The Trump administration’s steady stream of assaults on diplomacy has become a raging river. It started during the campaign, with Trump’s tirades against the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate accord, and various trade agreements. Declaring himself the “most militaristic person in the world,” candidate Trump advocated killing the families of terrorists and seizing Iraq’s oil fields, both of which would be war crimes. He bashed the United Nations as “not a friend” of the United States, freedom, or democracy.
After filling his cabinet with generals and appointing a secretary of state with no previous government or diplomatic experience, Trump has starved the State Department of senior officials, leaving hundreds of key positions empty. Home alone, Secretary Tillerson has performed something of a disappearing act, absenting himself from key meetings and major decisions. Career diplomats reportedly have been told not to speak to him directly or even to make eye contact. Tillerson welcomed a budget proposal that would eviscerate U.S. international presence and programs with cuts of nearly a third.
Slash and Reorganize
Reorganization of the foreign policy bureaucracy is the next wave of aggression. As part of chief White House strategist Stephen Bannon’s quest for the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” each agency has been instructed to submit a reorganization plan to “improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability of federal agencies, including, as appropriate, to eliminate or reorganize unnecessary or redundant federal agencies.” A newly released guidance memo requires initial drafts of agency reform plans by June 30.
There is no doubt that the State Department and the 20-odd other departments and agencies that carry out foreign assistance activities could benefit from streamlining and reform. But make no mistake: the purpose of this effort, and its likely result, is not to achieve greater efficiency or effectiveness. It is to sow chaos and destroy Americans’ faith in government.
The first clue is that decisions have been made before a review has been completed. The “skinny budget” released in March calls for the elimination of six U.S. foreign policy agencies, including one—the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC)—that is actually making money for the U.S. Treasury, having generated $2.6 billion for deficit reduction during the Obama administration alone. And although each agency is supposed to submit its own reorganization plan, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been barred from developing a proposal, since Trump and his team are bent on dismantling it.
This is not the first time there have been efforts to slash international spending and restructure U.S. foreign policy institutions. Yet previous reorganizations have failed to save money or improve results. The merger of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) into the State Department in the late 1990s effectively downgraded both functions and did not reduce overall international affairs spending. It just transferred responsibilities and budgets to new offices. USIA’s culture never meshed well with State’s, and in January 2017, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that the USIA should be revived “on steroids.”
Learning from the 1990s
Five lessons emerged from the painful experience of mission closures, reductions-in-force, and organizational changes of the 1990s:
It costs money to save money. The up-front financial costs of closing diplomatic facilities and terminating workers are exceptionally high, with savings only in the out-years. Breaking leases, selling property, relocating staff, shipping furniture and vehicles, removing or destroying sensitive equipment, paying for severance packages, buy-outs, and early retirements, and fighting lawsuits all cost significantly more than the status quo. Diplomatic presence will not be easy or cheap to reestablish later.
Penny-wise can be pound-foolish. It is far more expensive to maintain employees overseas than in D.C. headquarters. But cutting foreign posts only increases the relative size of the Washington bureaucracy and the burdens placed upon it. Conversely, sacrificing a greater number of Washington-based positions in order to limit reductions to representation abroad will leave the State Department without the staff to produce congressionally mandated reports, respond to public and media inquiries, and provide background and analysis for high-level decision-making.
Reorganization has efficiency and opportunity costs.Reductions-in-force are not easy, procedurally or psychologically. Civil service and Foreign Service rules create a complex mishmash of “bumping” rights that make it nearly impossible to get rid of low-performers. Instead of individuals being fired, specific positions are eliminated, setting off a chain reaction of desk-switching that is difficult to predict or control. Lack of clarity about whether employees will be able to keep their jobs and ranks, which functions they will be performing, where they will be sitting, and who they will be reporting to leads to low morale and lost productivity. Very little work gets done in an agency being reorganized, a process that can drag out for years.
