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Article Excerpt
The following is an edited transcript of the fifty-sixth in a series of Capitol Hill conferences convened by the Middle East Policy Council. The meeting was held on April 16, 2009, in the U.S. Capitol Building with William L. Nash moderating.
WILLIAM L. NASH: President, Middle East Policy Council
All bilateral relationships have a history, some good, some bad. Certain relationships have too much history, mostly bad, and, unfortunately, I think the U.S.-Iran relationship may well fall into that category. But the hard issues facing the two countries are much more than bilateral. There are many invested participants, and even the observers to the relationship have important, sometimes vital, interests in what takes place between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Today we want to discuss these hard issues and address the policy options that the United States might take to improve the political and security circumstances. I suspect economic and cultural factors will come into play as well.
THOMAS R. PICKERING: Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the Russian Federation and Israel
I'd like to set the stage by doing two things that are very much on my mind. One is to take a look at the world context very briefly for our consideration of Iran and the Middle East, and then to take a look at Iran itself and the nature of the differences between the United States and Iran.
To begin with, the world situation has changed in so many obvious ways. We've had a go with unilateralism, and now we understand that multilateralism is indeed an important facet of being effective as a country. We've had a go with the use of military force, and now we understand, perhaps more than ever, that diplomacy has a very significant role to play in our national progress, prosperity and survival. We've had a go, obviously, at a number of other facets of dealing with problems. It may be too strong to say, "diktat," but we've had a go at saying, "watch what we say, not what we do," and I think we have moved away from that. The leadership in the new administration seems to thoroughly understand those problems.
There are a couple of other features of the landscape that may be a little less obvious, but I think they're very important. One of those--and I will talk about six major issues facing the administration--is that most of the issues that now face this administration, and indeed the world at large, are defined in functional as opposed to geographical terms. So there is a shift in world attention that affects much of how we think and operate with issues, but is also a reflection of how the world shifts. I think this will be obvious as I lay out briefly for you the six major issues.
It will also be apparent that it is no longer sufficient to think about issues in traditional narrow stovepipes. One example, obviously, is energy. Energy is intimately related to what we do on climate change, and they're both intimately related to our policies on the environment.
They are, indeed, a cluster of issues. You could carry this to a ridiculous extreme and say everything is related internationally, but this cluster is a very important point. We need to be thinking about issues grouped together rather than in narrow stovepipes, even if we seek to treat them narrowly, and I would say there are two obvious implications of this. One is that there are synergies in the ways in which we treat issues that can help us in dealing with the policies if we do not write the policy prescriptions too narrowly, if we continue to think broadly about the set of issues. The other is the old, obvious and very debilitating problem that political leaders and diplomats have felt for centuries: unintended consequences. If, in fact, there is a cluster, then the consequences need to be made apparent between the sets of issues, and we need to think about the consequences in this cluster of issues rather than merely to think about the narrow stovepipe, to go back to the example of energy.
What are these six issues, and how and in what way do I think the functional questions predominate? At the top of the list is the international financial crisis. It involves, obviously, how nations are going to deal, in the future, with everything from investment to mortgages. That cluster of issues is no longer easily parsed or readily dealt with as a single question. And, indeed, throughout the financial crisis, we have found our governments running hard to stay even. I think the Obama administration has made a major effort to try to deal, for the first time, with the future and the serious and very difficult problem of how we are going to fund it all. Clearly, we do not want, at the end, to put our last hole card--the U.S. Treasury--at risk, but we all are going to see that battle right here in this building on that particular question.
Happily, we are trying to design budgets that, at least, take into account that critically important question. But that is only one facet, obviously, of a complex and difficult set of relations, where even the most articulate observers have trouble telling us what the major points will be to solve the problem. We are still cutting and trying a little bit on this issue.
The second set of issues I would define--and it's immediate for us in this meeting--is the Middle East, from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush. These are interrelated issues. They are not resolvable by solving one issue and all the others will fall into place, but how we deal with any one of these issues is going to be very important for the others. The issues that I see in this congeries are the three "I"-word countries--Iran, Iraq, Israel, the Arab-Israel peace settlement and the new "A" word, AfPak, the joint issue of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Since we're going to go into this in detail, I will only say the following: I think diplomacy is still woefully underutilized in Iraq. We still have a militarily dominated policy, which is absolutely necessary but totally insufficient, in my view, for finding an exit strategy. And we will have to get people to begin to look at the fact that diplomacy has a role to play in two simple aspects, both of which, in one way or another, intimately involve Iran.
One of those aspects is, what will be the settlement inside Iraq regarding majority rule and minority rights, and the division of oil income? A federation of 18 provinces, three regions, or some other one? The second set of issues, which is extremely important, is this: What will be the role and place of Iraq and Iran in a future Middle East, and is it important and useful to think about regional security and regional cooperation moving toward institutional terms? Iran is a major player there, just as it is in AfPak, and Iran is a significant player on the edges of the Arab-Israeli peace settlement.
