Updated by
Max Fisher @Max_Fisher
We've rarely admitted it, but the debate in the United States over
the Iran nuclear deal, which formally began this Saturday as the world
lifted many sanctions on Iran, was never really about nuclear weapons.
Not primarily, anyway.
Sure, the nuclear deal
itself has a lot to do with nuclear
weapons. But it should tell you something that America's debate over the
deal is still raging even after Iran has disassembled the bulk of its
nuclear program, and that we're now having nearly identical arguments
about the
US-Iran prisoner swap and the
US-Iran boat incident.
"The Iranian nuclear program is not really what opponents and
proponents of the recent deal are arguing about," Jeremy Shapiro, of
Brookings, wrote
nearly a year ago,
and it's still true. It's never been about nukes or boats or prisoners
but rather whether America should deal with Iran at all. Is this, to
paraphrase Margaret Thatcher's famous
quote
about Mikhail Gorbachev, a country that we can do business with? And
that question itself hits on divisions in US foreign policy that go way
beyond this one county and are much older than this one issue.
Iran has become the subject of America's most heated and divisive
foreign policy debate in perhaps a decade. But the vitriol is driven not
just by competing readings of Iran, or even by partisanship, but by a
confluence of deep and long-running disagreements over fundamental
questions of America's place in the world.
There are, to my eye, three distinct and separate divisions in
American foreign policy that are playing out here. If you'll forgive a
bit of jargon coinage — an ancient and glorious tradition among pundit
types — we might term those divisions: pragmatists versus hegemonists,
diplomats versus militarists, and Middle East reformists versus Middle
East status quo-ists.
Those debates have been raging, in one form or another, for years or
decades. In the past, sometimes they've overlapped and sometimes not;
the distinctions were sometimes clear and sometimes fuzzy. But Iran is
bringing out all three, more sharply and clearly, than has any issue in
years.
Because we're really having these three arguments at the same time,
and because they are all long-held disputes now playing out
simultaneously, everyone is talking past one another — and because it's
not even remotely
just about Iran, none of these disputes are
about to settled. But once you see them, this debate and its vitriol
start to make a lot more sense.
Pragmatists versus hegemonists
The pragmatists see compromise and conciliation, toward Iran and more
broadly in the world, as the most responsible way to maximize America's
interests while minimizing risks and costs. They are averse to
overextension and willing to write off some problems as too costly for
the US to wade into. They include President Obama as well as former
President George H.W. Bush, both realists willing to use or threaten
limited force but only when it can achieve clear, specific aims.
In this view, if Iranian and American interests can be made to
coincide, whether through diplomacy or coercion or both, then dealing
with even an adversary like Iran can achieve American interests while
also minimizing risks such as war.
The hegemonists tend to see any challenge to American primacy in the
world as a threat to the American-led liberal international order
itself. In this view, American dominance promotes peace and makes the
world safe for democracy — allowing that dominance to wane thus risks
inviting chaos and tyranny. This existential battle between America and
those who threaten its hegemony animates, in their eyes, nearly every
international crisis. The hegemonists include Ronald Reagan but also, at
many points, Jimmy Carter, whose 1980 "Carter Doctrine" declared the US
would use military force to protect its economic interests in the
Persian Gulf.
In this view, hegemony is about
perception as much as about
hard tools like tanks or missiles. Therefore, it is necessary to stand
down every challenger, not for simple reasons of ego or pride but
because even appearing to waver is a de facto surrender that imperils
America's not-at-all-guaranteed dominance. Iran isn't just one middling
country, but potentially the start of a global anti-American uprising
that could overturn the world as we know it. Whether America happens to
come out ahead in specific negotiations is not the point; negotiating in
itself legitimizes Iran's challenge to American dominance.
Pragmatists see American power as a tool, sometimes useful and
sometimes not, whereas hegemonists see American power as a good within
itself, something to be protected and promoted however possible, and
that by disuse will erode.
The Iran-US sailors incident is a perfect example of this division.
To pragmatists, the incident was defused and deescalated quickly and
relatively painlessly: All 10 sailors were freed within a few hours, and
the only cost was that Iran released embarrassing photos of the sailors
being detained. That trade-off, on balance, seems great for the US.
But, to hegemonists, that embarrassment did real-world damage to US
interests by giving the appearance of Iranian strength overpowering
American weakness, which thus invites more such challenges that could
eventually see the entire Middle East turned against us.
On Iran more broadly, pragmatists see decades of enmity that has been
costly for the US and brought little benefit, whereas a smidge more
compromise and even cooperation will not just serve US interests but
also reduce the costly risk of war. But hegemonists see an Iran that has
always been, and always will be, an imminent threat to America's
hegemony over the Middle East that can only ever be countered with all
American tools of power, including the credible threat of war.
Diplomats versus militarists
Every administration uses some combination of diplomacy and
militarism, whether it's the threat of force or its actual use, to
achieve its aims. The disagreement here isn't about which to privilege.
Rather, it's a disagreement over how adversarial regimes like Iran are
likely to respond to those tools.
And it's a disagreement about what
kind of global power
America is supposed to be: a power that guides through consensus and
coalition building, versus a power that leads unilaterally and, if
necessary, dominates through strength.
For the diplomats, the US can best achieve its goals by making sure
other countries' interests line up with its own, whether those countries
are allies or not. They're not just willing to work with adversaries
but often desire it, seeing it as a way to decrease hostilities. And it
often means working within other countries' domestic politics, trying to
shape them such that they'll be more likely to bend their countries in
our direction.
Presidents who've thought this way include Bill Clinton, who famously
intervened in Israeli politics to promote candidates who'd be more
sympathetic to American goals; and George W. Bush, who tried to
establish personal bonds with foreign leaders from Nicolas Sarkozy to
Vladimir Putin. Most famous, of course, was Richard Nixon, who was more
than happy to align the US with adversaries, even communist China, when
they could find mutual interests.
The militarists, on the other hand, see a world neatly divided
between allies and adversaries in a zero-sum contest for influence.
America's role is strengthening itself and its allies at the cost of its
enemies. In their views, enemy states' overwhelming goal in the world
is to counter and reduce American influence. Therefore, any negotiation
is folly because enemies will never compromise on their ultimate agenda
of weakening America and its allies. Because enemies are innately
hostile and everything is a zero-sum competition, military strength is
America's greatest asset.
Famous militarists include Dwight Eisenhower, who saw communism as a
monolithic force bent on world domination, leading him to intervene in
Vietnam rather than work with the revolutionary communist leaders who
had in fact reached out to the Americans; as well as Ronald Reagan, for
whom the Soviet Union was not motivated by complex interests or domestic
politics so much as by the twisted ideology of an "evil empire."
The diplomat-militarist divide is widest on Iran. Diplomats see a
country with complex and noisy internal politics that could be on the
verge of a major shift; they also see a rational state whose interests
can be shaped to clash less severely with America's. Militarists,
however, see an innately and implacably hostile enemy at best, and at
worst an irrational
"death cult" akin
to Nazi Germany. For militarists, it is essential to not only confront
Iran as directly as possible, but to provide unflinching assistance to
American allies who also oppose Iran, to demonstrate a unified front.
This is the divide, in particular, that has had much of the
Washington foreign policy community at one another's throats over the
past year. Diplomats are aghast at the militarists who would refuse a
rare opening to peacefully reduce hostility with Iran. Militarists
cannot believe how naive the diplomats are to believe that Iran could
ever be driven by anything other than an unquenchable anti-Americanism;
they see Iran's internal politics as a nation-size ruse meant to trick
Americans.
It's an argument that neither side can ever win, because it's not
really about the intricacies of Iranian politics or the merits of the
nuclear deal. It's about the way in which you see the world and
America's role in it.
Middle East reformists versus Middle East status quo-ists
America's obsession with the Middle East goes back decades: to the
oil crisis, to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, to the 1990 Gulf War;
starting in the 1980s, the religious right developed a preoccupation
with Israel and thus the Israel-Arab conflict. The 2001 terrorist
attacks and the 2003 Iraq invasion guaranteed at least a generation of
heavy American involvement in the region.
So there is a real sense in the US, and indeed in Middle Eastern
capitals, that America owns this mess of a region and that it's
America's responsibility to deal with it. For a few years after the Iraq
invasion, it was hard to have an open debate about this because those
who'd advocated for the invasion felt compelled to argue that everything
was fine. Now that we've had two successive administrations oversee the
region's deterioration, it is finally a bipartisan consensus that the
region is in severe crisis.