Expectations never diminish. Even if the workforce is sharply reduced, Congress and senior foreign policy officials are unlikely to scale back their demands. Reports, activities, and procedures are either required by statute or necessary for the fair and legal functioning of the executive branch. Without a clear, consensual, long-term plan to pare down essential functions, the work will end up being done by outside contractors—often the very same people who were just laid off from the government (or who jumped ship for higher salaries).
Big isn’t necessarily beautiful. Just as corporations launch spinoffs, affiliates, and subsidiaries to protect their brands and management structures while allowing for experimentation, the U.S. government creates specialized agencies like OPIC and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) to encourage innovation and escape ossified bureaucratic structures. Although administrative consolidation could achieve some financial savings, it would also introduce new inefficiencies and restrain flexibility.
It is tempting to believe that money can be saved and performance improved by restructuring the foreign policy agencies. But Trump’s reorganization order is an ideologically driven agenda for undermining the power and effectiveness of government institutions. Without a fair and inclusive process for identifying problems, analyzing causes, proposing remedies, approving changes, and implementing reforms, Secretary Tillerson will find himself presiding over the State Department’s destruction.
This is the third of four articles on how U.S. soft power ends. The first, on diplomacy and development aid, can be found here. The second, on dismantling USAID, can be found here.
by Paul R. Pillar
With the wide path of destruction that Donald Trump has been cutting—in which the damage is affecting matters ranging from principles of nondiscrimination to ethical integrity of government officials to reliable health care for Americans—it is easy to lose sight of what ultimately would be the most consequential destruction of all: the damage to a habitable planet. The consequences may not be as immediately apparent, during the first 100 days or even during four years, as some of the other carnage, but the importance to humanity is even greater. As with many other Trump policies, it is not yet clear exactly what the administration will do regarding a specific initiative such as the Paris accord on climate change, but the overall thrust of opposing any serious effort to retard global warming is all too obvious.
The recent demonstrations known as the march for science, although ostensibly not aimed at any one leader, were a salutary expression of concern, given that denial of climate change and the associated opposition against efforts to slow global warming represent one of the most glaring rejections of science, right along with the seventeenth century inquisition of Galileo. The rejection is of a piece with Trump’s contempt for truth on most any topic.
It is hard to know what goes through the minds of the climate change deniers and skeptics that Trump has installed in his administration. Most likely they are smart enough to know better but are playing out an appallingly selfish, politically narrow-minded, and short-sighted approach toward what sort of world will be left to their children and grandchildren. This is suggested by some of their contrived verbal formulations. For example, Scott Pruitt, to whom Trump has given the job of presiding over the evisceration of the Environmental Protection Agency, says, ”I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do…” Who’s talking about “precision”? That’s a false standard. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that human activity is a major, and probably the major, contributor to what is highly consequential global warming, even if the exact effects cannot be measured or predicted with “precision”.
The posture assumed on this issue by the likes of Trump and Pruitt is highly irresponsible. The Washington Post editorial page puts it aptly: “Children studying [Trump’s] presidency will ask, ‘How could anyone have done this?’ ”
Contempt and disdain are proper attitudes to adopt toward the climate change deniers, including the ones in the current administration. They should be shamed either for displaying such inexcusable ignorance or, what is even worse, for displaying selfishness and short-sightedness despite knowing better.
But that is not enough. And the problem goes far beyond Donald Trump. It extends to much of the Republican Party. As the Post editorialists observe, the GOP is “a once-great American political party embracing rank reality-denial.” James Inhofe was throwing snowballs in the Senate well before Trump was elected.
A savvy response to the deniers is to point out some of the more immediately visible economic and political consequences of the destructive approach toward climate change that the current administration has embraced. One should point out how not being in the forefront of developing renewable energy sources represents regression, not progress, for the U.S. economy, no matter how much false hope is given to Appalachian coal miners about getting jobs back. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is a prominent political leader who commendably is adding his influential voice to this subject.
One also should point out how the Trump administration’s degenerate posture on energy and climate change isolates the United States internationally. The posture makes the United States an object of disdain for taking a Dark Ages approach toward an issue in which, more than any other, everyone in the world has a stake. Anyone in the United States who professes to care about U.S. leadership in the world ought to be concerned about this, regardless of attitudes about atmospheric science.
