UPDATED Iran-US Special: The 4-Step Collapse of Obama's "Engagement" Into Confusion

UPDATE 7 August: Stephen Walt jumps in with this analysis....

Right now, Washington simply assumes that Iran won't negotiate unless it is coerced into doing so by outside pressure. At the same time, Tehran has made it clear that it wants to negotiate but refuses to do so under pressure. The predictable result is the current stalemate. You'd think the U.S. government could come up with something creative to try to overcome this impasse, instead of just hoping for a miracle.

UPDATE 0940 GMT: An interesting clue that, amidst the confusion, the discussion of US-Iran talks is very much alive. Alaeddin Boroujerdi, the head of the Iranian Parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, has said that dialogue with Washington requires the permission of the Supreme Leader.

Iran-US Special: Obama Extends His Hand “Engagement, Not Conflict”

This time yesterday I was confidently declaring that President Obama had renewed his approach for engagement with Iran. David Ignatius of The Washington Post was putting out the message, from a specially-arranged briefing of selected journalists: "President Obama put the issue of negotiating with Iran firmly back on the table Wednesday in an unusual White House session with journalists. His message was that even as U.N. sanctions squeeze Tehran, he is leaving open a 'pathway' for a peaceful settlement of the nuclear issue."

Ignatius' narrative fit a pattern which, while interrupted by the breakdown in nuclear discussions last October between Washington, Tehran, and other countries, was far from obsolete. Noting the recent US escalation in Afghanistan and Iran's role in any attempt at a resolution, I assessed, "While the nuclear issue was the first one to be addressed --- given its symbolic position, it had to be resolved before other matters could be tackled --- engagement with Tehran would also pay dividends for US policy in the Middle East, including Iraq, and Afghanistan as well as removing a troublesome issue in relations with Russia and China."

All very logical. Yet, within 24 hours, Obama's initiative has become a tangle of conflicting reports and political counter-attacks, taking us not towards engagement but towards the challenges I identified at the end of yesterday's analysis: "The conflict inside the Administration has taken its toll...The pressure from the US Congress [and opponents outside the Congress] — as well as the war chatter — will not evaporate."

Four Steps to Collapse:

1. THE CONFUSED MESSAGE

If, as Ignatius claims, the President was re-presenting the strategy of negotiating with Iran, others in the room failed to hear this. Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic opens his account: "The session, as envisioned by his aides, was designed to convince his audience that Obama's policy of engagement joined with sanctions is having the desired effect of isolating Iran from the international community even as the country's pursuit of a bomb has not abated."

So pressure, pressure, and only pressure, as Ambinder features Administration optimism that Russia is now on Washington's side. There is not a single word in his report about negotiations.

Robert Kagan recounts, "[Obama] did make clear that the door was, of course, open to the Iranians to change their minds, that sanctions did not preclude diplomacy and engagement, and that if the Iranians ever decide they wanted to 'behave responsibly' by complying with the demands of the international community, then the United States was prepared to welcome them." This, however, is only an annex to the Pressure message: "The 'news' out of this briefing was that the administration wanted everyone to know how tough it was being on Iran."

Peter David of The Economist has perhaps the fullest account of the discussion. Like Ambinder and Kagan, he notes the Administration line that sanctions are pinching Tehran. His presentation on negotiations is not that Obama advocated them but that he pointed to the possibility:

it was important to set out for the Iranians a clear set of steps that America would accept as proof that the regime was not pursuing a bomb: they needed "a pathway". With hard work, America and Iran could thaw a 30-year period of antagonism—provided Iran began to act responsibly.

Mr Obama said that the United States had received no direct contacts from Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, though high-level officials in Iran had investigated the possibility of re-engaging with the P5-plus-one (the permanent members of
the Security Council plus Germany). America would be willing to talk bilaterally to Iran "in the context" of a P5 process that was moving forward. There should meanwhile be a "separate track" on which America could co-operate with Iran on other issues, such as Afghanistan and drugs, for example.

2. THE ANTI-ENGAGEMENT COUNTER-ATTACK

Ambinder and David have not been amongst those beating the drum for confrontation with Tehran and, while Kagan has been a staunch advocate of an aggressive US foreign policy, including the 2003 Iraq war, he has been supportive of Obama's approach on sanctions.

