Bundan yaklaşık 1600 yıl önce Mısır’ın İskenderiye kentinde korkunç bir cinayet işlenir; ‘iffetsiz’ ve ‘günahkâr’ olmakla suçlanan bir kadın toplumun gözleri önünde ‘öfkeli’ bir güruh tarafından linç edilir. Taşa tutulan, parçalara ayrılıp yakılan kadın, matematikçi, gökbilimci, filozof Hypatia’dır.
Büyük İskender’in M.Ö. 332 yılında kurduğu İskenderiye, yüzyıllarca barış içinde yaşadı. M.Ö. 30’larda Roma’nın hâkimiyetine geçen kentte barış ortamı M.S. 300’lerde bitti. Limanları, bilginleri, kültür merkezi, dev kütüphanesi ve üniversitesiyle İskenderiye o dönem ticaretin ve aydınlanmanın merkeziydi. Başında ünlü matematikçi Theon’un bulunduğu okulda kızı Hypatia da matematik, felsefe ve astronomi dersleri veriyor, Platon, Aristo ve Oklid’in fikirlerini tartışmaya açtığı bu dersler dünyanın dört bir yanından gelen öğrencilerle dolup taşıyordu... Elif Eral, yazdı…
Kentin dokusu Hıristiyanlığın resmi din olarak kabul edilmesinin ardından hızla değişti. İktidara egemen olan Hıristiyanlar, Pagan ve Yahudiler başta olmak üzere farklı inançlara sahip kim varsa hedef aldı.
Kentte ardı ardına cinayetler işlenirken Hypatia çalışmalarını aralıksız sürdürdü. Her gün bir çember çizerek; dünyanın, güneşin, gezegenlerin hareketlerini yeniden hesap ediyor, öğrencilerine “Bizi birleştiren şeyler ayıranlardan daha fazla; tüm insanlar eşittir, kardeştir...” tavsiyesinde bulunuyordu.
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İskenderiye Üniversitesi’ni inançsızlığın merkezi olarak gören Hıristiyanlar, Serapis tapınağı, müze ve dev kütüphanenin yok edilmesi gerektiğini düşünüyordu. Kitapların parçalandığı, heykellerin yıkıldığı, insanların öldürüldüğü kanlı saldırıda yüzyılların bilimsel birikimi de yok edildi. En sevdiğini; babasını da kaybeden Hypatia, artık yapayalnızdı...
Ancak babasına söz verdiği gibi gerçeği aramaktan asla vazgeçmedi. Hypatia “Dünya hareket ederken daire mi çiziyor, elips mi, yoksa güneş dönüyor dünya yerinde mi duruyor” diye düşünürken kötülük yerinde durmuyor, örgütleniyordu... *** İskenderiye Patrikhanesi’nin ise o bilimsel çalışmalarını sürdürürken Hypatia’ya duyduğu kin her geçen gün artıyordu.
Eski öğrencisi olan kent valisinin onun tesirinde olduğunu ve bu sayede farklı inançların korunduğunu düşünüyordu.
Hypatia’nın öldürülmesi için tezgâh kuruldu. Başpiskopas Kril’in talimatıyla papaz pazar ayininde bir konuşma yaptı; kadının toplumda olması gerektiği yeri tanımladı önce, asla bir erkekle eşit olamayacağını, erkeğe akıl veremeyeceğini, kıyafetlerinden hareketlerine kadar dikkat edeceğini anlattı uzun uzun. Ardından Hypatia’yı hedef göstererek İskederiye’de haddini aşmış bir kadının yaşadığını, büyücü, günahkâr bir şeytan olduğunu söyledi.
Kalabalık soluğu Hypatia’nın kapısında aldı.
Önce saçından sürüklediler. Haypatia’yı çırılçıplak soyup en acı şekilde nasıl ölebileceğini tartıştılar; biri “Taşlayalım”, diğeri “Derisini yüzelim” dedi, öteki ateşe vermekten bahsetti. Karar veremediler, sırayla hepsini yaptılar...
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Tarihte bilinen ilk kadın matematikçi olan Hypatia’nın yazdığı kitaplar kütüphane saldırısında yok edildi. Feminist sanata da konu olan Hypatia hakkında çok sayıda roman, Oyun ve şiir yazıldı... Hypatia’yı “Bağnazlığın masum bir kurbanı” diye tarif eden Voltaire, öldürülmesini ise ‘sorgulama özgürlüğünün yok ediliş simgesi’ olarak görmüştür.
*** Derler ki Hypatia’nın katli sadece bir bilim insanın ölümü değil daha fazlasıdır; aydınlıkla karanlığın savaşında bir dönemeç kabul edilir.
Hypatia’nın; insanlığa büyük bir dersi daha vardır; tüm karanlığa inat ‘Göğe bakalım.. milliyet.com.tr
R. DANIEL KELEMEN is Professor of Political Science and Law at Rutgers University.
In a historic act of self-harm, the British electorate has chosen to leave the European Union. Brexit—as it is called—will do severe damage to the United Kingdom’s economy and its strategic interests. Brexit will also deal a heavy blow to the project of European integration. The EU will survive, but it will never be the same. Leaders of far-right parties across Europe cheered the referendum result, as did Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s allies shuddered, and financial markets in the country[1] and across the world plummeted.
With negotiations beginning over the terms of the United Kingdom’s departure, much is uncertain. But one thing is clear already: the Leave campaign’s claim that the EU had robbed the United Kingdom of its sovereignty was false. If nothing else, the vote shows that the country was sovereign all along and that it was free to make disastrous decisions.
A TOXIC CAMPAIGN
The Leave victory marks the culmination of a poisonous debate. Although the Remain campaign was responsible for some distortions of its own—such as claiming that Brexit would make British households 4,300 pounds (over $5,000) worse off per year[2]—the Leave campaign was premised on lies and empty promises. Proponents claimed that EU immigrants were to blame for the strains on Britain’s public services, when in fact they made net contributions to the Exchequer, to the tune of 20 billion pounds (over $27 billion) between 2000 and 2011[3]. Leave stoked xenophobia, suggesting that the EU was opening the United Kingdom to a flood of refugees and would soon allow millions of Turks to immigrate to Britain. Neither was true. In fact, London had complete control over how many refugees the United Kingdom accepted. Turkey is not “set to join the EU[4]” as the Leave campaign claimed, and in any case, Britain had a veto over Turkish membership.
Electronic boards are seen at the Madrid stock exchange which plummeted after Britain voted to leave the European Union in the EU BREXIT referendum, in Madrid, Spain, June 24, 2016.
Leave leaders also appealed to “Little England’s” worst nationalist instincts—repeatedly comparing the EU with Nazi Germany. The campaign’s only real parallel with Nazism was UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s “Breaking Point[5]” poster, which closely resembled Nazi propaganda picturing a column of refugees.
Of course, the Remain campaign was lackluster. Although Prime Minister David Cameron spoke passionately for continued British membership in the EU, he and his Conservative pro-Remain colleagues lacked credibility after years of scoring cheap points by bashing Brussels. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, a long-time eurosceptic, damned the union with faint praise when he declared that he was “seven out of ten” for Remain. Polling in the run-up to the vote revealed that nearly half of Labour supporters were uncertain of their party’s position on the referendum[6].
STUFF EU!
The Remain side lost despite enjoying the backing of labor unions, business leaders, universities, doctors, the governments of all of the United Kingdom’s allies, celebrities ranging from David Beckham to J.K. Rowling, and the leadership of every party aside from UKIP. The Bank of England, the IMF, and an overwhelming majority of economists warned that Brexit would severely damage investment, growth, and jobs in Britain. A majority of voters just didn’t care. Brexiteer Michael Gove was on to something when he said, “I think people in this country have had enough of experts.”
To be sure, the Leave side was fueled by a populist backlash against elites. But the campaign itself was led by consummate members of the Tory party elite such as Etonian former London Mayor Boris Johnson and Lord Chancellor Gove. Also, the anti-establishment mood didn’t seem to guide young voters: large majorities of those under 50 years old voted to stay, while it was those over 50 who pushed the United Kingdom out. Many frustrated young voters will feel that the old—nostalgic for a bygone Britain—have robbed them of a European future.
More than anything, though, the Leave vote was a vote against immigration. The closing days of the campaign revealed more starkly than ever just how central opposition to immigration was to the Leave campaign. Initial polling showed that nearly three-quarters of voters[7] who saw immigration as the most important issue facing Britain favored Brexit, whereas strong majorities of those who saw economic issues as the main concern supported Remain.
The day after the vote, Britons—those who got any sleep—awoke to the sight of Cameron announcing that he will step down as prime minister in time for the Conservative Party conference in October. Although Cameron originally promised to stay on regardless of the result, that position was untenable after he led the losing Remain campaign. Whether or not Boris Johnson replaces Cameron, it is clear that the new leadership will come from the Brexiteer wing of the Conservative Party. And so, Cameron lost the gamble of his life. Having called for a referendum in hopes of staving off UKIP and containing the anti-EU wing of his own party, he will end up handing them control. The Labour Party is in turmoil as well, with Corbyn facing a leadership challenge from his backbenches.
