How the U.S. and Iran Keep Failing To Find a Peace They Both Want

"What had been a precondition under Bush -- the suspension of enrichment -- had become a postcondition under Obama," said Mohammad Khazaee, Iran's ambassador to the UN. But rather than engaging in deliberate deception, the Obama administration simply had not settled on a desired endgame with Iran, on the nuclear issue or otherwise. For the Obama White House, the destination of diplomacy was simply a function of the journey. Still, the lack of clarity on the endgame was not just a point of criticism by Iran or by the president's domestic opponents. Even senior Obama administration officials were unclear on the strategy and the endgame, as evidenced by the leaked three-page memo, signed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, that warned of the

U.S. lack of a coherent, long-term plan to deal with Iran's steady progress toward a nuclear capability. The memo came to light in April 2010 but was penned in January of that year -- just as the U.S. was embarking on the sanctions track.

There is the question of whether the Iranian government actually desires a deal with the United States. A common school of thought in Washington states that enmity with America -- the "Great Satan" -- is one of the uncompromising pillars of the Islamic Re­public. As a result, Tehran cannot come to terms with Washington without risking an internal identity and legitimacy crisis. The state ideology of the regime requires enmity with the U.S., and without it the internal contradictions of the Islamic Republic would reach a breaking point. Iran's periodic reluctance to engage with the U.S. is grounded in this ideological rigidity rather than in internal divisions in Iran, mistrust of the U.S., or disinterest in the specific deals the U.S. has put on the table. The main obstacle to a diplomatic break­through is not the manner of the diplomacy or its extent or lack thereof, or the specifics of the deal, but rather the regime's DNA.

The calculations of the Iranian hard-liners are, however, not so mysterious and incomprehensible that analysts have to resort to ge­netics to make sense of them. Part of the reluctance of hard-liners in Iran to negotiate with the U.S. has been rooted not necessarily in these ideological factors but in the fear that any relationship with the U.S. would force Iran to adopt policies in the region that are aligned with those of Washington and, to a certain extent, Israel. Iran would lose its independence and, much like Egypt after the Camp David agreement, its bid for leadership in the region. Moreover, by aligning with the U.S., Iran would be forced to invest in the survival of pro-American Arab dictatorships rather than pursuing policies that would win it soft power on the Arab street. Because the Iranian hard-liners have calcu­lated that the Arab street will ultimately overthrow the monarchial and pro-American regimes in the region, Iran's long-term security would be best achieved by aligning itself with the populace. Consequently, agreeing to any engagement with Washington -- on its terms and de­signed to rehabilitate Iran as a compliant U.S. ally -- would contradict Iran's long-term security interests in the region.

Likely cementing the hard-liners' view of the U.S. as an increasingly irrelevant power inca­pable of adjusting to the new realities of the region are the continued decline of the U.S. in the Middle East, the Arab spring of 2011, and the downfall of the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, and beyond. Any realiza­tion that an opportunity was lost with Obama in 2009 probably has yet to sink in. "What happened is clearly proving what our officials including Supreme Leader said," Soltanieh said. "The Americans come sometimes with the good words but in practice they might have a knife to [stick] in your back."

Iran's suspicions and mistrust, whether justified or not, were paralyzing. What the Iranians failed to appreciate was that Obama's ability to drive the policy and "wear the pants" within the U.S. government was partly a function of how willing Iran was to take the same risk for peace that it had grown accustomed to taking for a continuation of the long-standing "no-war, no-peace" stalemate. In retrospect, once George W. Bush took office in 2001 and adopted a confrontational approach to Iran, reformists in former president Mohammad Khatami's circle came to regret their failure to recipro­cate President Bill Clinton's outreach. The unprecedented willing­ness of the Obama administration to reach out to Iran and embark on a cautious reconciliation process, even if inadequate, is unlikely to be re-created by any later U.S. administration for some time. Likewise, the opportunity Iran had with Obama in the first months of his presidency will likely not be fully appreciated by the decision makers in Tehran until much later.

Seeking to pin the failure on either side does not offer a better understanding of the complexity of the conflict. At times, both sides showed goodwill, but at other times both were overtaken by their suspicions and fears. Both sides miscalculated and made mistakes, and both sides felt that the other side was taking a smaller share of the risk for peacemaking. Both sides were interested at different times in some sort of a deal; the question was and remains whether they have been seeking the same deal. Only through sustained, persistent, and patient diplo­macy can that question be answered.

Ultimately, the failure of diplomacy between the U.S. and Iran came down to insufficient political will and the atmosphere of mis­trust that granted neither side any margin for error. The proposals put on the table may have been flawed; at different points either side may have played for time or sought to delay talks; and goodwill measures may not have been reciprocated. But these phenomena do not make U.S.-Iran talks unique; they are common features in almost all negotiations. Talks that succeed do not do so because the pro­posals are flawless and because both sides play fair. Rather, they succeed because the many flaws associated with the talks are over­come by the political will to reach a solution.

The will for a diplomatic solution must be strong enough to overcome every last hurdle. In the case of the U.S. and Iran, diplo­macy was in effect abandoned at the first hurdle. And though the desire for diplomacy was genuine, the administration's lack of confi­dence in its chances of succeeding -- several high-level officials in the Obama administration told me separately that they did not believe diplomacy would work -- raises the question as to whether the White House would fully invest in a policy it believed would fail. Lack of political will also plagued the bureaucracy. After the June election in Iran, in particular, a combination of fear and "old think" -- sticking to old patterns because they were comfortable and less risky -- set in and helped reduce the will to see diplomacy through.

"People are just afraid of their own shadows," a senior State Department official said. "You propose something and people all scurry for cover. ... There is a collective inability to break the patterns of the past and the principles of the past. I mean, thirty years of doing something in a certain way is pretty powerful." This "collective inability," which is also present on the Iranian side but not necessarily for the same reasons, is what makes U.S.-Iranian tensions more than just an an­tagonistic relationship. It is an institutionalized enmity.

Excerpted from Trita Parsi's A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran (Yale University press).

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