Let me define a couple of other of these issues so at least you see where this takes us. One of those is what I would call nuclear weapons--everything from major disarmament, to moving to zero, to dealing with nonproliferation, to conventional disarmament, and indeed to the nature of potential conflict and how it is affected by these issues. This is another large congeries of questions, and, indeed, nonproliferation is not totally absent from the considerations we'll be discussing this morning with respect to Iran.
Another important set of issues, which also plays into the Middle East, is what I call rivals and partners: the role the United States will play in the future international relationship of China, Russia, India and the EU--which is halfway toward being a partner but still obviously needs to be treated in part as the sum of all of its parts as well as the pieces, particularly Britain, France, Germany and so on.
The other two that I would put on my list, but you could add your own, are Japan and Brazil. These countries will be extremely important, Russia particularly on the nuclear-weapons and nonproliferation side, China in international financial terms for us, indeed Europe as well, and Japan. We can see many ways to deal with them.
My view is that the United States needs to have specific policies for finding common national interests with these potential rivals, so that we build partnerships rather than stronger rivalries with them as we go ahead. I believe here, again, the administration has started off very well with Russia, which perhaps, in terms of our relationship, defined the nadir. This has been helpful for opening up the possibilities, whether nuclear disarmament, better trade relationships, or improved understanding on the Middle East and the near abroad. There are two other pressing issues defined in functional terms that need to be considered. Most important, particularly in the Middle East but also in Africa and Latin America, is the difficult problem of poverty, growth and development. They are closely linked to critical questions of global health, food and water; to failed states; to problems of migration; and, indeed, to drugs and criminality, all of which form a nexus. We have the critical question of trade, which is a bridge element back to the first issue of our international economic crisis. Finally, there are energy, climate change and the environment, which I started out with as an example. There is probably no region more important for energy than the one we're talking about.
Having set the stage, let me briefly discuss two or three things that come to mind with respect to Iran. First, my view is that the future of our relationship with Iran will not depend on a totally accurate reading of Iranian internal politics. That remains something of a crap shoot. I find many Iranian friends have such differing views of what is happening in Iran's internal politics that, while it cannot be ignored, it will not be a sovereign answer to the problem. Iranian actions, as opposed to "Tehranology," if I can coin a phrase, will be much more important, and it is significant to continue to keep that in mind and to watch as much what is done as what is said. There are no fewer factions in Iran than there are in this country, and to some extent the confusing swirl of politics in this town is an amplified mirror image of Tehran.
Second, as a diplomat, I always found an element of clarity in trying to figure out what the other side's issues and problems were. That's less difficult. As I look at Iran and try to put myself in an ayatollah's slippers, existential questions arise. Regime survival, regime change, the use of force: those kinds of issues have to be important if you sit in Tehran and look at this overwhelming nuclear-armed behemoth in the United States.
The second set of issues I think equally important encompasses regional stability and Iran's role and place in it. Is Iran going to continue, for one purpose or another, to be isolated and separated, or is it going to be brought in? How and in what way can that issue be resolved to meet the demands from the region as well as from Iran and to recognize that Iran is a significant country with a vital history that has a serious role to play? That role, in my view, cannot be revolutionary or proselytizing so much as being a major contributor to stability, and that's a challenge.
I think, finally, there are many other issues from the Iranian side that are out there, whether it is the hangover from the USS Vincennes incident, the unresolved sets of issues at The Hague regarding the shah's money and how it gets divided, or a set of questions that may come out of Iranian concerns involving alleged U.S. covert action to destabilize the Iranian government and so on. They need to be dealt with.
On the U.S. side, we have equally deep and persuasive concerns. Some of these obviously have to do with the nuclear program--which we'll get into and on which many of us have some policy ideas--but that cannot be the be-all and end-all of the relationship. The other sets of U.S. concerns have to do with support for terrorism, Middle East peace, and the question of how Iran treats its own citizens in human-rights and civil-rights terms. Those are significant.
The final point: objectives. For the United States and Iran, the objective ought to be to seek a normal relationship over a period of time, a relationship that involves not just embassies and ambassadors, but an ability for people on all sides to talk with, to know and to work with each other. This is obviously a millennial description, but we ought to be informed on our side by millennial aspirations in the hope that things will come together well enough for us to continue to move in that direction. We have a lot at stake, and Iran has a lot at stake. I think the new administration has begun well, but it has huge challenges ahead of it.
TRITA PARSI: President, National Iranian American Council
Let me start by associating myself with a lot of what Under Secretary Pickering said and address one...
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