A British flag which was washed away by heavy rains the day before lies on the street in London, Britain, June 24, 2016 after Britain voted to leave the European Union in the EU BREXIT referendum.
But divisions within the Conservatives and Labour are the least of the United Kingdom’s worries now. With the pound plummeting to its lowest value in decades, stock markets around the world tumbling, and Standard & Poor’s planning to strip the United Kingdom of its AAA status, the short-term economic consequences of Brexit are already apparent. The long-term economic and political consequences, although more uncertain, are potentially far more troubling.
Voters also awoke to a disunited Kingdom: the referendum map revealed a sharply divided nation, with Scotland, Northern Ireland, and London voting overwhelmingly for Remain, whereas most of the rest of England went for Leave. Scottish leaders have already declared that they should not be dragged out of the EU against their will by English voters and have called for a second referendum on Scottish independence. In Northern Ireland, too, some Sinn Fein leaders have called for a vote on leaving the United Kingdom to enter a union with the Republic of Ireland.
And as they begin to feel the economic pain of Brexit and contemplate the potential disintegration of the United Kingdom, it may also begin to dawn on Brexit supporters that the Leave campaign sold them a false bill of goods. Even before breakfast the morning after the vote, Farage declared that it had been “a mistake” to claim that the 350 million pounds a week (a widely discredited figure[8]) that the United Kingdom would supposedly save by not paying into the EU budget would be directed to the National Heath Service. Brexit campaigner and Member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan also clarified for voters that Brexit would not mean an end to EU immigration into Britain; instead, the government would now have control over who comes in and migrants would no longer enjoy the rights of EU citizens. Ultimately, Leave voters who were venting anger over economic insecurity, declining living standards, and recent cuts to public services[9] will discover that structural changes in the economy and Conservative government policies—not the EU or migrants—were at the root of these problems.
IN A BIND?
Legally speaking, the referendum result is not binding. But politically, it would be practically impossible for the new leadership that replaces Cameron to ignore the result. In other words, the United Kingdom will soon set about the process of leaving the EU.
The EU treaties set out clear procedures in Article 50 [10]through which member states may leave. According to the process, the United Kingdom must notify the European Council of its intention to leave the Union, which would then instigate a process of negotiation lasting up to two years—or longer, if all member states agree—to determine the terms of withdrawal. Cameron promised to launch Article 50 immediately after the referendum, but in announcing his resignation, he declared that Article 50 should only be invoked by his successor in the autumn. Some Brexit campaigners have hoped to avoid the procedure altogether (and with it avoid the proviso that the European Parliament must endorse any deal) and to negotiate informally with the European Union. But EU leaders have already stated their position emphatically: the United Kingdom must follow the Article 50 procedure, and start doing so as soon as possible[11].
No one can say for certain what the outcome of the negotiations will be. The Leave campaign was notoriously vague on the issue[12], but there are a few main options—each problematic in its own way. First, if the United Kingdom wants to retain full access to the EU’s single market, it could follow the so-called Norwegian option and opt into the European Economic Area (EEA), which is an existing arrangement linking some neighboring countries to the EU’s single market. Otherwise, the United Kingdom could follow the similar Swiss option, through which it would create a bilateral deal with the EU similar to the EEA arrangement.
But in these models, in exchange for access to the single market, the United Kingdom would have to allow free movement of labor, pay into the EU budget, and follow the EU’s accumulated body of regulations—all things the Leave campaign promised would end with Brexit. In short, the United Kingdom would still be subject to single-market rules, but lose any role in shaping them. If, instead, the United Kingdom chooses to leave the single market entirely, it could trade with the EU like any other country that is a member of the WTO (the so-called WTO option). But in this case, British firms would face tariffs as well as substantial non-tariff barriers to trade. Given that 44 percent of British exports go the European Union’s single market, such an outcome would be damaging indeed.
In negotiating with the United Kingdom, the EU will face contradictory pressures. On the one hand, given the size and importance of the British economy, the EU will want to maintain a vibrant trading relationship. A deep recession in an economically isolated Britain would hurt continental Europe as well. On the other hand, the EU needs to drive a hard bargain with Britain to discourage any other member states from considering withdrawal. The EU must send a strong signal that leaving has costly consequences and demonstrate, as Jean-Claude Juncker put it on the eve of the referendum, that “out is out.”
AFTER BREXIT
In a European Union beset by problems—economic and monetary breakdown, refugees, and democratic backsliding in the east—Brexit is the greatest of them all. Support for the EU is at an all-time low, and the Leave victory has been cheered by far-right leaders, from France’s Marine Le Pen to the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, who have called for referenda of their own. Still, although concerns about the potential break-up of the EU are understandable, the union will likely hold together.
Brexit will deal a huge blow to the international prestige and self-confidence—whatever is left of it—of the European project. European leaders may heed the populists and the lessons of Brexit by placing more restrictions on access to social benefits for EU migrants. Indeed, there is growing support for such policies across the political spectrum in Germany. If the EU is to regain its standing, its leaders must also get a grip on the refugee crisis and move away from its single-minded promotion of austerity, which has been both self-destructive and deeply unpopular across much of Europe. But ultimately, no other member state is likely to leave the union. For those in the eurozone, exit would simply be too costly. And new members in eastern Europe depend too heavily on EU funding to contemplate exit. Only in Sweden and Denmark is EU exit imaginable, although still unlikely because large majorities in both countries still believe they are better off inside the EU than out[13].
Above all, the union will not disintegrate because—despite all its current troubles—it remains, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief of staff Peter Altmaier tweeted, “the best thing that happened to us in more than 200 years[14].” If the EU didn’t exist, European leaders would be trying to invent something like it. Certainly, many EU policies and institutions, above all the flawed regimes governing the eurozone and the Schengen zone, are in desperate need of reform (reform that some member governments have been blocking). But for all these faults, the EU has played a key role in promoting peace, prosperity, and democracy across Europe over six decades. Voters are frustrated with the EU, but most are even more frustrated with their national governments. Mainstream political parties across Europe remain deeply committed to the union, and we can expect European leaders to reaffirm that commitment in the days to come.
The United Kingdom has always been a reluctant member state, its marriage to Europe one of convenience, not love. Late to join the European Economic Community, ambivalent from the start, and constantly demanding and securing opt-outs from the euro and the Schengen free-movement zone, the United Kingdom has been drifting away from the union for years. Even as the country held its European partners at arm’s length, those partners have sought to embrace it. Citizens across Europe overwhelmingly supported the United Kingdom remaining in the EU, as did their leaders.
In the waning days of the campaign, Continentals quite literally tried to show the United Kingdom their love with grassroots campaigns such as #HugaBrit that saw Europeans hugging British friends and pleading with them not to go. In the end, though, all the hugs and policy concessions were to no avail.
British politicians—and many voters—have blamed the European Union for their problems for years. Now they will have to find something new to bang on about as they deal with an economic downturn and increasing strains on their own political unity caused by the decision to leave. Soon enough, the British will discover whether they truly prefer life outside the union. Having divorced in haste, they may end up repenting at leisure.
NEW YORK – The Brexit vote was a triple protest: against surging immigration, City of London bankers, and European Union institutions, in that order. It will have major consequences. Donald Trump’s campaign for the US presidency will receive a huge boost, as will other anti-immigrant populist politicians. Moreover, leaving the EU will wound the British economy, and could well push Scotland to leave the United Kingdom – to say nothing of Brexit’s ramifications for the future of European integration.
Brexit is thus a watershed event that signals the need for a new kind of globalization, one that could be far superior to the status quo that was rejected at the British polls.
At its core, Brexit reflects a pervasive phenomenon in the high-income world: rising support for populist parties campaigning for a clampdown on immigration. Roughly half the population in Europe and the United States, generally working-class voters, believes that immigration is out of control, posing a threat to public order and cultural norms.
In the middle of the Brexit campaign in May, it was reported that the UK had net immigration of 333,000 persons in 2015, more than triple the government’s previously announced target of 100,000. That news came on top of the Syrian refugee crisis, terrorist attacks by Syrian migrants and disaffected children of earlier immigrants, and highly publicized reports of assaults on women and girls by migrants in Germany and elsewhere.
In the US, Trump backers similarly rail against the country’s estimated 11 million undocumented residents, mainly Hispanic, who overwhelmingly live peaceful and productive lives, but without proper visas or work permits. For many Trump supporters, the crucial fact about the recent attack in Orlando is that the perpetrator was the son of Muslim immigrants from Afghanistan and acted in the name of anti-American sentiment (though committing mass murder with automatic weapons is, alas, all too American).
Warnings that Brexit would lower income levels were either dismissed outright, wrongly, as mere fearmongering, or weighed against the Leavers’ greater interest in border control. A major factor, however, was implicit class warfare. Working-class “Leave” voters reasoned that most or all of the income losses would in any event be borne by the rich, and especially the despised bankers of the City of London. Americans disdain Wall Street and its greedy and often criminal behavior at least as much as the British working class disdains the City of London. This, too, suggests a campaign advantage for Trump over his opponent in November, Hillary Clinton, whose candidacy is heavily financed by Wall Street. Clinton should take note and distance herself from Wall Street.
