All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
And next up on the show today is Flint Leverett from RaceForIran.com.
Of course, he teaches foreign relations at Penn State and is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation.
He also, of course, used to be a senior CIA analyst and was on the National Security Council and worked for the Secretary of State on the policy planning staff, et cetera, et cetera, like that in the George Bush administration.
Again, the website is RaceForIran.com.
He keeps that website there, that blog with his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, who is similarly credentialed.
Welcome back to the show, Flint.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
Good to be back with you.
Well, good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
I'm not so sure how happy I am about the news.
I really was trying to be optimistic about these Baghdad talks going on right now between...
Well, that was your first mistake.
Yeah.
Well, I, yeah, I guess it was.
I wonder why even bother if they really are going to go in there saying that no matter how low you capitulate, we will never lift the sanctions against you.
I mean, it's not even convincing on this end that they're trying.
Why even pretend?
They're going to do that bad job pretending.
Yeah.
Well, I think that they feel like if they want to, there is enough of a risk that the Israelis would strike before the election here, the election here, if there's not some ongoing diplomacy, that that is a motive for them to at least go through the motions.
I think they also feel like in terms of their, in terms of other international relationships, that with the kind of war talk, the war fever that was brewing vis-a-vis Iran, the effect that was having on oil markets earlier this year, that if the United States simply sat it out, you know, just said, we're not interested in doing diplomacy, they can surrender when they're ready to surrender, you know, that that was just not a viable international posture for the Obama administration in the run-up to the U.S. election, the presidential election here.
But, you know, the reality is this administration is no more prepared today to deal with the real issues that will determine if there is a deal, namely recognizing Iran's right to safeguarded enrichment and being willing to deal with sanctions and move toward a more normal relationship with this country.
The Obama administration is no more prepared to deal with those issues today than when they came in in 2009 and had their first go at diplomacy with the Islamic Republic.
It's as if these people have learned nothing, have fought through nothing, and have not in any way recalibrated their strategy toward Iran, toward the nuclear issue, to be more in line with, dare I say, reality.
Right.
I mean, OK, if they have to ameliorate the threat of an Israeli strike and if they have to calm the oil markets, because, hey, we got to calm this thing down, people are starting to flip out in the futures and drive the price way, way up here on the threat of war, we have to cool these things off temporarily.
Well, hey, we have to cool these things off for the long term, too.
And what's the benefit on the other side when the Mitt Romneys of the world and whoever else on the right are just going to say, do you see how naive you are?
You keep showing up over there and trying to have talks with these people, but you just can't have talks with a Shiite because they're just crazy or whatever.
And so all he does is open himself up to all kinds of political damage from the right for even going over there when if he would just see the ball through to the end zone, so to speak, and make a deal, we'll lift some sanctions, you re-sign the additional protocol, shake on it.
Then he could say, look at my great victory.
I told you that I could deal with Iran, you stupid Republicans, be quiet.
But he just leaves himself open for to be attacked as weak on the issue while not accomplishing a damn thing.
I agree.
Richard Nixon reportedly used to tell his staff about, you know, working on the breakthrough with China, working on other important issues.
It's supposed to have told his staff with some regularity that you pay the same price for doing something halfway as for doing it all the way.
So you might as well do it all the way.
And that was the mentality that got us the breakthrough with China in the early 1970s.
This is going to be a gamble.
It's going to be a political risk.
It's not easy to do, but it's important to do for the United States.
And so you need a president who's going to say, you know, I'm going to pay a price for doing this.
So if I'm going to pay this price, I might as well try and do it right and and get it right.
Well, meanwhile, that kind of mindset does not really seem very, very operative in this administration, unfortunately.
Yeah.
Well, and the whole thing about you can't deal with the Shiite because they're so crazy is just a bunch of who you can to.
That's the whole thing is that.
And in this particular case, it seems like the basis for the deal is just more than obvious.
I mean, it's just a little dialectical game.
They already played it.
You pile on a bunch of sanctions, then you offer to take some off.
Come on.
Yes.
But in the end, you have to really want the deal.
And that's what the administration I don't think they actually want the deal that would work, because it would mean they would have to go through some kind of public process of saying we have accepted Iranian enrichment.
We have accepted the principle and the reality of safeguarded, internationally safeguarded enrichment in Iran.
And we think that that is key to resolving the controversy, the tensions over the nuclear issue.
