For a while there I was beginning to doubt that it would be possible to strike a deal with Iran that all five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (plus Germany) could agree to, but somehow Secretary of State John Kerry got it done. He can begin preparing for his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech right now.
Yes, there will always be critics, but the president said it best this morning.
“Tough talk from Washington does not solve problems. Hard-nosed diplomacy, leadership that has united the world’s major powers offers a more effective way to verify that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon.” – President Barack Obama, July 14th, 2015
Before you get bogged down in the debate about the details of the deal, make sure that you stop to appreciate the single most important accomplishment here. We live in a world with nuclear weapons, which is a big problem. We have to have a non-proliferation strategy that the international community can agree on and make every effort to enforce. What’s key here is that the world united to say that it’s very important that we don’t sit back and do nothing while new countries get nuclear weapons. In this sense, the accomplishment isn’t really specific to Iran. The most significant thing is that we can agree that non-proliferation is the goal and come together to prevent the spread of nuclear weaponry. If Paraguay decides tomorrow that it wants a nuclear weapons program, we have a credible system in place to deter them.
This is huge.
Now, when it comes to Iran specifically, there is so much to say that I don’t even know where to begin. I will probably write about different elements of what I think this will mean as this debate goes on over the next couple of months.
One simple thing I’d like to address up front is that Iran has been an implacable foe of the United States (and vice-versa) for thirty-six years, and that isn’t going to change overnight. But there is the real potential for a thaw in the hostile relations between our two countries, and this makes Israel and our (Sunni) Arab friends and enemies very uncomfortable.
Let’s be blunt here for a moment and just admit to ourselves that the Sunni Arab world is a complete basketcase right now, and that the most important feature in the region is the rise of the Islamic State. When people tell you that the ayatollahs in Iran are religious fanatics, just remind yourself of what Saudi Arabia has inspired and financed in the form of the Taliban, al-Qaeda and now ISIS. Our Sunni allies have not been very good allies, and while we have strategic and economic interests in maintaining decent relationships with them, we have no good reason to prefer their ideology or their form of religion to what we see coming out of Teheran.
The Obama administration has already made it as clear as can be that they will not let the right-wing in Israel dictate to us how we should treat Iran’s government. Our interests and the settlers’ interests do not jibe, and Israeli citizens will have to make a decision about whether or not they want to be allies with the United States or just the worst neoconservative elements of the Republican Party. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried and failed to scuttle this deal and all he got out of it was damaged relations with the Democratic Party and much of America’s citizenry. That being said, the Obama administration has no intention of letting Iran threaten Israel or its Arab neighbors. If they want continued good relations and protection from the United States, they can have those things, and now with less of a threat of Iran suddenly announcing that they’ve built a nuclear weapons program.
So, this deal does have the potential (and I’ve barely scratched the surface here) of fundamentally altering the status quo in the Middle East, including how we weigh the importance of each of our alliances there. Not too long ago, our foreign policy elites thought our biggest problem in the region was the crumbling containment policy we had in place for Iraq’s secular Ba’ath Party. Only a few years ago, we were on board with Israel and Saudi Arabia as seeing Iranian proxies like Assad in Syria and Hizbollah in Lebanon as the biggest threats. But that was an error. As 9/11 should have made clear, the biggest threat in the region emanates from the Saudi regime and the ideology that they export around the world. In that fight, Iran is roughly the same kind of ally as Joseph Stalin was against Adolph Hitler. Their regime is ideologically loathsome but still preferable to the alternative, and they’re a critical bulwark against the spread of Islamic State.
We do not want to take sides in what is essentially a sectarian holy war in the Middle East, but we do now have to recognize that going around endlessly repeating that Iran is a major sponsor of terrorism looks a little silly when they’re fighting ISIS. It’s not that we want to take Iran’s side in this fight against our Sunni Arab allies, but we needed to get things better calibrated, and this deal will allow us the freedom to do that.
As I said at the outset, the most important thing here is proving that the international community can do non-proliferation, but it’s also key that this deal will give us a chance to take a look at the mess in the Middle East within a new paradigm. The old paradigm was not only not working, it created a hole so deep that the region is at risk of never being able to crawl out of it.
While our traditional allies are understandably anxious, I think they’ve earned this anxiety. And, really, if we take Einstein’s definition of insanity being the belief that doing the same thing over and over again will give you a different result, then our allies are insane.
Let them adjust to this new reality, and maybe they will behave better in the near future.