For another journalist at the meeting, however, the agenda was how to stoke the fire of a showdown with Iran. Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic omitted any reference to negotiations, whether Obama advocated them or merely saw the possibility of discussions. Instead, he fit the confusion of journalists' accounts into this pre-determined conclusion:

I am skeptical, though, about the possibilities of a diplomatic breakthrough, for two reasons, one structural, and one related to the state of Iran's opposition: The structural reason is simple; one of the pillars of Islamic Republic theology is anti-Americanism, and it would take an ideological earthquake to upend that pillar. And then there's the problem of the Green Movement. If the Iranian opposition were vibrant and strong, the regime might have good reason to be sensitive to the economic impact of the new sanctions package. But the opposition is weak and divided. The regime has shown itself to be fully capable of suppressing dissent through terror. So I'm not sure how much pressure the regime feels to negotiate with the West.

This is more than enough ammunition for those wanting to shoot down engagement. Max Boot soon wrote for Commentary: "What’s scary is that the illusions about 'outreach' in the upper reaches of this administration have still not been dispelled, despite a year and a half of experience (to say nothing of the previous 30 years of experience), which would suggest that the mullahs aren’t misunderstood moderates who are committed to “peaceful co-existence.”

3. THE FACTIONS INSIDE THE ADMINISTRATION

So what exactly did happen in the Obama briefing to scramble his message? Different journalists, from their own positions or just human nature, will hear --- and even try to produce --- different messages. Kagan, without naming Ignatius, writes:

Some of the journalists present, upon hearing the president's last point about the door still being open to Iran, decided that he was signaling a brand-new diplomatic initiative. They started peppering Obama with questions to ferret out exactly what 'new' diplomatic actions he was talking about.

There's an even more important factor here, however, one that Kagan points to --- but does not fully appreciate, at least in his column --- in his next sentences:

After the president left, they continued probing the senior officials. This put the officials in an awkward position: They didn't want to say flat out that the administration was not pursuing a new diplomatic initiative because this might suggest that the administration was not interested in diplomacy at all. But they made perfectly clear -- in a half-dozen artful formulations -- that, no, there was no new diplomatic initiative in the offing.

As one bemused senior official later remarked to me, if the point of the briefing had been diplomacy, then the administration would have brought its top negotiators to the meeting, instead of all the people in charge of putting the squeeze on Iran.

Kagan's point is incomplete. The Obama Administration has been split, perhaps since it came into office, between a faction who want genuine discussions with Iran and one that only thinks of discussions as the set-up, once there is an Iranian "rejection", for tougher economic and diplomatic measures.

So those who are on the "positive" side for discussions give their perspective to Ignatius --- thus the important reference to the US involvement as Afghanistan (which is not any other account of Obama's remarks) as a factor, if not a necessity, for conversations with Iran --- and those on the "negative" side become the "bemused senior official" in Kagan's article.

Joe Klein of Time, who was also present, captures the confusion: "This was a pretty strange meeting. The President's comments were on the record; his team's comments were on background, meaning that the individuals speaking could only be identified as 'senior Administration officials'."

And that's not all. For the spinning of the story was also going on beyond Obama's briefing. As I noted yesterday in the anlaysis, one or more unnamed officials sought out George Jahn of the Associated Press, leaking two letters (or selected extracts from the letters) from Iran to the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The intent --- supported by Jahn's presentation and failure to put quotes into context, let alone present the letters --- was to rule out any possibility of productive dialogue: "Letters by Tehran’s envoys to top international officials and shared with The Associated Press suggest major progress is unlikely, with Tehran combative and unlikely to offer any concessions."

Such manoeuvres  in turn prop up critics of engagement like Ed Morrissey as they put out the gospel: "Time is running out on stopping the mullahs from their doomsday pursuit, and open hands to the regime have hardly been effective over the last several years, including the last eighteen months.  Either we need to get serious about other options or concede that we’re not serious at all."

4. CAN OBAMA RESCUE HIS ENGAGEMENT?

There's even a black-comedy irony in this story. Flynt Leverett, one of the foremost advocates of a US engagement with Iran for a "grand bargain" on bilateral and regional matters, joins others in dismissing the possibility of productive discussions, not because the Administration is too "soft" (as Goldberg and Boot argue) but because of "the Administration’s maladroit handling of its diplomatic exchanges with Tehran, poor grasp of on-the-ground realities in Iran, and mixed messaging....The President feels he must call in Western journalists to signal Tehran is a sad commentary on the Obama Administration’s failure to develop a discreet and reliable channel through which to communicate with Iranian leaders."