The loss of U.S. leadership is especially evident in comparison with the other of the two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases: China. Although several years ago China had a backward view of the issue of climate change, seeing it as a Western excuse for trying to retard China’s economy—a notion that Donald Trump would later adopt in the reverse direction by describing climate change as a Chinese “hoax”—Beijing is now making a concerted effort to do something about the problem. China may have already passed, as of four years ago, its peak use of coal. There are no signs that the Trump administration’s back-sliding on the issue has lessened China’s commitment to take a progressive and responsible path on the matter.
Besides revamping its own energy structure, China has become a global leader on the issue. And besides being persuaded by the scientific research that describes how vulnerable China is to damage from climate change, Beijing also sees its progressive posture on the subject as a further way to exercise soft power in the sense of international influence. Trump’s retrograde attitude toward many aspects of the international order that have served the United States well has already meant surrendering much global leadership to China. His backward attitude on climate change means surrendering still more. This article was first published by the National Interest and was reprinted here with permission. Copyright The National Interest.
The region is one of expanding interests and growing challenges for Beijing.
By Andrea Ghiselli for The Diplomat
May 01, 2017
One of the main highlights of the much-watched Trump-Xi meeting in early April at Mar-a-Lago was President Trump informing his Chinese counterpart during dessert that in that moment Tomahawk missiles launched from U.S. warships were flying towards a Syrian military air base. Given the tensions brewing in the Korean Peninsula and Trump’s more-or-less successful attempt to pressure the Chinese to cut their support for North Korea, it is not surprising that many interpreted the missile strike in Syria as an American show of force and determination, and as a threat to do the same against North Korea if China would not cooperate. Yet, both Chinese scholars and media also looked at this from the point of view of China’s strategy in the Middle East and in the larger Mediterranean region. In the past the Chinese foreign policy community tended to have a rather ambiguous approach to the U.S. presence in the Middle East. On the one hand, Beijing viewed American engagement in the Middle East somehow positively because it prevented the United States from focusing solely on Asia and offered some degree of protection for Chinese companies in the region. On the other hand, the U.S. has been severely criticized for its military interventions in the region. However, now growing attention is being paid to the direct harms that Chinese interests might suffer from American actions. Indeed, as emphasized by Liu Zhongmin, the Director of the Shanghai International Studies University’s Middle East Studies Institute, as the Chinese economic and diplomatic presence in the region expands, China also becomes more sensitive to the ups and downs of American policies. It is then important to have a better understanding of what China’s presence looks like beyond the usual and general references to energy dependence and an alleged Sino-Russian de facto alliance. Enjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month.First of all, we have to enlarge our point of view to include what can be called an enlarged Mediterranean region stretching from the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Aden to the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal. Although such a conglomerate of countries, extremely different among each other, might make little sense at first, the truth is that they form a complex ecosystem of people and goods moving from one place to the other thanks to the connecting power of the sea. Chinese economic, and thus political, interests are not immune to these forces. Thanks to a number of factors — the enlargement of the Suez Canal, trends in the shipping industry and technology towards the creation of big alliances and fleet composed of fewer, but bigger ships, and the impossibility for American ports to easily take care of the most modern megaships — the Mediterranean Sea and the shipping routes going to and passing through are becoming increasingly important for China’s trade. Indeed, Chinese investments in port terminals and harbors, from Abu Dhabi to Suez and Greece, just to mention a few, have been growing in the past few years. Djibouti is becoming the new Chinese trade, financial and military, hub in the region. These are clear manifestations of the fact that we have to look beyond China’s energy ties with the Gulf countries, which have been providing China around the 40 percent of its yearly energy imports (equivalent to an average of 10 percent of the energy consumed in China every year) over the past decade and half. Indeed, China has steadily become one of the top trade partners for all the countries in South Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Although compared to Europe and other advanced economies most of the Middle Eastern and North Africa countries are not (yet) important markets for Chinese products, China aims at integrating them in its global chains of production within the framework of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) and make them example of a new, modern, and efficient, “made in China” brand. Consistently, the number of engineering contracts awarded to Chinese companies and of Chinese workers in the region have been surging. The shock of the 2011 Libyan crisis had only temporary effects. However, while China has many economic partners, its political relations with regional and extra-regional powers are much more complex and fragile. Iran and Turkey are often mentioned by Chinese scholars as pivotal countries for the governance of the region, especially when thinking about the eventual expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Nonetheless, either because Iran might recalibrate its economic strategy favoring European products, or because of rising instability and nationalism in Turkey, Chinese analysts call for cautiousness in approaching those two countries. The European countries are hardly seen as capable or useful partners. The disastrous military adventures in the region, especially Libya, are understandably interpreted negatively by China. Cooperation with them should be based on the acknowledgement that China is not a secondary actor, especially in Africa. Security cooperation, a Chinese scholar advised recently, should be pursued directly with North African and Middle Eastern countries. Although depicting China and Russia as allies trying to obstruct the United States in the region sounds catchy, the Chinese are well aware that Russia’s goals do not necessarily overlap with China’s. Russian “opportunistic” diplomacy in the region might fuel further chaos in the region. In the face of such a difficult choice in finding reliable partners, China’s growing reliance on the United Nations to try to ensure regional stability through peacekeeping missions and antipiracy patrols is easy to understand. Not surprisingly then, after a significant growth of the level of engagement in peacekeeping operations, now China is also aiming to placing one of his officers at the helm of the United Nations’ Department of Peacekeeping. What about the future? There is little doubt that China’s economic engagement with the larger Mediterranean region will keep growing in the foreseeable future under the auspices of the OBOR initiative, both shaping and being shaped by the regional economic and political landscapes. Yet, the Chinese strategic community is also well aware that it is necessary to avoid being drawn too deeply into regional affairs, especially when the use of military force is part of the debate. Hence, it is unlikely that China will take sides clearly with any of the potential partners mentioned above. Direct friction between Chinese and American interests in the larger Mediterranean region is rather unlikely in the foreseeable future, but China’s growing sensitiveness and Trump’s apparent carelessness hardly match with each other. Andrea Ghiselli is a PhD Candidate at Fudan University and Junior Research Fellow with the Torino World Affairs Institute where he manages the website www.chinamed.it, a website with data and translations from Chinese, Arabic, Persian, French, Turkish, and Italian about the economic, energy, and security ties between China and the Mediterranean region.
On April 20, Iran’s Guardian Council slashed the list of 1,636 applicants hoping to run in May 19’s presidential election down to six candidates. The finalists include Hassan Rouhani, the incumbent president; Ebrahim Raisi, the conservative custodian of the highly influential Imam Reza Foundation; Mohamed-Bagher Ghalibaf, Tehran’s current mayor; Es’hagh Jahangiri, Rouhani’s centrist vice president; and Mostafa Hashemi-Taba and Mostafa Mir-Salim, centrist and conservative former ministers, respectively. Of those removed from the list, the most notable is former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who against Khamenei’s wishes recently declared that he would run alongside his former Vice President Hamid Baghaei.
If the 2013 elections are any indicator, moderate candidates will now coalesce around Rouhani. That year, Mohammed-Reza Aref, current head of the reformists’ Hope List parliamentary faction, withdrew in support of Rouhani. This year, Jahangiri and Hashemi-Taba could well follow suit given that the reformist faction, which has generally backed moderate centrists, has already announced that it would throw its weight behind Rouhani. Without explicitly saying so, Ali Larijani did the same. He is the conservative speaker of parliament who has been gradually distancing himself from the hardliners.
According to some reformists, Jahangiri’s candidacy was really just a Plan B in case the Guardian Council rejected Rouhani. The same might be said of Mostafa Hashemi-Taba, another moderate-centrist former minister, who unsuccessfully ran in the 2001 elections that saw Mohammad Khatami’s re-election as president.
