The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner interviewed progressive foreign policy expert Matt Duss about why this Iran gambit is such a mistake. Here Duss discusses how the Obama administration approached the problem, first with the nuclear agreement and what they saw as the advantages that agreement conferred for future progress:
Over the past several months, there has been incredible repression by the Iranian regime against Iranians. We don’t know how many people have been killed, but it’s in the many thousands. The Trump Administration has occasionally threatened Iran, saying that it can’t kill protesters, and has occasionally made noises about caring about the welfare of the Iranian people, but the Administration has obviously allowed the regime to continue killing protesters. What do you think would be a sane posture for America to take toward Iran, and does the repression that we’ve seen over the past few months change how you think about it?
Clearly, this is a bad regime. It’s a repressive regime. It uses enormous violence against its own people, which we’ve seen horrific examples of over the past few weeks. I think the approach to Iran that makes the most sense was the one that President Barack Obama had, which was to acknowledge that Iran poses a challenge on a number of fronts, the most important of which was the possibility of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. That’s why he pursued diplomacy to deal with that challenge aggressively. He did so with close international partners, and got what, I think, was clearly a pretty strong nonproliferation agreement that established heavy inspections and surveillance of Iran’s nuclear program. That dealt with that one challenge, but it also created the opportunity to begin to deal with the other challenges Iran posed.
At the end of Obama’s Presidency, right before Trump took office, there were a number of American sailors seized by Iran in the Gulf, creating a situation that could have escalated easily and ended very badly. But because there was a line of communication that had been built up between the U.S. and Iran over the course of negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, that situation was de-escalated and ended without real incident. The nuclear deal was an opportunity to begin to deal with issues like Iran’s support for regional extremist groups and questions of Iran’s internal repression. That opportunity was squandered when Trump withdrew from the agreement during his first term. It showed Iran, and frankly showed the world, that you cannot trust the United States. And I have to say, Joe Biden squandered an opportunity to rejoin that agreement and to re-start that channel. I would add this: historically, Iran’s internal repression has gotten worse when it feels threatened externally. I’ve heard this from Iranian activists. And when you dial down tension between the U.S. and Iran, space for reform begins to open up.
Now I think given the level of the Iranian government’s violence against protesters, my understanding, again, from talking to Iranian colleagues, is that we are in a different situation. There’s much less hope now, if any hope, that the current government could be reasonably reformed, but, still, the idea that we can change the Iranian government for the better through a violent regime-change operation, like the one we’re witnessing right now, has a very bad historical track record.
He says that the Biden administration made a mistake in the early years of his administration by thinking they could slow walk further talks in the hope of getting more which seems odd to me. They changed their approach later but it was too late.
Personally, I think it was probably hopeless anyway since the election of Trump and his subsequent idiotic actions showed that the U.S. was becoming unstable and there was no reason to trust anything we did. Electing him to a second term has pretty much written that in stone. Agreements with America have no meaning anymore.
But it is interesting to see what might have been if we didn’t lose our minds back in 2016.