In the UK, these two powerful political currents – rejection of immigration and class warfare – were joined by the widespread sentiment that EU institutions are dysfunctional. They surely are. One need only cite the last six years of mismanagement of the Greek crisis by self-serving, shortsighted European politicians. The continuing eurozone turmoil was, understandably, enough to put off millions of UK voters.
The short-run consequences of Brexit are already clear: the pound has plummeted to a 31-year low. In the near term, the City of London will face major uncertainties, job losses, and a collapse of bonuses. Property values in London will cool. The possible longer-run knock-on effects in Europe – including likely Scottish independence; possible Catalonian independence; a breakdown of free movement of people in the EU; a surge in anti-immigrant politics (including the possible election of Trump and France’s Marine Le Pen) – are enormous. Other countries might hold referendums of their own, and some may choose to leave.
In Europe, the call to punish Britain pour encourager les autres – to warn those contemplating the same – is already rising. This is European politics at its stupidest (also very much on display vis-à-vis Greece). The remaining EU should, instead, reflect on its obvious failings and fix them. Punishing Britain – by, say, denying it access to Europe’s single market – would only lead to the continued unraveling of the EU.
So what should be done? I would suggest several measures, both to reduce the risks of catastrophic feedback loops in the short term and to maximize the benefits of reform in the long term.
First, stop the refugee surge by ending the Syrian war immediately. This can be accomplished by ending the CIA-Saudi alliance to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, thereby enabling Assad (with Russian and Iranian backing) to defeat the Islamic State and stabilize Syria (with a similar approach in neighboring Iraq). America’s addiction to regime change (in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria) is the deep cause of Europe’s refugee crisis. End the addiction, and the recent refugees could return home.
Second, stop NATO’s expansion to Ukraine and Georgia. The new Cold War with Russia is another US-contrived blunder with plenty of European naiveté attached. Closing the door on NATO expansion would make it possible to ease tensions and normalize relations with Russia, stabilize Ukraine, and restore focus on the European economy and the European project.
Third, don’t punish Britain. Instead, police national and EU borders to stop illegal migrants. This is not xenophobia, racism, or fanaticism. It is common sense that countries with the world’s most generous social-welfare provisions (Western Europe) must say no to millions (indeed hundreds of millions) of would-be migrants. The same is true for the US.
Fourth, restore a sense of fairness and opportunity for the disaffected working class and those whose livelihoods have been undermined by financial crises and the outsourcing of jobs. This means following the social-democratic ethos of pursuing ample social spending for health, education, training, apprenticeships, and family support, financed by taxing the rich and closing tax havens, which are gutting public revenues and exacerbating economic injustice. It also means finally giving Greece debt relief, thereby ending the long-running eurozone crisis.
Fifth, focus resources, including additional aid, on economic development, rather than war, in low-income countries. Uncontrolled migration from today’s poor and conflict-ridden regions will become overwhelming, regardless of migration policies, if climate change, extreme poverty, and lack of skills and education undermine the development potential of Africa, Central America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
All of this underscores the need to shift from a strategy of war to one of sustainable development, especially by the US and Europe. Walls and fences won’t stop millions of migrants fleeing violence, extreme poverty, hunger, disease, droughts, floods, and other ills. Only global cooperation can do that.
by Esfandyar Batmanghelidj
The United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union in a historic “Brexit” vote. The myriad ramifications of the vote will only be fully understood in the coming years, but it is clear that Brexit is as much about the return of great power politics as it is about affairs in the European sphere. Ian Bremmer has declared Brexit the “the most significant political risk the world has experienced since the Cuban Missile Crisis.” It should be no surprise that the prognosis of the Iran deal, perhaps the most significant diplomatic achievement of this decade, will be impacted by the British decision to leave the EU.
The vote has certainly made a splash in Iran. Hamid Aboutalebi, Rouhani’s deputy chief of staff for political affairs, tweeted that “Brexit is a ‘historic opportunity’ for Iran” that must be taken advantage of. On the other side of Iran’s political aisle, Brigadier General Massoud Jazayeri has praised the Brexit vote, suggesting that it represents a rejection of American policies. Whatever the logic of these statements, political actors in Iran are clearly watching the Brexit fallout with interest.
But Iranians should be wary of seeing Brexit as a benign event. The uncertainty and volatility now gripping Europe may have a significant impact on the implementation of the Iran deal. Just as Iran was working to reenter the community of nations, relying on the central coordination of the European Union, the political and economic capacity for implementation is being diverted and eroded. Diverted Political Capacity
Although much of the debate around the progress in implementation of the nuclear deal has focused on the US-Iran relationship and the role of the U.S. State Department, the diplomatic framework for the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is firmly rooted within the structures of the European Union. Annex IV of JCPOA outlines the creation of a Joint Commission with the mandate to “review and consult to address issues arising from the implementation of sanctions lifting” among other non-proliferation-related responsibilities. Annex IV specifically names High Representative Federica Mogherini as the “Coordinator of the Joint Commission” for implementation of the Iran deal.
Mogherini in turn leads the European External Action Service (EEAS), the diplomatic service of the European Union, which has played the central organizational role in coordinating Iran’s negotiations with the world powers. She was a key figure during the nuclear negotiations and spoke alongside Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif during the announcement that the P5+1 and Iran had reached a historic accord.
Within the EEAS, the Iran file has been held by Helga Schmid, recently promoted to secretary general of the service, in a move to give her more time to focus on the Iran deal. Below Schmid, an expert-level Iran Task Force was established in 2015. The task force, led by Portuguese diplomat Hugo Sobral is composed of seven members and works behind the scenes to iron out a wide range of issues related to implementation. Iran is unique in that it sits above most of the organizational hierarchy of the EEAS. Iran is such a complex issue, and has become so central to EU diplomacy as one of the few success stories of recent years, that the mandate for implementation is handled at the most senior levels.
Whereas EU coordination has been an asset for the Iran deal, it is now a risk. First, the diplomatic fallout of Brexit could monopolize the agenda at EEAS, with the senior leadership diverted from their work on Iran. Second, the greater the seniority of the diplomats, the greater the exposure to Europe’s impending political machinations. David Cameron has announced his resignation, and Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel will likely have to fight to keep their parties in control. The European foreign ministers who are stewarding the Iran deal—Britain’s Hammond, Germany’s Frank-Walter, and France’s Ayrault—are at risk of losing their jobs. Third, Brexit will clearly have an immense and detrimental impact on the political capacity of the EU. Already, surging populist politicians Marie Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands have called for their own countries to pursue referendums on leaving the union. Whether those votes come to pass, the focus of the political establishment in Europe will turn inward, and the willpower and capacity to lead in the international arena will wane. Eroded Economic Means
There is no other coordinating body for the Iran deal outside the EU-led framework. The EU’s central role, linking the foreign policy interests of the UK, France, and Germany (the E3 states) enabled JCPOA to emerge from a consensus including the United States, China, and Russia. That consensus was crucial to the promise of sanctions relief, which is the most important aspect of the deal from the Iranian perspective. If Iran does not see an economic boon, the Iran deal is at risk of failing.
Troublingly, Brexit will negatively impact the ability of both the UK and Europe to deliver the economic benefits of the Iran deal. The primary barrier to increased trade and investment has been the hesitation of major banks to engage opportunities in Iran. Banks are concerned about the lingering impact of US sanctions. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has leaned on Mogherini and EU leadership to compel the US to provide greater comfort to European banks about doing business with Iran. But they have made only limited progress thus far. Additionally, banks are generally more cautious than before the 2009 financial crisis, and Iran is seen as a high-risk market with only limited near-term upsides. Most financiers and investors were hesitant to put capital into Iran prior to Brexit, and they will be even more hesitant now, slowing the inflow of FDI. As early market activity has shown, Brexit is having a significant downward impact on emerging market assets. Already stumbling, emerging markets like Iran will become a less attractive opportunity if the volatility continues.
The secondary barrier is within the UK itself. Optimists might note that one of the key arguments of the Leave campaign was that freedom from the EU would enable the UK to pursue business opportunitiesin key emerging markets around the world. Although the focus has been on China and India, Iran would certainly fall into that category.
Indeed, the UK has been trying to drum up trade with Iran for the past two years, but has had little to no success. In 2015, Chancellor Exchequer George Osborne was slated to lead a trade delegation to Iran, but this was cancelled largely due to political concerns from the UK’s regional allies. In May of this year, Sajid Javid, the business secretary, was meant to lead a business delegation only for it to be cancelled as the Brexit debate threw Cameron’s cabinet into disarray. The UK does have a formal “trade envoy” to Iran in Lord Norman Lamont, who has been a supporter of renewed Iran-UK ties for many years as the chairman of the British-Iranian Chamber of Commerce. But Lord Lamont has had limited success mustering British business, and the UK lags far behind France, Germany, and Italy in terms of promised FDI. Iranians find some hope in the fact that Lord Lamont supported Brexit and will thus retain or even gain political influence in the aftermath of the referendum. But faltering political will is not the only challenge facing British business with Iran.