Over the coming weeks, such maneuvering should clear the field for Rouhani to take on a conservative challenger. In Iran, although the candidates for the presidency are selected by the Guardian Council in consultation with the supreme leader, the competition after the list is set is mostly unscripted.
Ebrahim Raisi in Qom, Iran, April 2016.
THE CHALLENGERS
The centrist-reformist camp will face off against three conservatives: Ghalibaf, Raisi, and Mir-Salim. All are associated with the Popular Front for the Forces of the Islamic Revolution, known by its Persian acronym JAMNA, an umbrella group founded in late 2016 for the express purpose of contesting Rouhani in the 2017 elections.
Raisi, a 57-year-old mid-level cleric who is touted as the leading conservative candidate, is close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, under whom he studied for 14 years. He has also increasingly been noted as a possible choice for the third supreme leader. His black turban marks him as a Seyyed, one who claims to be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, and his mostly judicial government positions have included prosecutor-general, chief of the General Inspections Office, and, since 2006, member of the Assembly of Experts, which will select Khamenei’s successor. In March 2016, Khamenei also tapped him to replace the late Ayatollah Abbas Vaez-Tabasi as custodian of Iran’s richest and most important religious charitable foundation, Astan-e Ghods-e Razavi (also known as the Imam Reza Foundation, which manages Iran’s holiest site, the Eighth Shiite Imam Reza’s Mausoleum). Raisi is only the second person to occupy this position since the Iranian revolution.
However, despite support from conservative clerical power centers including the influential Combatant Clergy Association, the Qom Seminary Teachers’ Society, and even the Steadfastness Front, which is chaperoned by the ultraconservative Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, Raisi remains little known among average Iranians. What is widely known—as Tehran’s deputy prosecutor, he allegedly co-presided over a large number of executions at the Evin prison in 1988—could as much repel some voters as attract others.
At 56, Ghalibaf, Tehran’s mayor for the last 12 years and former commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ air force and the Khatam ol-Anbiya economic conglomerate, is running for the presidency for a third time. His strength lies in his name recognition and his executive experience. But his ambitions could be derailed by a real estate corruption scandal that erupted in August last year and implicated Tehran’s municipal government. The collapse of Tehran’s Plasco building this January, which reportedly killed between 20 and 30 people and wounded scores more and some blamed on his mismanagement, could also hurt his chances. For some, his past also has its dark spots: during the 1999 student unrest, Ghalibaf famously took to the streets brandishing a club. A year later, he assumed command of Iran’s police forces. If that and the other allegations don’t get in the way, Ghalibaf could present the biggest threat to Rouhani. (In 2013, he came in second to Rouhani, albeit by a wide margin.)
Mir-Salim, the third conservative candidate, is a 69-year-old French-educated engineer who held high government posts in the early 1980s, including head of Iran’s police and advisor to Khamenei, who was then president. His subsequent stint as minister of culture and Islamic guidance for President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani came amid a forceful crackdown on the reformist press. However, Mir-Salim’s current political tendencies are less certain; some have suggested that he might end up shoring up Rouhani the way conservative candidate Ali Akbar Velayati inadvertently did in 2013, when he uncharacteristically attacked fellow conservative and presumed supreme leader favorite Saeed Jalili over his rigid approach to nuclear negotiations.
Iran’s conservatives will remember the 2013 elections with some embarrassment. One of their five (from among eight finalists) withdrew, and the others failed to unite behind a consensus candidate, grievously splitting the conservative vote. If they learned their lesson, then at least one if not two of the candidates is likely to withdraw as it becomes clearer who the favorite is. Indeed, while JAMNA officially proposed a slate of five candidates, an internal statute clause also calls for the candidates to cede to a consensus figure. As things stand, however, neither Raisi nor Ghalibaf appears willing to give way, although at least one observer believes Raisi could be a mere cipher to help boost Ghalibaf’s prospects.
