The Geneva Talks, Redux

While the U.S. (with the American media blindly following suit) has portrayed Iran’s willingness to enter negotiations as a function of the immense pressure of UN and unilateral sanctions (clearly misleading since Iran has never suggested that it is unwilling to talk to anyone, not even when there were no sanctions imposed on it all), U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also struck an unusually moderate tone in Bahrain over the weekend preceding the talks, directly addressing the Iranian delegation at a security conference and, perhaps to counter the week-long leaks of State Department cables and mindful of her Arab hosts, saying that the U.S. is firmly committed to a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear issue but also, in interviews, suggesting that Iran might one day be permitted to enrich uranium on its own soil. Enrichment of uranium, of course, has been the raison d’être of all four rounds of UN imposed sanctions, and seemingly the intractable issue for all sides in the Iranian nuclear saga.

While many in the U.S. media have expressed pessimism that the Geneva talks will result in any deal that could alleviate tensions between Iran and the West (and perhaps also Arab leaders, who, based on Wikileaks revelations, are out of sync with their populations on the danger Iran presents to them), some—ordinarily intelligent and one would think informed Iran experts, some of them Iranian-American—have suggested in opinion pieces that no deal is possible with the Islamic Republic as it stands, and that the U.S. should instead focus on empowering the “Green Movement”, as if the opposition to the Ahmadinejad government inside Iran is simply waiting not only for the U.S. to help it come to power, but that when it does, it will also simply do the U.S.’ bidding. It is this kind of dangerous thinking, combined with the American preference of applying pressure over serious diplomacy (Cuba, anyone?) that might lead one to believe that talks are doomed, at least as long as the U.S. is setting the agenda.

Up until now, American Public Diplomacy has been very good in portraying every failed diplomatic maneuver as the fault of the Iranians, while Iranian Public Diplomacy has been very weak in portraying, at least to the Western world, failures as partly due to U.S. intransigence and one-sidedness on the issue of enrichment, a right Iran has under the NPT. And if these talks fail, one might expect more of the same: handwringing in America over Iranian obstructionism and handwringing in Tehran over American hostility toward the Islamic Republic. But while many observers are anticipating failure, there is still reason to believe that the talks could succeed, at least in reducing tensions and setting the stage for further diplomacy.

All indications are that in these talks the U.S. will revive the idea of a nuclear fuel-swap as a confidence-building measure, first offered in Geneva in 2009 and subsequently revived by the Turks and Brazilians in May of 2010, but so far there has been no indication of exactly what the U.S. would be willing to offer in return for Iran’s “confidence building” gesture, and nobody, at least in the American media, seems to be asking. Would sanctions—all or some—be lifted while Iran sent most of its enriched uranium out of the country? If not, then why would Iran agree to do so? But given domestic pressure from his right, President Obama will have a difficult time lifting sanctions—“rewarding Iran” in the parlance of neo-cons and conservative American politicians—if all he gets is a fuel-swap deal, and given domestic pressure from left and right in Iran, the Iranian government will have a hard time selling the idea of a fuel-swap that doesn’t gain it something tangible in return. Given that Iran has already agreed in principle to a fuel-swap, however, it shouldn’t be difficult for it to negotiate the fine points of a deal, and given that U.S. unilateral sanctions, particularly banking sanctions that are affecting the Iranian people, go far beyond the scope of UN sanctions, it shouldn’t be difficult for the U.S. to agree to at least suspend some of the unilateral sanctions (or stop Stuart Levey’s globetrotting to get other countries to adhere to U.S. sanctions) while diplomacy runs its course. (Iran could, perhaps, also agree to more intrusive IAEA inspections—as a prelude to ratifying the Additional Protocol later—to provide the Obama administration cover against attacks from a rabidly anti-Iran Congress.)

What this would mean, though, is that the U.S. would finally be trying a third tack in its relations with Iran: one of pure diplomacy. The Bush-era tactic of all pressure and no diplomacy (“we don’t talk to evil”) didn’t work; the Obama tactic of pressure plus diplomacy (“carrots and sticks”) hasn’t worked, so perhaps all that’s left, short of war, is diplomacy and no (or at least reduced) pressure. And if there is a genuine will on the part of the Obama administration to come to an agreement over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, as well as over other issues of contention between the two countries, there is no reason to doubt that it can, despite what naysayers claim is Iran’s reluctance to enter into any sort of deal with the U.S., a claim that has been refuted by many Iranian politicians but most importantly the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, himself.