We think that is key to getting the United States on the path toward a better relationship with this incredibly important country and an important part of the world.
But they do not want to go through that.
They flinched in 2009 when they first came in and dealt with the issue.
There are people in the administration who understand very well that if you're going to get a deal, a nuclear deal with Iran, it is going to include Iranian enrichment.
But for every person in the administration who understands that reality, there's someone else in the administration who comes up with a political argument or, you know, an argument from the Israelis or an argument from some other quarter as to why the administration shouldn't do that.
And Obama has never been willing to bite the bullet and show leadership on it.
And so and yet the fact that we recognize the right to enrich uranium since 2005 or 2004 when they started.
Right.
I mean, it's not even a matter of the NPT.
I mean, yes, there's an NPT, nonproliferation treaty signatory.
Iran has the right to, you know, all civil nuclear technologies, including the fuel cycle.
But even apart from the treaty, you know, a country has a sovereign right to that.
It's not it's not based in a treaty.
It is one of the attributes of sovereignty that if you decide you want to develop nuclear energy, nuclear technology, you may do that.
Now, we have this international regime, the NPT, and we'd sure like for you to do it in that context.
And that's what Iran says it wants to do.
But we are not willing to, you know, take that logic chain to its conclusion.
Right.
But meanwhile, we'll go on and they'll go on enriching uranium, not just to three point five percent, but they'll continue on enriching up to 20 percent, which is what the Americans claim that they're so worried about is that the 20 percent, well, you can enrich it from 20 percent up to 90 percent pretty easily.
And so that amounts to a capability in this and that when they can negotiate that away, this thing that makes them so scared, they say the the Iranians have gone through all kinds of efforts to make it clear publicly, privately, through all kinds of channels that, you know, the 20 percent enrichment is in the context of a larger deal, the right kind of deal that is negotiable, that they only started 20 percent enrichment because they couldn't reach an agreement, satisfactory agreement to refuel the Tehran research reactor with an outside supplier.
So now they're making fuel on their own, but they are still prepared to negotiate about the 20 percent enrichment.
But one of the things that they want in that deal is a recognition they have a right to enrich.
There is no serious argument that they don't.
And it is it is really disappointing that, you know, three years, almost four years into his presidency, that Obama is still, you know, stuck in the kind of mediocrity and dysfunctionality that, you know, produced diplomatic failure with Iran in his first year.
All right.
Well, we got to hold it right there.
On the other side of this break, we'll be back with Flint Leverett.
He teaches foreign policy at Penn State and works at the New American Foundation.
The website is Race for Iran dot com.
We're talking about the Baghdad talks.
When we get back, we'll talk about Congress's role in all this and really the stats kind of catch up on the stats and negotiations, supposedly, as they exist today.
All right, so welcome back to the show, it's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I don't know how I'm still so naive.
I really was just trying to hope against hope that because the basis of a deal between America, which, you know, the U.N.
Security Council is just fronting for America on this one anyway, the basis of a deal between America and Iran is so easy and so obvious that I thought maybe they could just take it and maybe really it's just because I want a break from all the anti-Iran propaganda for a change.
I want war off the table for just, I don't know, a few months or something.
And we're talking with Flint Leverett about how apparently that is not happening.
The Baghdad talks going on yesterday and today are apparently going nowhere.
And we sort of skipped over any detail at the beginning.
It sort of just went without saying that it's all gone nowhere.
But can you tell us from what you understand, Flint, what exactly has gone on there in Baghdad?
Is there anything hopeful out of Iraq today?
I would say there are hopeful elements in that I think it's very clear, I mean, to me it's been clear for a long time, but I think it's become manifestly clear to to more and more people that the Iranians really would like a deal that everything that we have heard over the years from our neoconservative friends and others, that this is a crazy, irrational regime that is, you know, implacably and unreasonably anti-American or at the very least too dependent on anti-Americanism for its own domestic legitimacy to ever contemplate doing a deal with the United States.
And Hillary and I have been saying for years that that's not true.
That is a myth.
But now it's reaching a point where I think it's harder and harder to make that argument with a straight face that this is some crazy regime and doesn't want a deal.
They've come both to Istanbul last month, to Baghdad now.
They have had a very clear, coherent agenda, which they have pursued in a very measured and tactically rational way.
And I think that's a good thing.
We ought to want to keep that going.
We ought to want to stay engaged in it.
The problem comes in, OK, but the other side, the side with the United States on it, has to have something to put on the table, too.
And right now what we have is a big set of demands of the Iranians.
And in terms of what we would be willing to do, and remember last month in Istanbul, all parties agreed that this was going to be done on the basis of reciprocity, that if the Iranians did something, conceded something, offered something, there would be a reciprocal step by the other side.
And so you have this principle established, but, you know, the United States doesn't really seem to want to play in that way.
And even the Europeans, it's not just the Russians and Chinese, the Europeans now are basically saying that it's the United States that is holding things back.
The United States won't agree to deal seriously with the enrichment issue, and they won't agree to deal in a serious way with sanctions relief.
If you could get a deal that the Iranians would sign on to, you know, presumably part of what they would want out of this is some sanctions relief.
And the administration is just they just simply don't want to have that conversation.
And it really is all just domestic politics, right?
They can't lift the sanctions because that'll look bad.
And there's an election going on and all these kinds of things.
This is why there's obviously a very heavy domestic political component to it.
But there's also there's also a regional component to it.
And it's not and it's not purely wrapped up with with Israel.
Any part of what I keep coming back to the China model, because I think it is very relevant in the way that the United States could think about its relations with Iran.
I mean, what you had before Nixon and Kissinger went to China, what you had was 20 years of this really dysfunctional policy where we successive American administrations thought that if we do not absolutely keep down, crush, keep it in the tightest box possible, this communist regime in China, the United States isn't going to be able to have a strategic position in Asia.
That kind of logic ended up getting us into the Vietnam War.
And what Nixon and Kissinger did that's so important is they basically said, look, the United States has interest in Asia.
We're not going to withdraw from Asia.
But trying to be the hegemon, trying to be the guy who runs everything in Asia is just dysfunctional.
You know, we not even a country as powerful as the United States can do it.
And in order to have a more rational platform in this region, we have to come to terms with this big country called called China.
And I think that there is a very analogous logic at play in the Middle East where we've tried being the hegemon in the Middle East.
We've tried it in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places.
It doesn't work.
It actually makes us weaker by taking on that kind of that kind of project.
And we need to say, OK, we want to be active in the Middle East.
We have critical interest here.
But, you know, we're going to need to do this by recognizing and having positive relationships, all the important players in the region and especially with Iran.
But that is that is an argument.
That is a strategic logic, which this administration, unfortunately, seems no more capable of embracing than its predecessors in the Bush 43 administration were.
And it really does not.
In a way, it sounds like what you're saying is American strategy in the Middle East.
In a way, it sounds like what you're saying is without this bogus nuclear issue, we wouldn't have an excuse to punish them for their independence.
We wouldn't have a reason to pretend to fear their power in the region when really what threat are they anyway?
Well, you know, we'd come up with other reasons.
We'd talk about them as supporters of terrorism or, you know, we'd come up with another reason for it.
But you're exactly right in that the nuclear issue is very, very handy in that it provides the administration with a kind of cover.
It doesn't really have to face up to strategic reality in the Middle East and face up to the reality that the United States needs a positive working relationship with the Islamic Republic.
And, yeah, it really is a it really is a very, very profound strategic failure on on the administration's part.
And then so the talks still have one more day tomorrow.
Right.
And do you expect anything out of that?
No, I really think, you know, everyone's already seems to be indicating that, you know, the next the next any real action that's going to happen is is going to be in Moscow next month.
I think they've they've set dates now for for a couple of days of talks in in Moscow.
Well, at least they've agreed on that.
Yeah.
Which, you know, given what we were saying earlier about the kind of short term motives for the administration to be involved in a diplomatic process on this right now, you know, I think that and the Iranians understand this very, very well.
I think the administration has a real interest in avoiding a complete breakdown.
You know, a little bit like the the man at the circus with the plate spinning on the on the sticks, you know, they're going to work really hard to keep this plate spinning in the air, at least until November.
But, you know, unless they really come up with a with a policy and with a strategy, you know, this isn't going to be a very productive process.
All right.
Well, we'll keep our eyes on the race for Iran dot com.
Flint Leverett, foreign policy professor at Penn State and his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, keep their blog there.
Thanks very much for your time.
Appreciate it.
As always.
Thank you, Scott.
Always good to talk with you.