A “RESISTANCE ECONOMY”
Whomever the vote comes down to, the main issue in this election remains the state of the economy. Since the 2015 nuclear deal credited to Rouhani’s government, Iran’s crude oil sector has nearly recovered to pre-sanction production levels of four million barrels per day. In February this year, exports even fleetingly brushed three million barrels per day for the first time since 1979. According to the International Monetary Fund, Iran’s GDP grew by 7.4 percent between April and September 2016, although such growth was hardly surprising given the already low starting point. Conversely, the country’s non-oil economy sputtered along with an average annual growth rate of only 0.9 percent in 2016, widely blamed on the reluctance of the world’s major banks to re-engage Iran.
What is worse, the benefits of Iran’s relative economic rebound have yet to percolate down to ordinary Iranians. According to official statistics, unemployment has risen slightly to about 12.7 percent (30 percent for youth) over the past two years, although inflation has dropped compared to the Ahmadinejad period. Beyond that, environmental problems, often aggravated by underdevelopment and overexploitation—not necessarily Rouhani's doing—are approaching critical levels. Just last February, a freak dust storm incapacitated the relatively neglected Khuzestan province, home to many of Iran’s oil deposits and its largest community of ethnic Arabs, triggering mass antigovernment demonstrations.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran, April 2017.
Unsurprisingly, then, in his Persian New Year speech in March, a critical Khamenei charged that the government's economic policies had fallen short of his and the people’s expectations. He extolled instead the virtues of a “resistance economy,” one that in his telling would outflank external sanctions and instead transform adversity into increased self-sufficiency.
Overseas, the United States remains the key external influence on Iran’s elections. U.S. President Donald Trump has yet to set out his Iran policy, but top officials including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis have begrudgingly acknowledged Iran’s compliance with the nuclear agreement while also denouncing its regional activities. Compounded with U.S. sanctions, every hostile pronouncement from the White House or Congress and certainly any suggestion that the United States would rescind or renegotiate the nuclear deal will only undermine Rouhani and vindicate the conservatives’ accusations of American duplicity.
One way Rouhani has sought to neutralize the United States’ threats is by closing ranks with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a move motivated as much to diminish the prospects of a Trump-Putin entente as by shared strategic interests in Syria’s war. On the latter, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif recently made it plain that Russia could use Iran’s bases for strikes against Syria’s opposition after an awkward controversy last August over Russian sorties flying out of Hamedan.
ROUHANI’S PROSPECTS
Assuming that Rouhani sweeps the centrist vote, he stands a fighting chance of reelection against Raisi and Ghalibaf. In terms of the economy, Raisi’s yearlong experience at the helm of the Imam Reza Foundation is likely to give him little advantage, given that such foundations are notorious for their lack of accountability. Furthermore, Raisi, unlike Rouhani, has yet even to cut his teeth in international politics. Unless Raisi stands down, Ghalibaf’s electoral prospects will remain diluted at best, never mind the allegations of graft against him. But, as Brexit and Trump suggest, surprises can happen.
As for Ahmadinejad, his rejected candidacy is a boon to both rival camps, given how his feisty brand of cash-handout populism could have poached votes from both the conservative electorate and from Rouhani’s supporters who are disgruntled with the state of Iran’s economy. Yet, despite the mess he bequeathed to the economy, his Messianist heterodoxy, and his repeated recalcitrance in toeing Khamenei’s line, Ahmadinejad’s seeming popularity among Iran’s disadvantaged classes gives him leverage in future attempts to challenge the establishment.
It is hardly a matter of controversy that the Supreme Leader holds the final word on security and foreign policy. But Iran’s history since the late 1980s suggests that the electorate’s choice of president can significantly influence domestic life and Iran’s relations with the world. For instance, Khatami and Ahmadinejad, both under Khamenei and in the face of domestic opposition, implemented drastically different visions of Iranian society and statecraft. The same yawning gulf now stands between Rouhani’s reelection and a hardline victory
Washington's working relations with the next president should not preclude it from leading the fight against the IRGC's missile proliferation and regional militancy.
Iran is a country at war, in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Yet the candidates campaigning for the May 19 presidential election have hardly spoken a word about the country's regional and military policies. Their silence speaks volumes about Iran's political system. Whoever is elected president will have no authority over the military or the malign activities of Iranian-led Shiite militias. So should the election matter to the United States? And how should Washington approach the winner of this month's vote?