At a structural level, the economic priorities of the UK will change. Although the Leave campaign touted an embrace of new global markets, the initial priority will be to shore up the British economy by ensuring continued access to the European Common Market. This will require that the UK negotiate a free-trade agreement with the EU-27. This process will be extremely complex and lengthy, and as the global law firm Baker & McKenzie notes, “there are concerns that the UK lacks the manpower and expertise required for such negotiations.” Michael Dougan, a professor at the University of Liverpool, has cautioned that, in terms of the push to emerging markets, “Logistically it is difficult to imagine that the UK has the internal diplomatic and civil-service capacity to negotiate more than one or two agreements at a time, let alone sixty or seventy.” A logistical challenge will also face the chief executives of major British and European companies, who will now need to focus their attention on post-Brexit planning. They will have fewer resources to devote to developing opportunities in Iran, especially at the required senior levels. Practically speaking, Iran will not be a priority in the post-Brexit economic agenda. A Change in Mindset
The Brexit vote took place a little less than a year following the historic announcement of the Iran deal on July 14, 2015. What is perhaps most shocking for those of us who followed the Iran deal, and rejoiced in that announcement, is the different mindset affecting the political and economic landscape today.
When the Iran deal was announced, it seemed a triumphant example of cooperation and vision where the national interests of seven different countries, representing the global community, eventually produced a single robust agreement. In many ways, Brexit is a rejection of the type of politics that brought us the Iran Deal.
This may be the final consequence, with the hardest impact to gauge. A single national referendum has shaken the collective faith in the project of formalizing consensus and cooperation in international relations. Iran is coming back into the community of nations. But with the potential demise of the EU, that community will seem less welcoming and less hopeful.
Esfandyar Batmanghelidj is the founder and organizer of the Europe-Iran Forum, a leading economic conference. He is also a researcher on Iranian political economy and social history. Photo courtesy of speedpropertybuyers.co.uk/ via Flickr
The president has long been criticized for his lack of strategic vision. But what if a strategy, centered on Iran, has been in place from the start and consistently followed to this day?
February 2, 2015 | Michael Doran
President Barack Obama makes a statement about Iran’s nuclear program in November 2013. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images.
President Barack Obama wishes the Islamic Republic of Iran every success. Its leaders, he explained in a recent interview, stand at a crossroads. They can choose to press ahead with their nuclear program, thereby continuing to flout the will of the international community and further isolate their country; or they can accept limitations on their nuclear ambitions and enter an era of harmonious relations with the rest of the world. “They have a path to break through that isolation and they should seize it,” the president urged—because “if they do, there’s incredible talent and resources and sophistication . . . inside of Iran, and it would be a very successful regional power.”
How eager is the president to see Iran break through its isolation and become a very successful regional power? Very eager. A year ago, Benjamin Rhodes, deputy national-security adviser for strategic communication and a key member of the president’s inner circle, shared some good news with a friendly group of Democratic-party activists. The November 2013 nuclear agreement between Tehran and the “P5+1”—the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany—represented, he said, not only “the best opportunity we’ve had to resolve the Iranian [nuclear] issue,” but “probably the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy.” For the administration, Rhodes emphasized, “this is healthcare . . . , just to put it in context.” Unaware that he was being recorded, he then confided to his guests that Obama was planning to keep Congress in the dark and out of the picture: “We’re already kind of thinking through, how do we structure a deal so we don’t necessarily require legislative action right away.”
Why the need to bypass Congress? Rhodes had little need to elaborate. As the president himself once noted balefully, “[T]here is hostility and suspicion toward Iran, not just among members of Congress but the American people”—and besides, “members of Congress are very attentive to what Israel says on its security issues.” And that “hostility and suspicion” still persist, prompting the president in his latest State of the Union address to repeat his oft-stated warning that he will veto “any new sanctions bill that threatens to undo [the] progress” made so far toward a “comprehensive agreement” with the Islamic Republic.
As far as the president is concerned, the less we know about his Iran plans, the better. Yet those plans, as Rhodes stressed, are not a minor or incidental component of his foreign policy. To the contrary, they are central to his administration’s strategic thinking about the role of the United States in the world, and especially in the Middle East.
Moreover, that has been true from the beginning. In the first year of Obama’s first term, a senior administration official would later tell David Sanger of the New York Times, “There were more [White House] meetings on Iran than there were on Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. It was the thing we spent the most time on and talked about the least in public [emphasis added].” All along, Obama has regarded his hoped-for “comprehensive agreement” with Iran as an urgent priority, and, with rare exceptions, has consistently wrapped his approach to that priority in exceptional layers of secrecy.
From time to time, critics and even friends of the president have complained vocally about the seeming disarray or fecklessness of the administration’s handling of foreign policy. Words like amateurish, immature, and incompetent are bandied about; what’s needed, we’re told, is less ad-hoc fumbling, more of a guiding strategic vision. Most recently, Leslie Gelb, a former government official and past president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has charged that “the Obama team lacks the basic instincts and judgment necessary to conduct U.S. national-security policy,” and has urged the president to replace the entire inner core of his advisers with “strong and strategic people of proven . . . experience.”
One sympathizes with Gelb’s sense of alarm, but his premises are mistaken. Inexperience is a problem in this administration, but there is no lack of strategic vision. Quite the contrary: a strategy has been in place from the start, and however clumsily it may on occasion have been implemented, and whatever resistance it has generated abroad or at home, Obama has doggedly adhered to the policies that have flowed from it.
In what follows, we’ll trace the course of the most important of those policies and their contribution to the president’s announced determination to encourage and augment Iran’s potential as a successful regional power and as a friend and partner to the United States.
2009-2010: Round One, Part I
In the giddy aftermath of Obama’s electoral victory in 2008, anything seemed possible. The president saw himself as a transformational leader, not just in domestic politics but also in the international arena, where, as he believed, he had been elected to reverse the legacy of his predecessor, George W. Bush. To say that Obama regarded Bush’s foreign policy as anachronistic is an understatement. To him it was a caricature of yesteryear, the foreign-policy equivalent of Leave It to Beaver. Obama’s mission was to guide America out of Bushland, an arena in which the United States assembled global military coalitions to defeat enemies whom it depicted in terms like “Axis of Evil,” and into Obamaworld, a place more attuned to the nuances, complexities, and contradictions—and opportunities—of the 21st century. In today’s globalized environment, Obama told the United Nations General Assembly in September 2009, “our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. . . . No balance of power among nations will hold.”
If, in Bushland, America had behaved like a sheriff, assembling a posse to go in search of monsters, in Obamaworld America would disarm its rivals by ensnaring them in a web of cooperation.
For the new president, nothing revealed the conceptual inadequacies of Bushland more clearly than the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Before coming to Washington, Obama had opposed the toppling of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein; once in the U.S. Senate, he rejected Bush’s “surge” and introduced legislation to end the war. Shortly after his inauguration in January 2009, he pledged to bring the troops home quickly—a commitment that he would indeed honor. But if calling for withdrawal from Iraq had been a relatively easy position to take for a senator, for a president it raised a key practical question: beyond abstract nostrums like “no nation can . . . dominate another nation,” what new order should replace the American-led system that Bush had been building?
This was, and remains, the fundamental strategic question that Obama has faced in the Middle East, though one would search his speeches in vain for an answer to it. But Obama does have a relatively concrete vision. When he arrived in Washington in 2006, he absorbed a set of ideas that had incubated on Capitol Hill during the previous three years—ideas that had received widespread attention thanks to the final report of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan congressional commission whose co-chairs, former secretary of state James Baker and former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, interpreted their mission broadly, offering advice on all key aspects of Middle East policy.
The report, published in December 2006, urged then-President Bush to take four major steps: withdraw American troops from Iraq; surge American troops in Afghanistan; reinvigorate the Arab-Israeli “peace process”; and, last but far from least, launch a diplomatic engagement of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its junior partner, the Assad regime in Syria. Baker and Hamilton believed that Bush stood in thrall to Israel and was therefore insufficiently alive to the benefits of cooperating with Iran and Syria. Those two regimes, supposedly, shared with Washington the twin goals of stabilizing Iraq and defeating al-Qaeda and other Sunni jihadi groups. In turn, this shared interest would provide a foundation for building a concert system of states—a club of stable powers that could work together to contain the worst pathologies of the Middle East and lead the way to a sunnier future.
Expressing the ethos of an influential segment of the foreign-policy elite, the Baker-Hamilton report became the blueprint for the foreign policy of the Obama administration, and its spirit continues to pervade Obama’s inner circle. Denis McDonough, now the president’s chief of staff, once worked as an aide to Lee Hamilton; so did Benjamin Rhodes, who helped write the Iraq Study Group’s report. Obama not only adopted the blueprint but took it one step further, recruiting Vladimir Putin’s Russia as another candidate for membership in the new club. The administration’s early “reset” with Russia and its policy of reaching out to Iran and Syria formed two parts of a single vision. If, in Bushland, America had behaved like a sheriff, assembling a posse (“a coalition of the willing”) to go in search of monsters, in Obamaworld America would disarm its rivals by ensnaring them in a web of cooperation. To rid the world of rogues and tyrants, one must embrace and soften them.