In the rare moments when people can put aside arguments over which
American president is more to blame, their disagreements often boil down
to one core issue: Is it better to rebuild and reinforce the status quo
in the Middle East or to reform the regional order in some new way that
will make it more likely to survive?
For the status quo-ists, this often comes down in part to Israel.
America's closest ally in the region is well-served by the status quo,
in which the Middle East is dominated by secular dictators whose
countries once waged war on Israel but have mostly come to make peace
with it. Those dictators are the heart of this worldview: Status
quo-ists appreciate their reliability and fear that a democratic Middle
East will empower Islamists and populists who oppose the United States.
The reformists don't really have a specific plan for how to change
the Middle East so much as a sense that it has to happen. Dictatorships
are unstable and can topple suddenly and violently; the region's
division between Saudi-backed Sunni powers and Iran-backed Shia powers
has fueled much of the last decade's violence. The reformists tend to be
skeptical of America's most powerful Mideast ally, Saudi Arabia, and to
suspect that Iran is going to rise in power whether we like or not, so
it's better to shape that rise as best we can.
There is a lot of mutual suspicion here. Reformists see the status
quo-ists as trying to build American strategy on a foundation of
quicksand, and wonder why they're so eager to embrace Saudi monarchs who
behead dissidents and an Israeli right that has long defied American
presidents of both parties. Status quo-ists, meanwhile, suspect that the
reformists are at best seeking America's total surrender from the
region and at worst trying to engineer a Middle East dominated by our
enemies.
Iran is at the center of this argument: Everyone agrees that Iran is
ascendant and America's Sunni-dictator allies are struggling. The
question becomes: Should America throw itself into reversing those
trends, or accept them as inevitable and try rather to shape them in a
way that will be tolerable?
The reformists, to be clear, don't want to ally with Iran, but rather
to minimize hostilities and try to shape Iran's behavior to be more
productive, while also building up America's allies. But status quo-ists
see this as tantamount to surrender, and believe the US should be
wholly focused on stopping or reversing that rise.
This is a relatively new debate; it has only really opened under
George W. Bush and, to a much greater extent, under Obama. Both have
approached the Middle East as reformists, seeing the status quo as
untenable. Though whereas Bush sought to deliberately spark the region's
complete transformation by toppling Saddam and promoting democracy,
Obama's view is that the Middle East is changing under forces and
pressures beyond American control.
Today you can see this division playing out among the presidential
candidates, and it's not along partisan lines. Status quo-ists Ted Cruz
and Bernie Sanders have both stated strong support for America's
authoritarian allies in the region.
Meanwhile, reformist Hillary Clinton supported the nuclear deal with
Iran and has warned that Middle East dictatorships can't last. Marco
Rubio has challenged those dictatorships as well, though he is more akin
to second-term George W. Bush in wanting to see Middle Eastern politics
transform but preserve its regional power balance.
The Iran debate will never, ever be settled
Looking over these three disagreements and how they are playing
out over Iran, the point is that none of them is remotely partisan. And
none of them is about to be resolved; they are differences in
philosophy that can be argued for or against but will probably always be
part of the American foreign policy conversation.
This is why you have seen, over the past year, many members of
Washington's foreign policy community argue themselves red in the face.
They can cite as many facts about Iranian nuclear cuts, or about Iranian
funding for terror groups, as they want. They can debate the nature of
Iran's moderates or the likely fate of its supreme leader all day. Such
narrow questions are simply not what these arguments are really about.
Rather, it's an argument about conflicting worldviews and readings of
American power and ambitions for the Middle East. Even if we were to
fully acknowledge that's what we're arguing about, those disagreements
are fundamentally irresolvable, which is why they've been with us for
decades. And they'll continue to be with us for decades.
Iran will not always be at the center of those debates, but it will
probably feature heavily in them for as long as the Middle East is in
chaos, which is
likely to last decades.
So you can expect to hear the same arguments over Iran for, if not the
rest of your life, at least a big chunk of it. Just know that while
people might refer to Iran a lot in those debates, they're really
talking about something much bigger.