THE PRESIDENCY AND IRAN'S POLITICAL SYSTEM
A complex political system has evolved in Iran since the Islamic Revolution nearly four decades ago. An elected government, including the president and parliament, is tasked with day-to-day management of the country, while the Supreme Leader and appointed institutions such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps act as the "guardians of the revolution," setting policies for Iran's involvement abroad and most everything else. The president has no authority over the two main pillars of Iran's regional strategy: the IRGC's ballistic missile program and its legion of Shiite militias operating throughout the Middle East. The destabilizing activities carried out by the IRGC and its proxies directly affect the security and interests of the United States and its allies, and the election (or reelection) of a moderate president will not reduce that threat level.
Yet the election still matters up to a point. Iran is a major regional actor, so the United States and other countries need to maintain relations with it. The elected government generally represents the Islamic Republic in regional and international talks, and the president is the face of the government. For example, the negotiations leading up to the 2015 nuclear deal showed the president's importance in navigating sensitive international issues. To be sure, the talks would not have begun, nor would the deal have been reached, without the Supreme Leader's explicit approval. Yet President Hassan Rouhani's team believed in the process, showed good intentions, and played a critical role in facilitating the discussions preceding the agreement. A different president might have been less enthusiastic in striking a deal with the West and could have raised issues that blocked or delayed it.
The election also matters on the economic front, a key component of Iran's stability. The president and his government play an important role in the country's monetary policies and, to some extent, fiscal policies. For example, Rouhani's government inherited an economy that was trending toward hyperinflation near the end of his predecessor's term.
But here too, the power of the presidency is seriously constrained by revolutionary institutions. Nearly half of Iran's economic activities are managed by a dozen mega-foundations controlled by either the Office of the Supreme Leader or the IRGC. This so-called "nongovernmental public sector" was created partly by expropriating the ancien regime's private property via revolutionary courts, and to a much larger extent by the mass transfer of government-owned properties to mega-foundations under the guise of privatization. Among the holdings of these foundations are major banks and other financial institutions, oil and gas services companies, auto makers, construction companies, and transportation entities. The foundations themselves are exempt from all taxes. Meanwhile, the elected government is left to preside over the remaining non-privatized properties, which are generally money-losing ventures and/or legacy industries. The president's team generally controls oil sales as well, but the "nongovernmental public sector" also carries out its own oil deals.
Despite these limitations, the president's role in Iran's foreign relations and economic activities is still significant. It is therefore to the benefit of Washington and its allies if the election produces a moderate figure in that post.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC
The founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, often told audiences that the revolution was not just about Iran, but the whole region. Toward that end, the IRGC-Qods Force was created to be the headquarters of Shiite militancy in the Middle East. The resultant legion of Iranian-led militias became the revolution's expeditionary army; today, it is involved in all of the region's wars. These forces are answerable only to the Supreme Leader, bypassing government supervision. And by establishing themselves in so many countries, they have evolved into an entity that can outlast the Islamic Republic itself.
As the Qods Force became the embodiment of the Supreme Leader's external ambitions, the wider IRGC was tasked with defending the revolution against all enemies, internal and external -- whether real or imaginary. And as the Qods Force organized its legions abroad, the IRGC developed what is arguably the region's largest ballistic missile force back home. Together, the expeditionary army and missile force are cast as the defenders and propagators of a Shiite Islamic Revolution, posing a clear and present danger to the military personnel and national interests of the United States and its allies.
BALANCING DIPLOMACY AND CONFRONTATION
Establishing working relations with the elected government in Tehran is in America's interest even if there is no misunderstanding about which actors exert real power on the issues that most affect U.S. security interests. Washington has already demonstrated its ability to communicate with the government by negotiating and implementing the nuclear deal. And while that deal apparently came at the price of relaxing limitations on the IRGC's missile program and offering other concessions, it slowed down (at least for now) Iran's nuclear breakout program.