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How would this work in the case of Iran? During the Bush years, an elaborate myth had developed according to which the mullahs in Tehran had themselves reached out in friendship to Washington, offering a “grand bargain”: a deal on everything from regional security to nuclear weapons. The swaggering Bush, however, had slapped away the outstretched Iranian hand, squandering the opportunity of a lifetime to normalize U.S.-Iranian relations and thereby bring order to the entire Middle East.
Obama based his policy of outreach to Tehran on two key assumptions of the grand-bargain myth: that Tehran and Washington were natural allies, and that Washington itself was the primary cause of the enmity between the two. If only the United States were to adopt a less belligerent posture, so the thinking went, Iran would reciprocate. In his very first television interview from the White House, Obama announced his desire to talk to the Iranians, to see “where there are potential avenues for progress.” Echoing his inaugural address, he said, “[I]f countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.”
Unfortunately, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, ignored the president’s invitation. Five months later, in June 2009, when the Green Movement was born, his autocratic fist was still clenched. As the streets of Tehran exploded in the largest anti-government demonstrations the country had seen since the revolution of 1979, he used that fist to beat down the protesters. For their part, the protesters, hungry for democratic reform and enraged by government rigging of the recent presidential election, appealed to Obama for help. He responded meekly, issuing tepid statements of support while maintaining a steady posture of neutrality. To alienate Khamenei, after all, might kill the dream of a new era in U.S.-Iranian relations.
If this show of deference was calculated to warm the dictator’s heart, it failed. “What we intended as caution,” one of Obama’s aides would later tell a reporter, “the Iranians saw as weakness.” Indeed, the president’s studied “caution” may even have emboldened Tehran to push forward, in yet another in the long series of blatant violations of its obligations under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), with its construction of a secret uranium enrichment facility in an underground bunker at Fordow, near Qom.
When members of Iran’s Green Movement appealed to Obama for help in 2009, he responded meekly—after all, to alienate Khamenei might kill the dream of a new era in U.S.-Iranian relations.
This time, Obama reacted. Revealing the bunker’s existence, he placed Khamenei in a tough spot. The Russians, who had been habitually more lenient toward the Iranian nuclear program than the Americans, were irritated by the disclosure of this clandestine activity; the French were moved to demand a strong Western response.
But when Khamenei finessed the situation by adopting a seemingly more flexible attitude toward negotiations, Obama quickly obliged. Delighted to find a receptive Iranian across the table, he dismissed the French call for toughness, instead volunteering a plan that would meet Iran’s desire to keep most of its nuclear infrastructure intact while proving to the world that it was not stockpiling fissile material for a bomb. In keeping with his larger aspirations, the president also placed Moscow at the center of the action, proposing that the Iranians transfer their enriched uranium to Russia in exchange for fuel rods capable of powering a nuclear reactor but not of being used in a bomb. The Iranian negotiators, displaying their new spirit of compromise, accepted the terms. Even President Ahmadinejad, the notorious hardliner, pronounced himself on board.
Obama, it seemed to some, had pulled off a major coup. Less than a year after taking office, he was turning his vision of a new Middle East order into a reality. Or was he? Once the heat was off, Khamenei reneged on the deal, throwing the president back to square one and in the process weakening him politically at home, where congressional skeptics of his engagement policy now began lobbying for more stringent economic sanctions on Tehran. To protect his flank, Obama tacked rightward, appropriating, if with visible reluctance, some of his opponents’ rhetoric and bits of their playbook as well. In 2010, he signed into law the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act (CISADA), which eventually would prove more painful to Iran than any previous measure of its kind.
In later years, whenever Obama would stand accused of being soft on Iran, he would invariably point to CISADA as evidence to the contrary. “[O]ver the course of several years,” he stated in March 2014, “we were able to enforce an unprecedented sanctions regime that so crippled the Iranian economy that they were willing to come to the table.” The “table” in question was the negotiation resulting in the November 2013 agreement, known as the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA), which we shall come to in due course. But masked in the president’s boast was the fact that he had actually opposed CISADA, which was rammed down his throat by a Senate vote of 99 to zero.
Once the bill became law, a cadre of talented and dedicated professionals in the Treasury Department set to work implementing it. But the moment of presumed “convergence” between Obama and his congressional skeptics proved temporary and tactical; their fundamental difference in outlook would become much more apparent in the president’s second term. For the skeptics, the way to change Khamenei’s behavior was to place him before a stark choice: dismantle Iran’s nuclear program—period—or face catastrophic consequences. For Obama, to force a confrontation with Khamenei would destroy any chance of reaching an accommodation on the nuclear front and put paid to his grand vision of a new Middle East order.
2011-2012: Round One, Part II
“The hardest cross I have to bear is the Cross of Lorraine,” Winston Churchill supposedly cracked about managing his wartime relations with Charles de Gaulle. As Obama sees it, his hardest cross to bear has been the Star of David, represented by Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
To the Israelis, who have long regarded Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat, Obama’s engagement policy was misguided from the start. Their assessment mattered, because influential Americans listened to them. What was more, American Jews constituted an important segment of the Democratic party’s popular base and an even more important segment of its donors. In the election year of 2012, for Obama to be perceived as indifferent to Israeli security would jeopardize his prospects of a second term—and hardly among Jews alone.
When the Israelis threatened to attack Iran, Obama responded by putting Israel in a bear hug. From one angle, it looked like an expression of friendship. From another, like an effort to break Netanyahu’s ribs.
The Israelis did more than just criticize Obama; they also threatened to take action against Iran that would place the president in an intolerable dilemma. In 2011, Ehud Barak, the defense minister at the time, announced that Iran was quickly approaching a “zone of immunity,” meaning that its nuclear program would henceforth be impervious to Israeli attack. As Iran approached that zone, Israel would have no choice but to strike. And what would America do then? The Israeli warnings grew ever starker as the presidential election season heated up. Netanyahu, it seemed, was using the threat of Israeli action as a way of prodding Washington itself to take a harder line.
To this challenge, Obama responded by putting Israel in a bear hug. From one angle, it looked like an expression of profound friendship: the president significantly increased military and intelligence cooperation, and he insisted, fervently and loudly, that his policy was to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon by all means possible. With the aid of influential American Jews and Israelis who testified to his sincerity, Obama successfully blunted the force of the charge that he was hostile to Israel.
From another angle, however, the bear hug looked like an effort to break Netanyahu’s ribs. Even while expressing affection for Israel, Obama found ways to signal his loathing for its prime minister. During one tense meeting at the White House, for example, the president abruptly broke off to join his family for dinner, leaving Netanyahu to wait for him alone. In mitigation, Obama supporters would adduce ongoing friction between the two countries over West Bank settlements and peace negotiations with the Palestinians. This was true enough, but the two men differed on quite a number of issues, among which Iran held by far the greatest strategic significance. In managing the anxieties of his liberal Jewish supporters, Obama found it useful to explain the bad atmosphere as a function of Netanyahu’s “extremism” rather than of his own outreach to Iran—to suggest, in effect, that if only the hothead in the room would sit down and shut up, the grownups could proceed to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem along reasonable lines.
The tactic proved effective. At least for the duration, Obama prevented Israel from attacking Iran; preserved American freedom of action with regard to Iran’s nuclear program; and kept his disagreements with the Israeli government within the comfort zone of American Jewish Democrats.
If, however, Netanyahu was Obama’s biggest regional headache, there was no lack of others. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was certainly the most consequential. Obama had assumed that the king would welcome his approach to the Middle East as a breath of fresh air. After all, the Baker-Hamilton crowd regarded the Arab-Israeli conflict as the major irritant in relations between the United States and the Arabs. Bush’s close alignment with Israel, so the thinking went, had damaged those relations; by contrast, Obama, the moment he took office, announced his goal of solving the Arab-Israeli conflict once and for all, and followed up by picking a fight with Netanyahu over Jewish settlements in the West Bank. How could the Saudis react with anything but pleasure?
In fact, they distanced themselves—bluntly and publicly. While meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the end of July 2009, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal announced that Obama’s approach to solving the Arab-Israeli conflict “has not and, we believe, will not lead to peace.” Behind that statement lay a complex of attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, but much more than that. At the end of the Bush administration, King Abdullah had made his top regional priority abundantly clear when, according to leaked State Department documents, he repeatedly urged the United States to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and thereby “cut off the head of the snake” in the Middle East.
When Obama strode into office and announced his desire to kiss the snake, the Saudis lost no time in making their displeasure felt. Three months later, the king responded gruffly to an extensive presentation on Obama’s outreach program by Dennis Ross, then a senior official in the State Department with responsibility for Iran. “I am a man of action,” Abdullah said according to a New York Times report. “Unlike you, I prefer not to talk a lot.” He then posed a series of pointed questions that Ross could not answer. “What is your goal? What will you do if this does not work? What will you do if the Chinese and the Russians are not with you? How will you deal with Iran’s nuclear program if there is not a united response?” The questions added up to a simple point: your Iran policy is based on wishful thinking.
As it happens, one traditional American ally in the region was—at least at first—untroubled by Obama’s policy of Iran engagement: the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Indeed, Erdoğan found much to extol in the new American initiative, which dovetailed perfectly with his own foreign policy of “zero problems with [Arab and Muslim] neighbors.” Among other things, Erdoğan meant to establish Ankara as the middleman between the United States and Iran and Syria, Turkey’s traditional adversaries. This vision nested so comfortably within Obama’s planned concert system that Erdoğan quickly became one of the few international personalities with whom Obama developed a close personal rapport.
Contrary to what observers have long assumed, Obama does connect his Iran policy and his Syria policy: just as he showed deference to Iran on the nuclear front, he has deferred to the Iranian interest in Syria.
Soon, however, serious tensions arose. By the summer of 2012, one problem overshadowed all others: Syria—and behind Syria, Iran. Erdoğan watched in horror as the Iranians together with their proxies, Hizballah and Iraqi Shiite militias, intervened in the Syrian civil war. Iranian-directed units were not only training and equipping Bashar Assad’s forces in his battle for survival, but also engaging in direct combat. At the same time, within the Syrian opposition to Assad, a radical Sunni jihadi element was growing at an alarming rate. In short order, the Turks were adding their voice to a powerful chorus—including Saudi Arabia, the Gulf sheikhdoms, and the Jordanians—urgently requesting that Washington take action to build up the moderate Sunni opposition to both Assad and Iran.
The director of the CIA, David Petraeus, responded to this request by America’s regional allies with a plan to train and equip Syrian rebels in Jordan and to assist them once back in Syria. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all supported the Petraeus plan. But Obama rejected it.
Why? Undoubtedly the president had a mix of reasons and possible motives, which were the objects of extensive speculation in the media. But one motive was never included in the list: namely, his fear of antagonizing Iran. For the longest time, it was simply assumed that Obama drew no connection between his Iran policy and his Syria policy. This, however, was not the case. In fact—as we shall see below—just as, from the beginning, he showed deference to Iran on the nuclear front, he showed the same deference to the Iranian interest in Syria.
2013-2014: Round Two, The Secret Backchannel
An ostensible thaw in American-Iranian relations occurred early in the president’s second term. To hear him tell it today, what precipitated the thaw was a strategic shift by Tehran on the nuclear front. In his version of the story—let’s call it the “official version”—two factors account for the Iranian change of heart. One of them was American coercive diplomacy; the other was a new spirit of reform in Tehran. And the two were interrelated. The first, as Obama himself explained in the March 2014 interview cited earlier, had taken the form of “an unprecedented sanctions regime that so crippled the Iranian economy that [the Iranians] were willing to come to the table.” The second was a corollary of the first. The same sanctions regime had also helped bring to power the new government of Hassan Rouhani, whose moderate approach would in turn culminate in the November 2013 signing of the interim nuclear deal, which “for the first time in a decade halts their nuclear program.”
Obama’s version is an after-the-fact cocktail of misdirection and half-truths, stirred by him and his aides and served up with a clear goal in mind: to conceal Round Two of his Iran outreach.
The turning point in the American-Iranian relationship was not, as the official version would have it, the election of Hassan Rouhani in June 2013. It was the reelection of Barack Obama in November 2012.
In early 2013, at the outset of his second term, Obama developed a secret bilateral channel to Ahmadinejad’s regime. When the full impact of this is taken into account, a surprising fact comes to light. The turning point in the American-Iranian relationship was not, as the official version would have it, the election of Hassan Rouhani in June 2013. It was the reelection of Barack Obama in November 2012.
Indeed, the first secret meeting with the Iranians (that is, the first we know of) took place even earlier, in early July 2012, eleven months before Rouhani came to power. Jake Sullivan, who at the time was the director of policy planning in Hillary Clinton’s State Department, traveled secretly to Oman to meet with Iranian officials. The Obama administration has told us next to nothing about Sullivan’s meeting, so we are forced to speculate about the message that he delivered.
Most pertinent is the timing. At that moment, pressure was mounting on the president to intervene in Syria. Sullivan probably briefed the Iranians on Obama’s strong desire to stay out of that conflict, and may have sought Tehran’s help in moderating Assad’s behavior. But summer 2012 was also the height of the American presidential campaign. Perhaps Sullivan told the Iranians that the president was keen to restart serious nuclear negotiations after the election. Recall that this meeting took place shortly after a hot microphone had caught Obama saying to Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved, but it’s important . . . to give me space. This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”
Did Sullivan give the Iranians a similar message? Did he tell Ahmadinejad’s officials that Obama’s need to secure the pro-Israel vote had forced him to take a deceptively belligerent line toward Iran? That Iran had nothing to fear from an Israeli attack? That after the election Obama would demonstrate even greater flexibility on the nuclear issue?
Whatever the answers to these questions, it is a matter of record that Obama opened his second term with a campaign of outreach to Tehran—a campaign that was as intensive as it was secret. By February 2013, a month after his inauguration, the backchannel was crowded with American officials. Not just Sullivan, but Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, National Security Council staffer Puneet Talwar, State Department non-proliferation adviser Robert Einhorn, and Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice were all engaging their Iranian counterparts.
According to the official version, this stampede toward Tehran had no impact on Iranian-American relations. Nothing notable occurred in that realm, we are told, until the arrival on the scene of Rouhani. In fact, however, it was during this earlier period that Obama laid the basis for the November 2013 Joint Plan of Action. And that agreement was the product of three American concessions—two of which, and possibly the third as well, were made long before Rouhani ever came to power.
In April 2013, the Americans and their P5+1 partners met with Iranian negotiators in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where they offered to relieve the sanctions regime in exchange for the elimination of Iran’s stockpiles of uranium that had already been enriched to 20 percent. This was concession number one, bowing to the longstanding Iranian demand for economic compensation immediately, before a final agreement could be reached. Even more important was concession number two, which permitted the Iranians to continue enriching uranium to levels of 5 percent—this, despite the fact that six United Nations Security Council resolutions had ordered Iran to cease all enrichment and reprocessing activities.
Iranian negotiators rejected these two gifts—or, rather, they pocketed them and demanded a third, the one they coveted the most. Hailing the proposals by their counterparts as a step in the right direction, they criticized them for failing to stipulate the Iranian “right to enrich.” There was a difference, they argued, between temporarily permitting Iran to enrich uranium to 5 percent and recognizing its inalienable right to do so. If Obama wanted a deal, he would have to agree to shred the Security Council resolutions by offering, up front, an arrangement that would end the economic sanctions on Iran entirely and that would allow the Iranians to enrich uranium in perpetuity.
By exaggerating the spirit of reform in Tehran, the White House was able to suggest that Iran, and not America, had compromised.
Obama’s acceptance of this condition, the third and most important American gift, is what made the Joint Plan of Action possible. The American negotiators transmitted the president’s acceptance to the Iranians in the backchannel, and then John Kerry sprang it on his hapless negotiating partners in November. We do not know when, precisely, Obama made this offer, but the Iranians set their three conditions before Rouhani took office.
In brief, the Iranian election was hardly the key factor that made the interim deal possible. But it did supply window dressing at home when it came to selling the deal to Congress and the American public. By exaggerating the spirit of reform in Tehran, the White House was able to suggest that Rouhani’s embrace of the deal represented an Iranian, not an American, compromise. In truth, Obama neither coerced nor manipulated; he capitulated, and he acquiesced.
Round Two: Iran, Syria, and Islamic State
The nuclear issue wasn’t the only tender spot in U.S.-Iran relations in this period. Before returning to it, let’s look briefly at two other regional fronts.
Obama’s second term has also included efforts to accommodate Iran over Syria. Susan Rice, by now the president’s national-security adviser, inadvertently admitted as much in an address she delivered on September 9, 2013, a few weeks after Bashar Assad had conducted a sarin-gas attack on Ghouta, a suburb outside Damascus, that killed approximately 1,500 civilians. Reviewing past American efforts to restrain the Syrian dictator, Rice blithely depicted Tehran as Washington’s partner. “At our urging, over months, Russia and Iran repeatedly reinforced our warning to Assad,” she explained. “We all sent the same message again and again: don’t do it.”
Why did Obama back off on strikes against Syria? Could it have been fear of scuttling the biggest—and still secret—foreign-policy initiative of his entire presidency?
Rice’s remarks were disingenuous. In reality, the Islamic Republic was then precisely what it remains today, namely, the prime enabler of Assad’s murder machine. But Rice’s intention was not to describe Iranian behavior accurately. In addition to accustoming the American press and foreign-policy elite to the idea that Iran was at least a potential partner, her speech was aimed at influencing Congress’s deliberation of air strikes against Syria—strikes that Obama had abruptly delayed a week and a half earlier in what will certainly be remembered as one of the oddest moments of his presidency.
The oddity began shortly after Obama sent Secretary of State John Kerry out to deliver a Churchillian exhortation on the theme of an impending American attack. While that speech was still reverberating, the president convened a meeting of his inner circle in the Oval Office, where he expressed misgivings about the policy that his Secretary of State had just announced. Curiously, the meeting did not include either Kerry or Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, the principal members of his senior national-security staff. Obama then invited Denis McDonough to break away from the others and join him for a private walk around the White House grounds. On his return, Obama stunned the waiting group with the news that he had decided to delay the strikes on Assad in order to seek congressional approval.
What thoughts did Obama share with McDonough? We can dispense with the official explanation, which stresses the president’s principled belief in the need to consult the legislative branch on matters of war and peace. That belief had played no part in previous decisions, like the one to intervene in Libya. Clearly, Obama was hiding behind Congress in order either to delay action or to kill it altogether. The true reasons for the delay were evidently too sensitive even for the ears of his closest national-security aides. Could they have included fear of scuttling the biggest—and still secret—foreign-policy initiative of his second term, possibly of his entire presidency?
In the event, the punt to Congress bought Obama some time, but at a significant political cost. At home the decision made him appear dithering and weak; on Capitol Hill, Democrats quietly fumed over the way the White House was abruptly ordering them out on a limb. In Syria, Assad crowed with delight as his opponents crumpled in despair. Elsewhere, American allies felt exposed and vulnerable, wondering whether Obama would ever truly come to their aid in a pinch.
As we know, Obama’s quandary would become Moscow’s opportunity. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov offered the president a way to regain his balance. Russia and the United States, Lavrov proposed, would cooperate to strip Assad of his sarin gas. From the sidelines, the Iranians publicly applauded the proposal, and Obama jumped to accept it.
But the deal was a quid pro quo. In return for a minor (though highly visible) concession from Assad, Obama tacitly agreed not to enter the Syrian battlefield. In effect, the Russians, Assad, and the Iranians were offering him, and he was accepting, surrender with honor, enabling him to say later, with a straight face, that the episode was a successful example of his coercive diplomacy. “Let’s be very clear about what happened,” he bragged in his March 2014 interview. “I threatened [sic] kinetic strikes on Syria unless they got rid of their chemical weapons.” In reality, Assad only gained—and gained big. Obama immediately muted his calls for Assad to step down from power, and his behavior thoroughly demoralized the Syrian opposition. Nor did the deal stop Assad from launching further chemical attacks. Once deprived of his sarin stockpiles, he simply switched to chlorine.
During an interview on primetime television shortly after Lavrov offered his country’s help, Obama pointed to Russian and Iranian cooperation with Washington as one of the bargain’s greatest benefits. The “good news,” he said, “is that Assad’s allies, both Russia and Iran, recognize that this [use of sarin] was—this was a breach, that this was a problem. And for them to potentially put pressure on Assad to say, ‘Let’s figure out a way that the international community gets control of . . . these weapons in a verifiable and forcible way’—I think it’s something that we will run to ground.”
This was fictive. Obama made it sound as if Tehran was eager to punish Assad for his use of chemical weapons, but nothing could have been farther from the truth. Even as he was speaking, Iran was publicly blaming the Syrian rebels, not Assad, for the Ghouta attack. Nor was stopping the slaughter ever the president’s true goal. From his perspective, he did not have the power to prevent Assad’s atrocities. He did, however, have the sense to recognize a good thing when he saw it. The opportunity to join with Iran in an ostensibly cooperative venture was too good to let slip away—and so he seized it.
That Obama has treated Syria as an Iranian sphere of interest all along has been brought home in a recent report in the Wall Street Journal. In August 2014, according to the Journal, the president wrote a letter to Ali Khamenei, acknowledging the obstacle to their cooperation presented by the nuclear impasse but taking pains to reassure Khamenei regarding the fate of Assad, his closest ally. American military operations inside Syria, he wrote, would target neither the Syrian dictator nor his forces.
This element of the president’s thinking has received remarkably little attention, even though Obama himself pointed to it directly in a January 2014 interview with David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker. The Arab states and Israel, Obama said then, wanted Washington to be their proxy in the contest with Iran; but he adamantly refused to play that role. Instead, he envisioned, in Remnick’s words, “a new geostrategic equilibrium, one less turbulent than the current landscape of civil war, terror, and sectarian battle.” Who would help him develop the strategy to achieve this equilibrium? “I don’t really even need George Kennan right now,” the president responded, alluding to the acknowledged godfather of the cold-war strategy of containment. What he truly needed instead were strategic partners, and a prime candidate for that role was—he explained—Iran.
Obama was here revealing his main rationale in 2012 for rejecting the Petraeus plan to arm the Syrian opposition that we examined earlier. Clearly, the president viewed the anti-Assad movement in Syria just as he had viewed the Green Movement in Iran three years earlier: as an impediment to realizing the strategic priority of guiding Iran to the path of success. Was the Middle East in fact polarized between the Iranian-led alliance and just about everyone else? Yes. Were all traditional allies of the United States calling for him to stand up to Iran? Yes. Did the principal members of his National Security Council recommend as one that the United States heed the call of the allies? Again, yes. But Obama’s eyes were still locked on the main prize: the grand bargain with Tehran.
The same desire to accommodate Iran has tailored Obama’s strategy toward the terrorist group Islamic State. That, too, has not received the attention it deserves.
Last June, when Islamic State warriors captured Mosul in northern Iraq, the foreign-policy approval ratings of the president plummeted, and Obama’s critics claimed, not for the first time, that he had no strategy at all. Ben Rhodes sprang to his defense, suggesting that despite appearances to the contrary, the administration actually had a plan, if a hitherto unannounced one. “We have longer-run plays that we’re running,” he said. “Part of this is keeping your eye on the long game even as you go through tumultuous periods.”
The administration has subtly exploited the rise of the Islamic State to elevate Obama’s outreach to Iran. Behind the scenes, coordination and consultation have reached new heights.
Rhodes offered no details, and subsequent events seemed to confirm the impression that Obama actually had no long game. In addition to being caught flat-footed by Islamic State, moreover, he was reversing himself on other major issues: sending troops back to Iraq after having celebrated their homecoming, ordering military operations in Syria that he had opposed for years. How could such reversals be consistent with a long game?
The answer is that the reversals, although real, involved much less than met the eye, and the long game remained in place. In August, it seemed as if the American military was preparing to mount a sustained intervention in both Iraq and Syria; today, however, it is increasingly apparent that Obama has at best a semi-coherent containment plan for Iraq and no plan at all for Syria—a deficiency that was obvious from the start. At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Senator Marco Rubio pointed to the obvious weaknesses in the administration’s approach, and asked John Kerry how to fix them. Kerry stunningly suggested that the gaps would be filled by . . . Iran and Assad. “[Y]ou’re presuming that Iran and Syria don’t have any capacity to take on” Islamic State, Kerry said. “If we are failing and failing miserably, who knows what choice they might make.”
Here, giving the game away, Kerry provided a glimpse at the mental map of the president and his top advisers. The administration has indeed subtly exploited the rise of terrorist enclaves to elevate Obama’s outreach to Iran. Behind the scenes, coordination and consultation have reached new heights.
Meanwhile, so have expressions of dissatisfaction with traditional allies for taking positions hostile to Iran. Our “biggest problem” in Syria is our own regional allies, Vice President Joseph Biden complained to students at Harvard University in early October. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were “so determined to take down Assad” that they were pouring “hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons” into the Syrian opposition. A few weeks later, a senior Obama administration official cuttingly described another ally, Israel’s prime minister, as “a chickenshit,” and a second official, similarly on the record, bragged about the success of the United States in shielding the Islamic Republic from Israel. “[U]ltimately [Netanyahu] couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.”
Of course, administration officials routinely insist that the United States is not working with Tehran. The coordination, however, is impossible to disguise. Thus, when Iranian jets recently appeared in Iraqi skies, they professed ignorance. Reporters, noting that the jets were flying sorties in the same air space as American jets and striking related targets, asked the Pentagon spokesman how the American and Iranian air forces could work in the same space without colliding. “We are flying missions over Iraq, [and] we coordinate with the Iraqi government as we conduct those,” said the spokesman. “It’s up to the Iraqi government to de-conflict that airspace.” When Kerry was asked about the news that the Iranian air force was operating in Iraq, he responded that this was a “net positive.”
A positive? With American acquiescence, Iran is steadily taking control of the security sector of the Iraqi state. Soon it will dominate the energy sector as well, giving it effective control over the fifth largest oil reserves in the world. When the announced goal of the United States is to build up a moderate Sunni bloc capable of driving a wedge between Islamic State and the Sunni communities, aligning with Iran is politically self-defeating. In both Iraq and Syria, Iran projects its power through sectarian militias that slaughter Sunni Muslims with abandon. Are there any Sunni powers in the region that see American outreach to Tehran as a good thing? Are there any military-aged Sunni men in Iraq and Syria who now see the United States as a friendly power? There are none.
In theory, one might argue that although an association with Iran is politically toxic and militarily dangerous, the capabilities it brings to the fight against the Islamic State more than compensate. But they don’t. Over the last three years, Obama has given Iran a free hand in Syria and Iraq, on the simplistic assumption that Tehran would combat al-Qaeda and like-minded groups in a manner serving American interests. The result, in both countries, has been the near-total alienation of all Sunnis and the development of an extremist safe haven that now stretches from the outskirts of Baghdad all the way to Damascus. America is now applying to the disease a larger dose of the snake oil that helped cause the malady in the first place.
