Hassan Rouhani holds his first press conference after taking office in front of national and international press in the presidential press hall on August 6, 2013 in Tehran, Iran. (Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images)[/caption]Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani, known as a pragmatic and moderate figure, takes office after a period of eight years which saw Iran dragged into a sea of problems, chief among them the recurring crisis over the country’s nuclear program. Despite the obstacles he faces, he has a real chance of ending the lengthy standoff with the US over Iran's controversial nuclear program, provided that the US is willing to meet him half-way.
The Ahmadinejad years
In contrast to both Rouhani’s earlier efforts as chief nuclear negotiator and the team he is assembling now, Ahmadinejad and his team were politically naïve and inexperienced, with close to no knowledge of international relations, though they were simultaneously over-confident and narcissistic. They were also focused on promoting a rare discourse which was a mix of an idiosyncratic understanding of Islam and Iranian ultra-nationalism under the banner of the “Iranian school of Islam.”
Ahmadinejad took office in 2005, determined to change Iran’s reconciliatory approach towards the West under the reformist president Mohammad Khatami, who had been working in tandem with Rouhani, then Secretary of the National Security Council.
A paper drafted by Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2007 attacked the conciliatory discourse of “critical dialogue” towards the West during the presidency of Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989-1997), and proposed a strategic change in Iran’s position from “the accused to the accuser”. In other words, “the best defense is a good offense” became the doctrine of choice in respect to Iran’s foreign policy.
It was in pursuit of this policy that Ahmadinejad and his team raised the issue of the Holocaust, questioning the veracity of mainstream historical accounts. Ahmadinejad’s team would argue that the Holocaust is the Achilles heel of both Israel and the US. In 2007, one of Ahmadinejad’s advisors said in an interview that “by raising the issue of the Holocaust we closed [Iran’s] nuclear file.” Prior to Ahmadinejad taking office, no Iranian official or religious leader, including the two supreme leaders, raised the issue of the Holocaust or questioned its validity as a historical event.
This controversy—combined with other statements, including the widely-reported mistranslation about “wiping Israel off the map”—were highly detrimental to Western diplomatic approaches toward Iran. Hardliners in Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the US used them to mobilize the western media to create a powerful anti-Iran atmosphere. Meanwhile, these statements raised the cost of negotiating with Iran considerably for any administration in the US.
Ahmadinejad’s emergence coincided with two developments that facilitated the actualization of Iran’s aggressive foreign policy. First, the collapse of Iran’s two arch enemies: the Taliban to the east, and Saddam Hussein to the west. In the case of Iraq, Iran, due to its historical relationship with the Iraqi Shi’a opposition groups, could quickly position itself as an influential actor in Iraq’s politics after Saddam’s fall, and thus impose pressure on the US and limit its room for maneuver in the post-Saddam years.
Second, the sudden increase in the price of oil, hitting historic highs after 2005, generated a surge in oil revenues for Iran, permitting it to adopt increasingly aggressive policies challenging the US hegemony in the region.
On the nuclear front, Iran abandoned confidence-building policies in favor of the new strategy of changing its position from the accused to the accuser, expanding its nuclear program dramatically in response to Western pressure. The Ahmadinejad team’s rationale behind their aggressive nuclear policies was based on two miscalculations.
First, due to the lack of a coherent geopolitical perspective, they believed that imposing effective sanctions on Iran was not achievable. Hossein Moussavian, a former diplomat and nuclear negotiator and current associate research scholar at Princeton University, maintains in his book The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir, that there was a school of thought in Iran that argued that threats to refer Iran’s nuclear dossier from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to the United Nations and passing sanction resolutions against Iran “was all a western bluff and would not happen.”
Second, they believed that if Iran would cross the technological barrier of mastering the complete nuclear fuel cycle, the US would be forced to retreat in the face of a fait accompli. As it transpired, they were wrong on both counts.
Now Rouhani has emerged, seemingly with completely different strategic thinking. He, under the banner of “moderation,” is determined to bring Iran’s nuclear issue to an end, but beyond that seeks to move toward normalization of relations with the US. “Iran is not supposed to refuse to talk to the US and the relations [between the US and Iran are not supposed to] remain severed,” he remarked before his election.
Rouhani’s advantages
Hassan Rouhani has political experience and credentials that can hardly be matched in Iran. He served as the Secretary of the National Security Council (NSC) for 16 years, eight years as the Head of the Foreign Policy committee of the Parliament (Majlis), and was Iran’s chief negotiator with the EU3 (Britain, France and Germany) from 2003-2005. So it is a safe assumption to say that Rouhani knows and understands both foreign policy and the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.
Meanwhile, Rouhani has a close and long-standing experience of operating effectively within Iran’s corridors of power, including having served for 23 years as Ayatollah Khamenei’s representative on NSC prior to his election. This places Rouhani in a unique position in negotiations with Iran’s Supreme Leader, as well as political-security members of Iran’s NSC, while he is negotiating with foreign powers to strike a deal. The voluntary suspension of the uranium enrichment between 2003 and 2005, a confidence building measure, happened thanks to Rouhani’s negotiation skills, and the use of them on actors both inside and outside of Iran. This has profound implications. Many politicians, as well as analysts in the US and Israel, argue that Rouhani’s election would not alter Iran’s policies because the ultimate decision-maker is the Supreme Leader. However, this ignores the fact that while the Iranian Supreme Leader may hold an exalted position in Iranian society, he cannot escape the human trait of being influenced by those around him, particularly a president with a powerful mandate underpinned by millions of votes. This fact explains why, during the presidency of Khatami, Iran could adopt a moderate, tolerant foreign policy, while Ahmadinejad followed a belligerent foreign policy that enraged much of the world.
More interestingly, Rouhani’s foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, is among the savviest and most skilled of Iran’s diplomats. Zarif was the major actor in the crafting and conducting of dialogue and cooperation with the US envoy during the developments that resulted in the formation of Hamid Karzai’s interim government in the aftermath of the fall of the Taliban in 2001. When the focus shifted from toppling the Taliban to establishing a new interim government in Afghanistan at the Bonn Conference of December 2001, “Zarif had achieved the final breakthrough without which the [Hamid] Karzai government might never have been formed,” according to James Dobbins, the US point man at the conference.
Hossein Mousavian told this author that Zarif also played a major role in drafting Iran’s 2003 “grand bargain” proposal to the United States, which was never responded to by the neo-conservative-influenced government of George W. Bush. The fact that Javad Zarif has been appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs informs the world that Rouhani intends to change the trajectory of Iran’s foreign policy.
Rouhani’s Opportunities
Iran’s economy is in crisis. Inflation is skyrocketing, unemployment—especially among the youth—is rampant, and the Rial, Iran’s currency, has lost two-thirds of its value since the end of 2011. Besides the mismanagement of Ahmadinejad’s team, which has been partly responsible for bringing the economy to the current situation, economists inside Iran unanimously maintain that sanctions have also had a profound impact. This situation presents Rouhani a tremendous opportunity to gain the support of Ayatollah Khamenei and the power elite, such as leading figures in the military-security apparatus, to directly negotiate with the Americans and reach a solution on the nuclear issue. If it were not for the deteriorating economic conditions in the country, forces such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) would certainly constrain Rouhani’s room to maneuver.
The case in point is the letter that several IRGC commanders sent to President Mohammad Khatami at the peak of the reform movement. The letter read, “Despite all the respect that we have for you we have lost our patience. If you do not take action [on controlling the reform movement] we will not tolerate the situation anymore.”
Javad Zarif’s strong vote of confidence from the parliament on August 14 indicates that there is a consensus on the necessity of shifting the course of foreign policy to a rational, pragmatic, and realistic one.
The nuclear issue, although a major challenge, also provides Rouhani an opportunity to reach to a compromise on this most disputed issue between Iran and the United States. A deal on the nuclear issue is far easier than one, for instance, on human rights, which involves numerous subjective elements. A deal on Iran’s nuclear program—although not easy—would be about tangible and verifiable factors.
Moreover, because reaching a solution on the nuclear issue would require lots of talks and compromises, it could set a precedent proving that the two countries are abandoning their decades-old uncompromising stances. An agreement on the nuclear issue could be used as a springboard to tackle other areas of dispute between the two countries, namely terrorism and human rights.
Another issue that presents itself as an opportunity is the chaotic situation in the region. Extremism and instability threaten the security of both countries. Iran, the US, and its regional allies can form an effective partnership to confront and contain both. Today, the main beneficiaries of the conflict between the US and Iran are jihadist groups, while Iraq and Syria are vulnerable and could easily slide into a state of collapse, and become home to organized crime, drug trafficking and terrorism. Chaos in these two countries could spill over into their neighbors, potentially destabilizing the whole region. Iran is well positioned in both countries, and can cooperate with the US and its western and regional allies to stabilize Iraq and Syria before they spiral into total chaos.
More interestingly, if tension between Iran and the US eases and a set of objective measures that prevent the development of a nuclear weapon is agreed, tension between Iran and Israel on the one hand, and Iran and Arab countries in the region on the other, will be mitigated, and with it the risk of a disastrous regional war. This factor could also motivate the US to reach agreement with Rouhani’s government, because the current status quo, with its persistent tensions, is unsustainable.
Rouhani’s Challenges
Rouhani faces numerous challenges and obstacles to bringing the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program to an end, both at home and abroad. There is not enough space here to discuss all those challenges, but the most notable are as follows.
Israeli hardliners, the pro-Israel lobby, and the Congress of the United States have consistently advocated that pressure is the only way to persuade Iran to change course, meaning an increase in the sanctions to an intolerable level.
For example in an August 12 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Senator Mark Kirk and Representative Eliot Engel argued that:
“American resolve is critical, especially in the next few months. By bringing the regime to the verge of economic collapse, the U.S. can convert that leverage into a diplomatic solution, forcing Iran to comply with all international obligations, including suspending all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.
"We can go a long way toward achieving that goal by taking the rest of Iran's oil exports off the market, cutting off access to its overseas reserves, and blacklisting strategic sectors of the Iranian economy. The House voted 400 to 20 last month to approve such measures. It's time for the Senate to act.”
Observers consider the bill mentioned above, H.R. 850, the toughest sanction bill on Iran to date, and a de facto oil embargo.
Assertions like those in Kirk and Engel’s article have many supporters in Washington, yet are unsubstantiated and dangerous. Iran’s nuclear program has become a huge symbol of national pride. The Iranian leadership has constantly linked Iran’s nuclear program to the nation’s pride and dignity (ezzat-e melli). To surrender to pressures and suspend that program is consequently tantamount to betrayal and selling the nation’s dignity. The Iranian leadership will lose its authority and stature among grassroots supporters and rank-and-file conservatives. Simply put, the nezam (Iran’s political system) cannot afford the costs of such a decision.
Meanwhile, it would be an obvious and glaring breach with the discourse of Iran’s Islamic revolutionary ethos, which advocates resistance to bullying and pressure from foreign powers, to surrender to coercive US policies. In other words, the United States is not simply asking the Iranian government to change its policy. Rather, it is asking them, in a sense, to accept foreign domination and give up their independence under coercion. What makes the matter worse is the involvement of Israel, which wants to impose a perceived humiliating compromise on the Iranian nezam.
Consequently, the Iranian scholar and former nuclear negotiator Hossein Mousavian wrote that when negotiation with the EU3 was falling apart in 2005, he told the representatives of the European powers that “Iran would restart enrichment at any cost.”
The monumental challenge facing Rouhani is to convince the US that if they are genuinely seeking a peaceful, diplomatic solution, there are other ways than the suspension of uranium enrichment to address their concerns about the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program. What Rouhani can offer to win the trust of the West, as he has repeatedly said, is to implement objective measures for creating maximum transparency, in order to ensure that Iran will not make any move toward weaponization. Issues such as putting a cap on uranium enrichment at five percent, or shipping the existing stockpile of enriched uranium outside the country, are technical issues that are negotiable and solvable.
Furthermore, in exchange, Iran should be offered sensible relief on sanctions, in order to be able to both convince Iran’s leadership of the benefits of negotiations to finalize a nuclear deal, and to pull the economy out of its current situation. A piecemeal approach by the US will not be helpful. As a former Iranian politician told this author, “the US should be ready to give big if it expects to get big.”
In their op-ed, Senator Kirk and Congressman Engel posit that “It is clear that talks will only succeed if the regime feels pressure to change course.” However, the realities point in the opposite direction. In 2003, Iran had 164 centrifuges. As sanctions piled up, more centrifuges were built. Today Iran has 18,000 centrifuges. In 2003 the country had one fuel enrichment plant, today it has two. The second one was constructed beneath the mountains south of Tehran as sanctions toughened. Before imposing sanctions, Iran produced low-enriched uranium of 3.5 percent purity. As sanctions heightened, they moved to higher purity and produced 19.75 percent enriched uranium (weapon-grade uranium should be above 90 percent purity).
To conclude, Rouhani is determined and is in a position to end Iran’s nuclear crisis. However, for that he needs cooperation from the US. The perception that paralyzing sanctions will force Iran to suspend its nuclear program is out of touch with the realities of Iran’s politics. If H.R. 850 is finalized and implemented based on this misconception, we would enter a new level of conflict. Once a cornered, oil-embargoed Iran has nothing else to lose, it could take an irrational and potentially dangerous path.
