09/24/13 – Stephen M. Walt – The Scott Horton Show

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So our first guest on the show today is Stephen M. Walt from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
He's the co-author, of course, of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, and he keeps a blog at foreignpolicy.com.
And I think I can be, yeah, more specific, it's walt.foreignpolicy.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
And today's a pretty exciting day.
Tell me, what do you think about what's going on at the U.N. so far?
Well, it's obviously a big event for the American president to be giving his annual address to the opening of the U.N. General Assembly.
But this year, it's been much more exciting than normal because of the possibility of at least some movement between the United States and Iran, in particular in response to the initiatives that the Iranian government has been making ever since their presidential election, and the possibility, in fact, I think now the reality that we're going to see some serious negotiation.
So now there were rumors that there was going to be a meeting, not just between Kerry and the Iranian foreign minister, but even between Barack Obama and Rouhani.
Was I right?
Is he in town, too?
Yes.
The Iranian president will be speaking, I think, later today.
I'm not exactly sure what the schedule is.
But for the last several weeks, there have been a variety of rumors and a sort of will-they-won't-they conversation about whether or not there would actually be a direct meeting.
Would that direct meeting be sort of inadvertent?
You know, they bump into each other in the hall.
Would it be something more formal?
Would it actually be a sit-down?
No one has really known about that.
And, you know, the fact that we're even obsessing over that question reveals just how large the gulf is between the two countries, that it's such a big deal for the leaders to even have a handshake or even have a conversation is really, itself, rather symbolic of just how difficult the diplomacy could be.
Yeah, I was reading this morning that the, Connolese Rice, I guess, had talked for just one very brief moment, or maybe not even that, back in the Bush years.
Other than that, something like even just John Kerry meeting with their foreign minister.
That would be the highest level talk since 1979, I guess, the talks over Iraq between Nicholas Burns, whether that was the ambassador to Iraq and the Iranian ambassador to Iraq or somebody like that.
That's a lower level meeting.
And on that much more narrow set of issues there about Iraq and America's relationship with Iran there and that kind of thing.
Yeah, my own view is that this is really quite misguided, that we get ourselves in these positions where almost in a childish fit of spite, we decide we're just not going to talk to these people that we don't agree with.
And the fact is, you need to be able to have diplomacy, even with your adversaries.
In fact, it's often more important with your adversaries.
We had constant diplomatic contact with the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, and that was a very good thing.
It didn't mean we agreed with them.
It didn't mean we gave away the store.
But the fact that we impose what is essentially an artificial barrier by saying we're not even willing to talk to people is deeply counterproductive.
And if you think about sort of the other times when we've done that, you know, we kept Communist China in the deep freeze for over 20 years, wouldn't talk to them.
We haven't really talked to the Castro regime in Cuba for over 50 years, and that hasn't had any positive effects that I can see.
So it would be very nice if we could get conversations with Iran and other countries with which we have disagreements on a more routine basis, so we could focus on the substance of our disagreements and not on the atmospherics, you know, whether or not there's going to be a handshake or not.
Right.
Well, now, as you point out on your blog here at foreignpolicy.com, Obama came into power with Iran specifically, not just foreign policy in general, and he wants to be a peacemaker type of a president, kind of a meme, but on Iran specifically, he came into power calling them the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was a seeming kind of in a way was saying we're not going to regime change you.
We recognize the legitimacy of your government for the first time this whole time.
We want to have talks.
He even originally proposed the 20% fuel swap thing before he rejected their acceptance of his offer.
So it seems like, well, again, as you say on your blog, the outlines of the deal are obvious here, and really all Obama has to do to be Obama the Great is just live up to what he said he was going to do in the first place, make peace with Iran.
It's almost that simple, but not quite.
The outlines of a deal are in place, but there are details in any kind of deal that will have to be worked out, and it may be that we can't get a deal that we're happy with.
We obviously ought to explore that, and we ought to explore it in a serious way.
I think President Obama, when he came in in 2009, did want to try and turn the corner here, but the real pattern of his first term was that any time he faced any serious domestic political opposition and any time things didn't go his way, he tended to back off.
It's also true that the Iranian presidential election of 2009, which obviously was contested and a lot of violence accompanied it, was not helpful at all if you were trying to change the relationship.
The optics now, and I think the political realities, are quite different.
You have a moderate president in Iran.
He apparently has gotten the authority from the Supreme Leader, Khamenei, to do these negotiations.
So in a sense, all the stars have lined up about as well as we could hope, and the key question now will be whether or not Rouhani on the Iranian side and Obama on the American side have the political will to push past those who are going to try and oppose this, try to drag things out, sort of run out the clock as it will, and not actually make any real progress.
Right.