The approach is detrimental to American interests in other arenas as well. We received a portent of things to come on January 18 of this year, when the Israel Defense Forces struck a convoy of senior Hizballah and Iranian officers, including a general in the Revolutionary Guards, in the Golan Heights. Ten days later, Hizballah and Iran retaliated. In other words, by treating Syria as an Iranian sphere of interest, Obama is allowing the shock troops of Iran to dig in on the border of Israel—not to mention the border of Jordan. The president’s policy assumes that Israel and America’s other allies will hang back quietly while Iran takes southern Syria firmly in its grip. They will not; to assume otherwise is folly.
Round Three: 2015-
In November 2013, when Obama purchased the participation of Iran in the Joint Plan of Action, he established a basic asymmetry that has remained a key feature of the negotiations ever since. He traded permanent American concessions for Iranian gestures of temporary restraint.
The most significant such gestures by Iran were to dilute its stockpiles of uranium enriched to 20 percent; to refrain from installing new centrifuges; and to place a hold on further construction of the Arak plutonium reactor. All three, however, can be easily reversed. By contrast, the Americans recognized the Iranian right to enrich and agreed to the principle that all restrictions on Iran’s program would be of a limited character and for a defined period of time. These two concessions are major, and because they are not just the policy of the United States government but now the collective position of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany, they will likely never be reversed.
In his negotiations with Iran, the president has traded major American concessions for Iranian gestures of temporary restraint. These concessions will likely never be reversed.
Obama has repeatedly stated, most recently in his 2015 State of the Union address, that the interim agreement “halted” the Iranian nuclear program. Or, as he put it in his March 2014 interview, the “logic” of the JPOA was “to freeze the situation for a certain period of time to allow the negotiators to work.” But the agreement froze only American actions; it hardly stopped the Iranians from moving forward.
For one thing, the JPOA restricts the program only with respect to enrichment capacity and stockpiles; it is entirely silent about the military components: ballistic missiles, procurement, warhead production. For another, to call what the JPOA achieved even in these limited domains “a freeze” is a gross exaggeration. Iranian nuclear scientists have continued to perfect their craft. They are learning how to operate old centrifuges with greater efficiency. And thanks to a loophole in the JPOA permitting work on “research and development,” they are also mastering the use of new, more effective centrifuges.
Therefore, the Iranian nuclear program is poised to surge ahead. The moment the JPOA lapses—a date first scheduled for July 2014, then rescheduled to November 2014, then re-rescheduled to June 30 of this year, possibly to be re-re-rescheduled yet again—Iran will be in a stronger position than before the negotiations began. This fact gives Tehran considerable leverage over Washington during the next rounds.
We can say with certainty that Obama has had no illusions about this asymmetry—that he conducted the negotiations with his eyes wide open—because the White House took pains to hide the truth from the American public. In 2013, instead of publishing the text of the JPOA, it issued a highly misleading fact sheet. Peppered with terms like “halt,” “roll back,” and “dismantle,” the document left the impression that the Iranians had agreed to destroy their nuclear program.
The Iranian foreign minister, however, refused to play along. He protested—loudly and publicly. “The White House version both underplays the [American] concessions and overplays Iranian commitments,” Javad Zarif correctly told a television interviewer. “The White House tries to portray it as basically a dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program. That is the word they use time and again.” He defied the interviewer to “find a . . . single word that even closely resembles dismantling or could be defined as dismantling in the entire text.”
President Rouhani went even further. In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, he emphasized not just that Iran had refused to destroy centrifuges within the terms of the JPOA, but that it would never destroy them “under any circumstances.” Currently Iran has approximately 9,000 centrifuges installed and spinning, and roughly 10,000 more installed but inactive. Until Rouhani made his statement, the Obama administration had led journalists to believe that the final agreement would force the Iranians to dismantle some 15,000 centrifuges.Rouhani disabused the world of those expectations.
“This strikes me as a train wreck,” a distraught Zakaria exclaimed after the interview. “This strikes me as potentially a huge obstacle because the Iranian conception of what the deal is going to look like and the American conception now look like they are miles apart.” Not long thereafter, as if to confirm the point, Ali Khamenei called for an outcome that will permit the development of an industrial-sized nuclear program over the next decade.
Khamenei’s hard line no doubt came as a surprise to Obama. When the president first approved the JPOA, he failed to recognize a key fact: his twin goals of liberating Iran from its international isolation and stripping the Islamic Republic of its nuclear capabilities were completely at odds with each other. From Obama’s perspective, he was offering Khamenei an irresistible deal: a strategic accommodation with the United States. Iran analysts had led the president to believe that Khamenei was desperate for just such an accommodation, and to achieve that prize he was searching only for a “face-saving” nuclear program—one that would give him a symbolic enrichment capability, nothing more. What soon became clear, however, was that Khamenei was betting that Obama would accommodate Iran even if it insisted on, and aggressively pursued, an industrial-scale program.
In theory, Khamenei’s intransigence could have handed Obama an opportunity. He could admit the “train wreck”—namely, that Round Two of his Iran engagement had followed the disastrous pattern set by Round One—and begin working with Congress and our despairing allies to regain lost leverage. This he obviously declined to do. Instead, he has chosen to keep the negotiating process alive by retreating further. Rather than leaving the table, he has paid Iran to keep negotiating—paid literally, in the form of sanctions relief, which provides Iran with $700,000,000 per month in revenue; and figuratively, with further concessions on the nuclear front.
Over the last year, Obama has reportedly allowed Iran to retain, in one form or another, its facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and Arak—sites that Iran built in flagrant violation of the NPT to which it is a signatory. This is the same Obama who declared at the outset of negotiations that the Iranians “don’t need to have an underground, fortified facility like Fordow in order to have a peaceful nuclear program. They certainly don’t need a heavy-water reactor at Arak in order to have a peaceful nuclear program. . . . And so the question ultimately is going to be, are they prepared to roll back some of the advancements that they’ve made.” The answer to his question, by now, is clear: the Iranians will not roll back anything.
The president believes that globalization and economic integration will induce Tehran to forgo its nuclear ambitions. Meanwhile Iran’s rulers are growing stronger, bolder, and ever closer to nuclear breakout capacity.
For a majority in Congress, and for all of America’s allies in the Middle East, this fact is obvious, and it leads to an equally obvious conclusion: the only way to salvage the West’s position in the nuclear negotiations is to regain the leverage that the president’s deferential approach has ceded to Iran. With this thought in mind, a large group of Senators is currently supporting legislation that will make the re-imposition of sanctions mandatory and immediate if the Iranians fail to make a deal by the time the current term of the JPOA lapses.
In an effort to bolster that initiative, Speaker of the House John Boehner invited Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington to address Congress on Iran. Netanyahu accepted the invitation without first consulting the White House, which reacted in a storm of indignation, describing the move as an egregious break in protocol and an insult to the president. Instead of trying to paper over the disagreement, Obama has done everything in his power to advertise it. In making his personal rift with Netanyahu the subject of intense public debate, the White House means to direct attention away from the strategic rift between them—and from the fact that the entire Israeli elite, regardless of political orientation, as well as much of the U.S. Congress, regards the president’s conciliatory approach to Iran as profoundly misguided.
Meanwhile, the president is depicting his congressional critics as irresponsible warmongers. He would have us believe that there are only two options: his undeclared détente with Iran and yet another war in the Middle East. This is a false choice. It ignores the one policy that every president since Jimmy Carter has pursued till now: vigorous containment on all fronts, not just in the nuclear arena. Obama, however, is intent on obscuring this option, and for a simple reason: an honest debate about it would force him to come clean with the American people and admit the depth of his commitment to the strategy whose grim results are multiplying by the day.
As a matter of ideology as much as strategy, Obama believes that integrating Iran into the international diplomatic and economic system is a much more effective method of moderating its aggressive behavior than applying more pressure. Contrary to logic, and to all the accumulated evidence before and since the November 2013 interim agreement, he appears also to believe that his method is working. In his March 2014 interview, he argued that his approach was actually strengthening reformers and reformist trends in Tehran: “[I]f as a consequence of a deal on their nuclear program,” he said, “those voices and trends inside of Iran are strengthened, and their economy becomes more integrated into the international community, and there’s more travel and greater openness, even if that takes a decade or 15 years or 20 years, then that’s very much an outcome we should desire.”
Perhaps the president is correct. Perhaps globalization will remove the roughness from the Islamic Republic just as ocean waves polish the jagged edges of shells. If so, however, it will happen on much the same, oceanic schedule. In the meantime, the seasoned thugs in Tehran whom the president has appointed as his strategic partners in a new world order grow stronger and bolder: ever closer to nuclear breakout capacity, ever more confident in their hegemonic objectives. On condition that they forgo their nuclear ambitions, the president has offered them “a path to break through [their] isolation” and become “a very successful regional power.” They, for their part, at minuscule and temporary inconvenience to themselves, have not only reaped the economic and diplomatic rewards pursuant to participation in the JPOA but also fully preserved those nuclear ambitions and the means of achieving them. Having bested the most powerful country on earth in their drive for success on their terms, they have good reason to be confident.
