Diplomatic Responses

I am a disappointment at parties.

In situations where I have to meet new people, especially non-academics, I will say that I study the modern Middle East. Often, I'll then be asked for my views on any number of contemporary geopolitical questions.

I usually don't have much of anything to offer. "Diplomacy-security-development" is not an idiom I'm very proficient using.

Now I know and respect people who wholly discredit this idiom as epistemologically vacant and politically suspect, but I can't plead that high-brow excuse.

I just don't know the ins and outs as I should, and I don't understand the work of the premises of individually-motivated rule-bound gamesmanship.

So with that disclaimer, let me pose a dangerous, naïve question: just what is the problem with negotiating a weapons-prohibition deal with Iran such as was announced today?

I want to run through 1) the main points of the deal, 2) the main objections I hear to our accepting them, and 3) my answers to these as a half-literate outsider to political science, international studies, and so on. On all of these, I invite your correction.

1) seems simple enough. The deal says Iran shall not take its metal-enriching programs further than it would need to have nuclear power. In exchange, the Western powers will drop their various economic punishments and prohibitions against the regime.

2) We cannot trust Iran as a negotiating partner because

a) the Islamic Republic is (somewhat of) a theocracy that could empower a fanatical elite indifferent to the suffering caused in a nuclear conflict, against which our democratic system is a safeguard.

b) "Death to America" has been a brand slogan for the regime in Tehran, and we should not be on speaking terms with people who maintain such a brand. They also maintain any number of heinous discourses against Israel, and Jews in general, that are if not promoted by at least associated with the state.

c) Iran has a poor human-rights record, and we should not reward violators of basic political decencies with recognition and inclusion if we can avoid it.

3) Within bigger pictures in modern history, I do not see the world or the US as less safe recognizing Iran or letting it determine its own sources for electricity. Furthermore, we can't make a political philosophy case against them without being completely inconsistent.

a) First and foremost, the US is the only country ever to use atomic weapons, and we did it as a secular democracy, against a civilian population, and against the advice of large parts of the security establishment.

I realize this basic point is a non-starter for many of my readers, so I will continue this section only addressed to basics of national interest, narrowly defined. 

In that, US-aligned, nuclear-armed Pakistan is much closer to state-failure than Iran, and militants there are at least equally callous toward inflicting suffering. And, anyway, why should we worry only about the evils of religious fundamentalisms?

We reached out to nuclear-armed China at the height of the Cultural Revolution, one of the most lethal episodes in world history, when control of the military and the security services were very much in question. We dealt with the nuclear-armed Soviet Union's atheist fundamentalism not through isolation but inclusion. We did this even in the Cuban crisis, when we actually did face a nuclear conflict of a level Iran is nowhere near capable of.

b) In keeping with this, we must note that when Iranian preachers and artists call for death to the US and to Americans, nothing has happens. Yet, in the US when neoconservatives and their liberal allies called for "regime change" on Iran's borders, the region descended into total chaos.

How can we hold the Iran's discourses (again, compare propaganda from China and the USSR) against it given the disproportions in effects of discourses in our two locations?

On the specific point of anti-Semitism, is not Islamophobia rampant in our political establishment? Are not Crusader themes a major element of our security discourses? Do not the regimes of Western Europe contain major racist and even para-fascist elements we are always explaining away as merely working-class resentment? 

We assume that cooler heads and geopolitical realities will moderate these influences. This assumption is highly questionable, but what makes Iran less susceptible to this moderation than anybody else?

Anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial are never acceptable, but do we imagine that isolation and punishment of a entire country will lessen their appeal? And do Zionists imagine these evils do not exist in other countries just because the US is allied with them?

c) Lastly, given that we have long-term alliances with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, given that we are deeply engaged with China and Russia, and given the ongoing reexamination of "the human question" itself in the face of violence and dispossession here at home, human rights gives us no special case against a country like Iran.

More to the point, how would any human rights, under whatever understanding, flourish in a country shut out from the internationalisms that have developed them?

I understand diplomacy is complicated, and I should not expect complete consistency in the geopolitical processes. I am sure there is plenty of information I do not have.

I do not mean the above questions rhetorically, and welcome contrary responses. By asking them, however, I am saying I do not think our special animus against Iran makes sense even within the narrow, cynical, and contested discourses of stability-freedom in which we have maintained it.