I suspect Leverett, because of his entrenched dislike of US foreign policy, goes a bit far with his unsupported assertion of the "failure to develop a discreet and reliable channel". I'm more than a few miles away from Washington, so I can't prove that the channel is operating, but last year's history is instructive. Between July 2009, when the Administration seized on the possibility of a deal in which Iran's uranium would be enriched in a country such as Russia, and October, a channel was established between Washington and Tehran. It was not direct but rather through third parties, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, European parties, and Turkey. And it led to face-to-face talks between US and Iranian representatives at Geneva in the autumn.

Even though that effort at an agreement ran adrift, the channels were not set aside. Ankara and the European Union have been used in recent weeks to pass Washington's thoughts to Tehran (and vice versa). Obama left more than a clue in his briefing: "High-level officials in Iran had investigated the possibility of re-engaging with the P5-plus-one [US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China]." Time's Klein offers further support that the process of 2009 --- contact at working levels --- is being repeated, although he fails to recognise it is two-way:

The President confirmed that "high level" Iranians have reached out to the Obama Administration over the past months, hoping to get a dialogue restarted. The President emphasized that neither the Supreme Leader nor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have attempted to contact us, and his aides later insisted that nothing concrete was in the works.

And in Tehran, once you get past President Ahmadinejad's more outlandish postures in recent weeks, he too has been putting out references to both indirect communication with the US and to direct talks in the near-future.

The problem is not that the channel for engagement does not exist; it is the interference that distorts and even scrambles it. The President and his advisors are putting out signals , not just to Tehran but to the US Congress, to their anti-engagement critics, to Israel, and to other countries. No surprise that those signals often clash, especially when the Obama Administration has the faction within that does not even believe in engagement.

Last November, I fretted, "The US President [may] be back in the cul-de-sac: pressed by some advisors and a lot of Congressmen to pursue sanctions which offer no remedy for — and no exit from — the political dilemma of his failed engagement."

This week, with those sanctions now reality, Obama tried to get out of the cul-de-sac with his high-profile briefing. Initially I thought he had a chance; 24 hours later, I am thinking that his effort --- at least in the context of domestic politics --- never made it around the corner.

Comments

[Catherine]

Don't forget Joe Klein (Time): Obama on Iran
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/08/05/obama-on-iran/" rel="nofollow">http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/08/05/obam...

[Catherine]

This is imo the most interesting part of Kagan's account:

He [president Obama] did make clear that the door was, of course, open to the Iranians to change their minds, that sanctions did not preclude diplomacy and engagement, and that if the Iranians ever decide they wanted to "behave responsibly" by complying with the demands of the international community, then the United States was prepared to welcome them.

It is here that this very straightforward briefing took a bizarre and amusing turn. Some of the journalists present, upon hearing the president's last point about the door still being open to Iran, decided that he was signaling a brand-new diplomatic initiative. They started peppering Obama with questions to ferret out exactly what "new" diplomatic actions he was talking about and, after the president left, they continued probing the senior officials. This put the officials in an awkward position: They didn't want to say flat out that the administration was not pursuing a new diplomatic initiative because this might suggest that the administration was not interested in diplomacy at all. But they made perfectly clear -- in a half-dozen artful formulations -- that, no, there was no new diplomatic initiative in the offing. As one bemused senior official later remarked to me, if the point of the briefing had been diplomacy, then the administration would have brought its top negotiators to the meeting, instead of all the people in charge of putting the squeeze on Iran. Some journalists nevertheless left with the impression that the big "news" out of their meeting with the president was a possible new round of diplomacy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/05/AR2010080504784.html?hpid=opinionsbox1" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ar...

[Catherine]

RE: Mr Obama said that the United States had received no direct contacts from Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,

On the other hand, and on another front (sorry to post here, but there's no well-visited Iraq thread up at the moment), apparently Obama IS in direct contact with a big-time Shiite cleric in regards to ongoing internal political conflicts: Obama Sent a Secret Letter to Iraq's Top Shiite Cleric
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/05/obama_sent_a_secret_letter_to_iraqs_top_shiite_cleric" rel="nofollow">http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/0...