At the same time, Iran's unelected revolutionary institutions present a host of other dangers to U.S. interests, primarily through their foreign militia legions and ballistic missile arsenal. On January 12, 2016, IRGC chief Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari told Fars News that the Qods Force commanded or backed around 200,000 well-armed and trained Shiite militants around the region. And as mentioned above, the IRGC's missile command is the largest of its kind in the Middle East.
Accordingly, the U.S. approach to the next government needs to be as complex and dual in nature as the Iranian political system itself. This means maintaining working relations with the president and his team, but without neglecting the other side of the policy coin: namely, countering the Supreme Leader and IRGC as they seek to expand Shiite militancy in the region. This is not unlike Washington's past approach to the Soviet Union. While the United States had working relations with the Soviet government and maintained a large embassy in Moscow, it also played the leading role in the struggle against the communist movement worldwide. Today, America's relations with the next Iranian president should not preclude it from leading the fight against rising Shiite militancy in the Middle East.
Nader Uskowi is a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute and the senior policy advisor to U.S. Central Command.
First as a diplomat, then as the head of a liberal-leaning think-tank in Istanbul, I have spent three decades trying to advance Turkey’s relationship with Europe. For years, I believed Turkey should join the EU to cement its place among western democracies. Now, it is time to accept that this path has reached a dead end.
The tragedy is that this outcome was not at all preordained. Yes, Turkey’s EU membership was always going to be a difficult endeavour. We had to battle deeply entrenched prejudices on both sides. Yet against all the odds, Turkey was still able to get to the starting line of the accession negotiations in 2005. This was thanks to a democratic wave initiated by a coalition of political parties in 1999 and revitalised by the ruling Justice and Development party, or AKP, when it came to power in 2002.
EU accession won the support of 74 per cent of the Turkish population in 2005. It was argued that this would finally prove that Islam, democracy and modernity could coexist. Turkey and the EU would decisively rebut claims of civilisational conflict advanced by writers such as Samuel Huntington.
The EU leaders’ decision in December to informally freeze the accession talks was a milestone in this derailed journey. It was the first time that this procedure had been used against a candidate country. The Council of Europe parliamentary assembly’s vote last week to degrade Turkey’s status because of continuing violations of fundamental freedoms is the final signal that EU membership is no longer a realistic prospect for Ankara.
The responsibility for this historic failure is a shared one. We first have to thank Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, for blocking the desire of Turkish people to join the EU. Between 2007 and 2012, he used opposition to Turkish accession as a trump card in his proto-populist agenda at home. He blocked unilaterally several critical strands in the negotiating process, fuelling suspicions among Turkish people about the sincerity of the European offer that endure today.
The EU’s strategic blunder of accepting the membership of Cyprus, a divided island, also contributed to the erosion of trust. The slowing of the pace of domestic reform in Turkey and the increasingly illiberal behaviour of the government in Ankara helped to hasten the moment of reckoning.
What now? A formal end to a political journey that began in 1963 is likely to trigger an escalation in tension between Ankara and Brussels in the short term. The refugee deal of March 2016 — in which Turkey made a commitment to stem the flow of illegal migrants to Europe in return for promises of financial assistance, resettlement and visa liberalisation — is on the verge of collapse. Yet Turkey and the EU will have to create a new framework for their relationship one way or the other.
If the EU hopes to continue to exert an influence on Turkey, this framework should reflect a revised set of good governance conditions tied to a programme of comprehensive trade liberalisation. The proposed modernisation of the Turkey-EU customs union provides such an opportunity.
The start of this round of talks should not be tied to human rights, however. Instead, the conclusion of the discussions should be conditional on improving the rule of law and implementing pro-market reforms that would lead to a more transparent, predictable and fair economic environment.
Because of its strategic blindness over the past decade, Europe has forfeited the ability to influence Turkey’s political trajectory. It has also abdicated any future role in helping Turks build a more liberal version of their flawed democracy. The most it can hope for is to retain some leverage over its economic future. The writer is executive chairman of the Edam think-tank and a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe
