A Foreign-Policy Roller-Coaster
Terry H. Schwadron
June 12, 2019
The roller-coaster that is U.S.-Iran policy is taking more swoops and swishes. Days ago, Donald Trump told British television interviewer Piers Morgan — a one time winner of “The Celebrity Apprentice” — that there is “a chance” of military action against Iran, after months of threats and then an apparent de-escalation of tensions between Tehran and Washington.
Earlier this past week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sent the roller-coaster in the opposite direction by telling reporters that the Trump administration is ready to hold talks with Iran with “no preconditions.”
In the meantime, we have ships and planes in the Gulf, within reach of Iran, and the White House is sending 1,500 additional troops to Iraq with the job of keeping an eye on Iran. That’s not enough troops to do damage, but enough to annoy the Iranians.
All this had followed reports from intelligence sources that Iran was seen loading small boats with weapons, and two Saudi oil tankers were damaged by what those intelligence sources said were Iranians. Congress members briefed on the evidence were split as to whether it represented any substantial threat.
And, The New York Times quotes officials of the International Energy Agency as saying Iran has begun ramping up its production of nuclear fuel, following through on a threat to begin walking away from the 2015 nuclear accord that Trump has dumped.
But Trump, who believes that a threat of violence is a perfectly good negotiating tool, continues to say into the public air that all Iran has to do is give up any aspiration of developing nuclear weapons, stop supporting surrogate militias in the Middle East, and stand down from building out conventional missiles. So far, Iran has said no, and called upon the United States to stand by the treaty terms it had agreed to with Iran when Barack Obama was president.
Until now, Pompeo and his White House ally, National Security Advisory John Bolton, have insisted on 12 steps Iranian leaders must take — all of them requiring sharp shifts in policy, some a surrender of sovereignty — before the United States would negotiate with them about lifting economic sanctions.
Slate magazine suggested that the clear message was that Pompeo wasn’t interested in talks. OIr it means that Trump, Pompeo and Bolton are bad negotiators, and “when it comes to foreign policy, the United States under their helm is a ship adrift in a stormy sea.”
A year ago, Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal — which Obama and the leaders of five other nations had negotiated with Iran three years earlier — and rei-mposed economic sanctions. Trump threatened to sanction other countries, including those European partners who had signed the nuclear deal, if they continued doing business with Iran. Trump called the policy “maximum pressure.”
Slate said, “The policy’s aim was unclear: Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton said they wanted to make the Iranians scream until their regime collapsed; Trump claimed he merely wanted them to come back to the table and negotiate a ‘better’ deal. Either way, Pompeo’s new statement scuttles whatever chances the pressure campaign had of working.”
Iran is feeling a serious squeeze on its economy, but the United States has provided Iran’s government with a common enemy. In any event, were the Iran religious leadership to step aside, there is no guarantee that it would be replaced by a less aggressive bunch. Indeed, the Iranian military is pretty hard-line on the issues that matter to the United States.
At any rate, if Pompeo was taking his foot off the gas pedal, Trump’s insistence in the television interview is putting it back on. In Tehran, all this must be pretty confusing, and a further reason for Iran to be turning to Russia and China rather than towards the United States.
Neither maximum pressure nor personal diplomacy has worked with getting North Korea to remove its nuclear weapons, of course.
What we have now in Iran is neither. Indeed, we seem to have a series of feints and bluffs. Apparently the Trump attention span is so short that Iran simply needs to wait out threat number one to await the next, contradictory alternative.
As Slate noted, in the case of Iran, the slackening began in mid-May, when Trump seemed suddenly to realize that the path he’d undertaken might lead to war. Trump told reporters he wanted the Iranian leaders to call him; he even gave Swiss officials — who had served as an intermediary between Washington and Tehran a phone number where he could be reached, and then apparently reached out to Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to serve as a back channel.
All this raises questions, of course: Does the administration have a workable strategy? Are the apparent switches of tactics intentional or merely a matter of poor execution? Is this being driven out of politics either towards an American voting base or for the promotion of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is also facing a tough election?
Over and over, we see a foreign policy with an isolated America at its center, fraying alliances and an under-estimation for the use of straight diplomacy to clearly identify and go after agreed upon goals.
It’s not exactly a formula to make America great.
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