[Ange-Paris]

Oh my god !!
" Ahmadinejad Drops A Bomb
Reza Kahlili, 08.05.10, 07:28 PM EDT"
..."As I stated recently in my presentation at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, they have already enriched over 90%. I do not know about the stock pile that has already been achieved, but this was long before they publicly announced the 20% threshold......"
http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/05/iran-nuclear-bomb-uranium-opinions-columinsts-reza-kahlili.html?feed=rss_asia" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/05/iran-nuclear-b...

[Ange-Paris]

Here you are the original article by Reza KHALILI

Inside Iran's Revolutionary Guard: A Defector Speaks
Featuring David B. Crist and Reza Kahlili
July 9, 2010 :
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC07.php?CID=535" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC07....

[Catherine]

Sorry to be such a doom-and-gloom delivery girl today, but while Obama's strategy of engagement with Iran flips, flops and flounders, his standing in the Arab world is in rapid decline:

The findings of the annual survey of Arab public opinion conducted by Shibley Telhami, released publicly today, offer stark evidence for this deflating bubble.

Telhami reports that positive views of President Obama have dropped from 45 percent in 2009 to 20 percent today, with his negatives rising even further -- from 23 percent to 62 percent -- as fence-sitters waiting to see what he delivered render their verdict. Only 12 percent express favorable views of the United States, compared to 15 percent in the final year of the Bush administration. Only 16 percent declare themselves hopeful about administration policies, compared to 51 percent last year, and a statistically insignificant 1 percent are pleased with the administration's policies towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sixty-three percent declare themselves discouraged, up from 15 percent.
http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/08/05/arab_confidence_in_obama_collapsing" rel="nofollow">http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/08/05...

[Catherine]

RE: UPDATE 0940 GMT:
And in English: 'Iran SNSC authority on talks with US'
The final decisions of the SNSC should meet the approval of the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei to become executable, ISNA quoted Chairman of Iran's parliamentary (Majlis) Committee on National Security and Foreign Policy Alaeddin Boroujerdi as saying on Friday.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=137647§ionid=351020101" rel="nofollow">http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=137647&sec...

[WitteKr]

Thank you Catherine! Joe Klein solved the mystery, in my case anyway...
In my opinion these are the most important elements from his report:
1. This was a pretty strange meeting.
2. Obama seemed very much on top of the complicated material.
3. The tone was calm, the words were not hard-edged, but the message was a tough one: if Iran wanted to talk, it had to take specific actions in order to do so.
4. In sum, it seems (...) that the Obama Administration has made significant progress in forcing the Iranians into a corner. The President, again, did not rule out a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities but the progress outlined by his senior officials seemed to promise that such a drastic (...) step might not be needed.

I have always been more optimistic about Obama's foreign policy then most contributors here (as I was also more optimistic about the chances of the Dutch football team to end up really high at the World Cup :-)
And Joe Kleins recollection confirms my feelings. Diplomacy - the intelligent kind - is back on the table in the US. It just seems their reporters have forgotten (after so many bad diplomacy years) how to deal with it...

[Catherine]

Hey WitteKr,
RE: It just seems their reporters have forgotten (after so many bad diplomacy years) how to deal with it...

It's more I think than just the reporters not knowling how to deal with diplomacy. It's the factions and lobbies in whose service the reporters place themselves or who are using the reporters (by feeding them what they want to see reported and how) without the reporters necessarily being in these factions'/lobbies' pockets.

[Kurt]

"To my eyes, the praiseworthy piece of the latest report on Obama's thinking on Iran is that he has apparently now moved into the third school, where I have been hoping he would end up long ago. This third school thinks that diplomatic engagement is hard and only doable if the United States and our international allies have sufficient leverage over the Iranian regime."

One-and-a-half cheers for Obama on Iran by Peter Feaver
http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/08/05/one_and_a_half_cheers_for_obama_on_iran" rel="nofollow">http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/08/0...

[Catherine]

Kurt,
Thanks for that Peter Feaver article - will read later, but I just luv the combination of the title and the big photo of Ahmadinejad smiling and waving! :-)

[Ange-Paris]

Kurt
You have been right and unfortunately we have lost 18 months which are too long in this subtle issue !

