Riccardo Redaelli

COMO, Italy—If proper “timing and tuning” are essential during negotiations, over the past decade, neither Washington nor Tehran has managed to tune their political mood into the same wavelength. When the Islamic Republic was ready to enter into negotiations, the White House was not, and vice-versa.

For years, I criticized the United States’ attitude towards Iran, in particular its inability to understand the Iranian threat perceptions and sense of isolation. During the Bush administration, the mantra was “we do not speak with the devil,” as then-Vice-President Dick Cheney dismissed any direct negotiation with Tehran. The U.S. policy of refusing direct talks with Iran, and its unrealistic and dogmatic stance on its low enriched uranium (LEU) program contributed to the disastrous results of the E3-EU (France, Germany and Great Britain) negotiations of 2003 to 2006. The refusal of the spring 2005 offer by the Iranian nuclear chief negotiator, Hasan Rowhani, has proven to have been a huge mistake: today, we could have had an Iran implementing the Additional Protocol of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and running a few dozen centrifuges. Instead, we find ourselves frantically looking for an agreement with a radical government that possesses thousands of them and that no longer implements the Additional Protocol.

In brief, U.S. containment strategies have failed in the past and have had huge geopolitical costs in the region, which indirectly led to a consistent Iranian foreign policy not in the United States’ interest, rather than a policy that would have weakened Iran’s ultra-conservatives. The result has created huge difficulties for Iranian reformists and pragmatic conservatives domestically as well as internationally.

The New U.S. Policy toward Iran and the Green Movement

The new U.S. administration, therefore, decided to offer Tehran direct negotiations without preconditions (always perceived as an intolerable humiliation to national pride by Iran’s post revolutionary political elite). President Obama’s message on the occasion of the Nowrūz festival almost exactly a year ago was an unprecedented move, aimed at overcoming the standstill in nuclear negotiations. Unfortunately for Obama, the Iranian electoral crisis exploded shortly after his offers had been made. Massive electoral fraud deprived Mir-Hossein Moussavi, the main reformist candidate, of millions of votes, as is easily demonstrated by a detailed analysis of the turnout figures. In the Islamic Republic, such an alteration of the electoral results represented an unpleasant and shocking degeneration of the Islamic Republic’s power mechanisms.

This was the main reason behind the rise of the so-called Green Movement, with pacific public protests and gatherings asking for new elections and the removal of an illegitimate president. The government reacted in the usual way, with a mixture of violent response from its security forces, arrests, harassment and threats. The electoral fraud had also polarized the Islamic Republic to an unprecedented degree, with its political elite deeply fragmented and with mass protests occurring that recall those of the 1970s against the Pahlavi monarchy.

The Present Mistake

For the international community, the dilemma was whether to back the popular protests or not. The West—and Washington in particular—decided to maintain a very low profile regarding Iranian domestic troubles, with the idea, as cynical as it is naïve, that a weakened regime might have been softer on the nuclear negotiations. The result was the meetings in Geneva and Vienna in the autumn of 2009, when Iran initially accepted the idea of a swap of its LEU stockpile to Russia and France, in exchange for already processed LEU at 20 percent for its research reactor. To the West’s discomfort, Tehran eventually refused the compromise, after confused and still unclear domestic debates.

During the past months, the hope that, following the domestic electoral turbulence, the Iranian government was ready to seriously engage with the Obama administration and that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was able to reach a compromise and deliver it at home (that is, getting the consensus of the rahbar and of the obscure Iranian “nuclear inner circle”) did not materialize, probably due to domestic political divisions. According to less benevolent interpretations, these diplomatic moves were simply another Iranian bluff: Tehran needed time to deal with the chaotic domestic situation. The offers made in Geneva and Vienna in Fall 2009 were part of a scheme for avoiding international pressure while the regime was cracking down on the protesters.

In fact, the West kept a very low profile on the issue for months. A commonly held view in Western political circles was that the reformists could easily be sacrificed on the altar of a nuclear compromise. The gamble did not, however, pay off: we did not get any agreement.
The harsh reality is that, in the meantime, the radicals in Tehran had increased the level of repression and brutality, with thousands of members of Iranian civil society arrested, threatened, raped, or tortured, and several people killed or sentenced to death by an increasingly overconfident, oppressive regime.

Break the Vicious Circle of Always Offering Ahmadinejad Something More

These events oblige the international community—and the West in particular—to reconsider their strategy. For instance, President Obama is facing growing opposition in Washington toward his policy of engagement, and the nuclear negotiations with Iran cannot be allowed to distract us from what is happening in Iran. First of all, it is crucial to prevent our declarations against the repression from being counterproductive, since the Iranian government is already accusing the reformists of being “fifth columnists” of enemies of the Republic. However, there are ways and means of making Tehran understand that the West is not looking for a regime change, but cannot tolerate such a level of domestic violence.

In other words, since Ahmadinejad and the pasdarans have deeply polarized the Iranian political scenario, we should carefully send messages to the Rahbar that Ahmadinejad represents a much greater risk for the Islamic Republic than the reformists, and that we are ready to negotiate with Supreme Leader Khamenei, but we will adopt a tougher stance (at every level, nuclear negotiations included) if he lends his support to such bloody repression. Some of the main religious and political leaders, such as Rafsanjani and, to a certain extent, Mohammad Khatami himself, are attempting the same, trying to de-polarize the domestic political spectrum in the hope that the Rahbar might decide to rebalance the system, adopting a more moderate position. It is probably the last chance Khamenei has to avoid a dramatic transformation of the Islamic Republic and far more severe international isolation.

At the same time, it is time to end our obsession with the uranium enrichment conundrum: it is clear that the only way to keep Iran latent at the nuclear weapon level is through verifications and political confidence, not merely technical solutions, such as the recent proposed swap with Russia, France, Turkey, or elsewhere. Without decreasing the level of mistrust, resistance to a comprehensive agreement will be insurmountable.

For years I backed track-2 programs with Iranians, and I still believe they represented a useful tool of communication, taking into account the antagonistic postures of Washington and Tehran. But the current scenario is radically different: the technical package offered in Vienna and Geneva to Iran represented an honorable compromise, based on the best diplomatic effort of recent years. The package is still on the table, and some minor amendments might be made in order to give extra guarantees to the Islamic Republic’s obsessions. However, we should resist the idea of acquiescing to new Iranian requests or looking for other, smoother “technical solutions” for convincing Iran. The offer is already favorable: it has been almost accepted, almost refused, renegotiated, reneged, and all other degrees of unclear response. In the meantime, Iran continues with its paranoid policy of repression and intimidation of reformists, intellectuals, professors, students, women’s’ rights activists, and simple citizens. And the West continues to stick to its past policy of ambiguous silence over it.

Lack of credibility was one of the main failures of the past U.S. administration’s policy toward the Middle East, since its rhetorical insistence on democratization was a far cry from an ambiguous policy of double standards. We should now avoid the risk of embarking on a pathetically weak new form of realpolitik .

Riccardo Redaelli is the Director of the Middle East Program at LNCV and Professor of Geopolitics at the Catholic University of Milano. He has participated in Track 2 talks with Iran.