw they would suffer no ill consequences for their defiance and, indeed, might even profit from it, Iran’s nuclear program expanded rapidly and Iranian forces grew increasingly bold in their confrontations with American troops in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite the track record of his predecessors and the statements of Iranian leaders, Obama pursued diplomacy with a vigor unseen since the Carter years. The Iranian leadership responded with disdain. For the first time in thirty years, the regime plotted an assassination in the heart of America. Human rights abuses multiplied in Iran.270 The Iranian nuclear program progressed to the verge of weapons capability.
Debate remained fierce about why engagement with Iran failed. Many proponents of engagement said that Washington, at best, was equally at fault with Tehran; more often, they blamed America. After the exposure of Iran’s bungled attack on Washington, D.C., a senior American official suggested that American aggressiveness explained Iran’s inclination to lash out.271 This, of course, is nonsense: whereas anti-American incitement is a staple of weekly Friday prayers in Iran, no American president, diplomat, or congressman has ever led crowds in anti-Iranian chants. George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech may be an exception to the rule, though he drew a sharp distinction between the Iranian people and the Islamic Republic. The disproportionate American focus on that single utterance reflects the American tendency to self-flagellate rather than recognize the rogue’s responsibility for diplomacy’s failure.
Diplomats counseling engagement with Iran too often assume that they and the Iranians share a common objective. They are wrong. Western officials see diplomacy as a process of compromise and conflict resolution. Iranian leaders, on the other hand, view it from a Manichaean perspective. As Kayhan explained it, “The power struggle in the region has only two sides: Iran and America.”272
Successive Iranian officials have bragged that America plays checkers while Iran plays chess. They have boasted about how Tehran deceives the West with diplomacy. For the ayatollahs, diplomacy is a tactic to divide the international community, pocket concessions, and hold off sanctions or military strikes. “Without violating any international laws or the nonproliferation treaty, we have managed to bypass the red lines the West created for us,” bragged Hamidreza Taraghi, an advisor to the Supreme Leader.273 The cycles of embracing and disengaging from talks have stymied the West for more than thirty years. That the State Department continues to grasp at Iran’s proffered straws demonstrates a lack of strategic review within American diplomatic circles.
One reason for the failure of diplomatic outreach to Iran has been inattention to the circumstances in which it is initiated. Diplomacy toward Iran works only when the costs of intransigence have grown too great for the Islamic Republic to bear. In 1981, Khomeini released the hostages not because of Carter’s persistence, but because Iraq’s invasion had increased the cost to Iran of its own isolation and because Reagan’s election signaled a resolve that Carter lacked. Likewise, Khomeini agreed to end the Iran-Iraq War only after the cost of continuing the stalemate grew too great. He likened his grudging about-face to drinking from a poisoned chalice.
Channeling diplomacy through the United Nations can compound the problem. By embracing a UN framework, Obama diluted his threat to impose harsh sanctions.274 Red lines matter. Wars in the Middle East are not caused by oil or water, but by overconfidence. When adversaries believe they can overstep red lines with impunity, they will. In 2006, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah acknowledged that had he understood Israeli red lines, he would not have launched the attack that led to war.275 The willingness of American officials to ignore their own red lines signaled to Iranian leaders that they could accelerate their nuclear and missile programs and even kill American troops without consequence.
American outreach bolsters the Iranian leadership’s perception of its own strength relative to the United States. Just as revolutionary authorities became more resolute with each Carter administration overture, so too did they grow defiant in the face of Obama’s outreach. In September 2010, Ahmadinejad used his bully pulpit at the United Nations to suggest that 9/11 was an inside job,276 the ultimate irony given that Joe Biden had justified American outreach by pointing to the spontaneous show of sympathy from Iranian citizens.
The Iranian leadership’s bad faith condemns diplomacy to failure in the absence of crippling sanctions or even limited military strikes. Ultimately, force counts. In June 2010, the Iranian government announced that it would send a ship to supply Hamas despite the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. Israeli officials publicly and repeatedly said they would intercept the Iranian ship. Iran blustered, but Israel stood firm and Iran blinked.277 Never has an American administration implemented a comprehensive strategy to force Iran’s Supreme Leader to blink, let alone drink from the chalice of poison and begin to negotiate sincerely.