[Nothing found for 4-steps-to-g]

[...] Iran-US Special: The 4-Step Collapse of Obama’s “Engagement” Into Confusion [...]

[WitteKr]

"Green" lines? Another addition to the discussion. "ABC's Christiane Amanpour talked about her surprise briefing by President Obama on Iran at the White House. She and several other reporters were offered a special briefing on Iran. They were not told that the person they’d hear from would be the briefer-in-chief, President Obama. (...) "Yes, these sanctions are potentially going to bite, but they don't know whether that cost-benefit analysis, perhaps being made in Iran right now, will outweigh what may be an ideological and nationalistic commitment to nuclear weapons,” Amanpour said on Top Line. “So there's a lot of unknowns, and that's always been the frustrating thing about Iran. You know, 30 years of estrangement with no regular dialogue. You're guessing a lot, and that's the issue. And that's why people who favor diplomatic engagement say, "At least we have to know what our adversary is thinking. What are the red lines, or the green lines, or whatever lines?"
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2010/08/top-line-amanpour-on-obama-iran-brieferinchief-and-the-drawdown-in-iraq-.html" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2010/08/top-li...

[Catherine]

RE: "Right now, Washington simply assumes that Iran won’t negotiate unless it is coerced into doing so by outside pressure. At the same time, Tehran has made it clear that it wants to negotiate but refuses to do so under pressure."

Correction One. Not "right now". This was the Bush admin's stance and it was this stance that candidate and recently inaugurated president Obama said he was going to change with a new approach: sitting down (negotiators and diplomats) and talking with Iran without preconditions; and discussing a range of issues of mutual interest.

Correction Two. Tehran has ALWAYS made it clear that it would not negotiate under pressure. This is not a new position.

"You’d think the U.S. government could come up with something creative to try to overcome this impasse,.."

Sigh. See correction one. :-(

[WitteKr]

Catherine, specially for you... since you take an interest :-) James Traub on "The Two Obama's" - It's too early to call the U.S. president a foreign-policy failure. But he does need to figure out what kind of global leader he wants to be.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/06/the_two_obamas?page=0%2C1" rel="nofollow">http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/0...

[Catherine]

Thanks WitterKr - I'll certainly read this with interest later on today.

[Catherine]

http://desertpeace.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/8-3-bad-dog.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://desertpeace.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/...

[Ange-Paris]

Catherine
"Tehran has ALWAYS made it clear that it would not negotiate under pressure. This is not a new position."
When we are responsable , we respect international laws ; it's not a pressure but an obligation of each country to respect those global regulations ! but don't worry , despite all this, it smells, they will have negociations as soon as ; I think it's not fair for my people with all costs they have paid as far ! sigh :-)

[Ange-Paris]

Big mistake; correction : sigh :-(

[WitteKr]

Obama gets thumbs up from NYT editors...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/opinion/07sat1.html?_r=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/opinion/07sat...

[Ange-Paris]

China is free to have trades with Iran but it will be sanctionned by USA whith whom it has beyond 400 billions dollars trade when with Iran its under 50 billions; I think the choice is easy to be made, except if china has a special relationship with Iran !

[Arshama]

@ UPDATE 0940 GMT: Alaeddin Boroujerdi

Jaras offers an explanation for Boroujerdi's intervention in its "Rumour" courner: apparently AN's representatives had secret negotiations with American officials (sic!) in Tehran without the SL's knowledge, which angered the rivaling IRGC. The Russians who support the IRGC passed this news on to the SL, which angered AN, hence his recent sharp attack on Russia. In reaction, Boroujerdi has made it clear that any dialogue requires the permission of the SL: http://www.rahesabz.net/story/20966/" rel="nofollow">http://www.rahesabz.net/story/20966/
I love this "secret" story for its dramatic elements, but leaving them aside, the raw fact appears to be an ongoing struggle for power between AN and the IRGC.

[Ange-Paris]

Perhaps our man is AN and the problem comes from SL and IRGC; that if he had free hands, he will become a great president !! perhaps he has a part of IRGC with him and he will make a coup ! perhaps he's the agent of USA ! my god, we become parano !!

[Catherine]

Hi Arshama,
RE "the raw fact appears to be an ongoing struggle for power between AN
and the IRGC"

Hey, wait a minute! I thought AN was supported by the IRCG. ???