Well, now, obviously one of the major themes of the war party this whole time has been that, look, these guys are all just obsessed with the 12th Imam coming back and whatever.
So you're not being realistic at all, Mr. Realist, when you say that they're just politicians and they want to maintain their power and that you can deal with them on a human level because they're lost in the world of the supernatural and they're, in a sense, crazy.
They're like David Koresh, right?
You can't negotiate that.
You just have to burn it.
And I wonder whether, do you think there's anything to that, or do you think that that narrative has finally died with the election of Rouhani?
I think that's nonsense, and it always has been the idea that Iran is led by a group of irrational mystics who don't look at interests, don't look at power, don't first and foremost want to keep themselves in power, I think is the sort of desperate argument that's made by people who can't come up with any rational or logical reasons to oppose trying to work things out.
I don't want to be overly idealistic here.
It's not as though there aren't some real differences, and it's not as though we don't have genuine security concerns with what Iran might do.
But that's, again, why you sit down and you try and negotiate a deal that protects our interests as best we can.
That's going to involve some hard bargaining.
It's probably going to involve some concessions on our part.
The United States is not going to get its maximal position.
You never do in any serious negotiation.
But I think the signs are that we can get a deal here that makes it sensible and rational for Iran to not cross the nuclear threshold.
I think that's a deal that's gettable, and we'll see through the negotiating process whether we can get that.
If we get that, and then we can start talking with Iran about some other issues where our interests may, in fact, ultimately align or at least overlap, that would be a huge positive step and would ultimately be good for the United States, but also good, I think, for many of our other friends in the region.
Well, and after all, they owe us one for overthrowing Saddam for them, right?
Yes, but I don't think they necessarily view it that way.
That was certainly not the purpose.
Remember back when we were overthrowing Saddam, the idea was we would do Iraq first, and then we would do Iran and Syria next.
So I don't think they look back on this as a sign of American benevolence.
I think it has been.
The whole Iraq episode has been one that has sobered up many Americans about the wisdom of these grand schemes for reordering the entire region.
And if that's the case, that's very healthy.
Well, now, on the craziness issue, you write on your blog that there are quite a few reasons to believe that the recent Iranian overtures are more than just talk.
I forgot exactly how you categorize it, but it's talk where they're basically putting it on the line.
They have to follow through with something here.
Right.
I mean, the main issue here is that Iran has not just said, you know, gotten up one day and given a speech saying, OK, we'd like to do a deal now.
We'd like to come in from the cold, as it were.
Ever since the election, there have been a whole series of events that the Iranian leadership has taken a whole series of steps, you know, releasing some dissidents, saying that the more radical factions of the Revolutionary Guard should stay out of this business for now.
And these are things that involve some political cost for Rouhani.
They're not just cheap talk.
They're involving putting his own reputation on the line.
So in a sense, if he makes this overture to us and it goes nowhere and six months from now, the United States is ramping up sanctions and refusing to budge at all on any of its positions, he's going to be dramatically undercut at home.
That's, again, not a statement that we're going to be able to work out all our issues.
It's just a statement that the Iranians are sincere about wanting to try and work this out, that we shouldn't feel like they're getting ready to, you know, hoodwink us in a big way, or this is all some kind of, you know, plot to fool the West into making lots of concessions.
I don't think that's true at all.
Hmm.
Now, don't get me wrong, because I can't imagine that anybody thinks that they have a real plan for carrying this out.
But it does seem that the policy on the American side all along has been regime change.
Hell or high water, someday.
Sort of like they passed the Regime Change Act against Iraq in 98.
And don't worry, someday our George W. Bush will come and carry this policy through kind of thing.
It seems like that is still the policy, is it not?
And how are they supposed to deal with us as though we're not crazy?
Yeah, that's a very good question.
There are clearly American politicians and Americans who think that, you know, overthrowing the clerical regime would be a wonderful thing.
And if we could figure out a way to do it, they would love to see us try.
I think those people are a remote minority now, and that's a very good thing.
Congress has passed various resolutions and has provided money to various Iranian exile groups in the past, which, you know, again, from an Iranian perspective, obviously looks very dangerous.
And one thing Americans should remember is we are a much more powerful country than Iran is.
You know, Iran's entire defense spending is only about $12 billion a year, whereas we're upwards of half a trillion.
And that should be borne in mind, too.
We look a lot scarier to them than they should look to us.
So yes, the Iranians, I think, have reasons to sort of question our sincerity.
I think Obama is sincerely interested in a deal.
I think he's got lots of support for that now, and I think the American people would support a sensible American negotiating strategy.
And as I said a while back, the real question is whether or not Obama now has the political will to really push forward on this, knowing that he's going to face some opposition on Capitol Hill and knowing that he's going to face a lot of protests from people who haven't wanted their relationship with Iran to improve at all.
Yeah.
Now, I got to ask you here, what's the big deal anyway?
I mean, I know they declared independence back in 79, and there are a lot of people in D.C. who hold a grudge about that.
And I know that Netanyahu and the Likudniks in Israel are terribly paranoid about the existence of any enrichment of any uranium in any way whatsoever, just like in his recent demands.
They better suspend everything and export it all, whatever they already have to, that kind of deal.
But is that it?
Is that what we're dealing with, an old grudge and the Israelis' paranoia?
Or is there something else here that matters that I'm not paying attention to?
Oil?
Well, all of those things are important, but there's a couple of other things.
It's not just the Israelis who worry about Iran.
It's also some of our other friends in the region, like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, who worry about Iranian power over time and don't want Iran to get too big, too influential in the region.
So they put pressure on the United States to do something about it as well.
Second, we've had, as you said, a troubled relationship with Iran for a long time.
And that's true on both sides.
Iranians sense that the United States has been sort of out to get them ever since the 1950s, when we sponsored the coup that brought the Shah back, and that ever since the Shah was ousted, we've still been trying to manipulate things.
So there's a lot of bad blood and some genuine strategic differences there.
That's why this is not going to be an easy process.
As President Obama said in his speech to the UN this morning, one shouldn't expect this all to get resolved overnight, right?
There's a lot of mistrust and, as you say, bad blood to work our way through.
But the only way to do that is to get started and to deal, I think, initially with the nuclear issue, because that's the most salient one, and then start looking at the other issues as well.
There's lots of evidence, by the way, that the Iranian people, and particularly younger Iranians, would like to have a much better relationship with the outside world, including a good relationship with the United States.
So there are no, it seems to me, unresolvable or absolute barriers to a very different relationship, and that would be good for us and good for Iran, and I think good, ultimately, for the region as a whole.
All right.
Now, very quickly here, we're almost out of time, but what do you make of John Kerry's efforts on the Palestine issue, the peace talks, as they call them?
Well, I've been skeptical that that was actually going to get anywhere.
And again, it will come down, I think, to a question of political will on the Obama administration's side.
They pushed hard on this in the first term, briefly, the very first year that President Obama was president, and then when they faced a lot of opposition from the Israel lobby and elsewhere, they backed off very quickly and really never raised it again.
The circumstances just don't look particularly propitious for this.
We have a quite hardline Israeli government.
We have a regional situation that's very much in flux, and there is a point where you sort of have too many issues going on simultaneously.
Obama said this morning that he's directing Kerry to negotiate very seriously with the Iranians.
There's just going to be a point where Kerry can't keep that many balls in the air simultaneously.
So I worry that if they're going to have to set some priorities here, as always, the Israel-Palestine issue will be the one that gets kicked down the road again, and it'll be the next president who gets to deal with that, which has been true, of course, for the last five, six, seven, eight presidents.
Well, now, what do you make of the Leverett's conclusion that what we need here is a real Nixon-goes-to-China-and-shake-hands-with-Mao kind of moment?
Because there's always going to be some kind of linkage between this, that, and the other thing that they can come up with over at Commentary magazine or whatever.
And so until we have a real breakthrough on just whether or not we're friends, we're never going to get anywhere on nukes, on Palestine, on anything else.
Well, there's two parts to that.
One is, I think their idea of a grand bargain with Iran often does make some sense, that in other words, you can't deal with all of these issues in isolation.
You have to see it as something of a package, even if that package doesn't all get resolved in the same instantaneous negotiation.
So the idea that we don't treat this just as getting Iran to give us what we want on the nuclear issue, and then maybe someday we'll talk about their issues, I think that won't work, and we'll have to think of this in a larger strategic context.
Where I'm more skeptical is the idea that an American president should pull a sadat and suddenly give a speech saying, I'm prepared to go to Tehran and talk to the supreme leader.
Some big dramatic gesture like that, a sort of Nixon to China thing.
We ought to remember that Nixon's trip to China wasn't just something that came out of nowhere.
There had been preliminary feelers.
Kissinger had gone there secretly.
You don't send the president off to negotiate something like that without having worked out in advance that really a deal is going to be had.
And therefore, I think the idea of some really bold initiative like that isn't quite realistic.
What we should be doing is thinking about the modalities and techniques that can get us to a larger conversation with Iran, but not necessarily with some big initial dramatic presidential announcement.
Right.
Okay.
Well, great.
Thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Very nice talking with you, Scott.
Good talking to you again, too.
That's Stephen M. Walt, everybody.
He teaches international affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and he blogs at Walt.
ForeignPolicy.com.
We'll be right back in a sec.
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