Opinion

A Taste Of Late-Season Cherry

The interim agreement restores mutual respect between the West and Iran, accepts Iran’s regional primacy

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A Taste Of Late-Season Cherry
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Diplomacy is a political art form. It requires patience, stamina, intelligence, discipline and the ability to ward off internal and external spoilers opposed to the prospect of reconciliation. The process leading up to the Geneva agreement with Iran required the ability to stay on course and the audacity to break with previous patterns. The Obama administration, the representatives of the European Union, the UK, France, Russia, China and Germany on the one side and the team surrounding the new president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, on the other, managed to remain goal-oriented. All parties remained focused on the prospect of reaching an agreement and were willing to pursue a quid pro quo strategy that did not leave the other side empty-handed.

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The result is an agreement that could be sold on both sides as a success. Iran managed to halt the drive to sanctions and unlock some of the country’s assets abroad. More importan­tly, sanctions on the country’s petrochemical and auto industry were temporarily lifted, on top of relief that will alleviate some of the economic calamities to have befallen Iran. On the other side, the European Union and the US in particular could boast of a halt in Iran’s nuclear enrichment activity beyond five per cent, more intrusive IAEA inspections and Iran’s willingness to negotiate about its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. The content of the agreement must be seen as a face-saving exercise for the Obama administration and Iran, the smallest common denominator that could be reached in the current context. The effect and political symbolism of the agreement, however, is nothing but historic. It has halted the drive to war and it has opened up direct channels of communication between Iran and the US for the first time since the Islamic revolution of 1979. The handshake between secretary of state Kerry and foreign minister Zarif could be followed, at the end of the diplomatic process, with a handshake between presidents Rouhani and Obama.

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For the first time in three decades of enmity, diplomats of both countries referred to each other without mutual demonisation. The discourse has shifted from narratives of aggression to diplomacy and reconciliation. Iran and the US, at least for now, have ceased to follow the route to conflict and are treading a new path that may lead to a permanent, strategic settlement that goes beyond the nuclear issue.

I have written more recently in On the Arab Revolts and the Iranian Revolution: Power and Resistance Today how shifts in rhetoric (discourse) beget shifts in policy. The current diplomatic language espoused by all sides have opened up the prospect of a larger strategic settlement with Iran, which may alter the dynamics underlying the international politics of West Asia and North Africa. The Obama administration understands very well that Iran is a regional power that cannot be sanctioned into submission or marginalised from the conflicts in Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iraq etc. There is an emergent understanding in the more liberal quarters of political elites in the US that Iran could be turned into a factor in the solution of regional crises, rather than ostracised as the ultimate threat to world peace. This is exactly why long-time US allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia are nervous: their criticism of the Geneva accord is a symptom of a larger anxiety. The fact that both failed to derail it is politically embarrassing, certainly for the Netanyahu administration, which adopted a loud campaign against diplomacy with Iran. Saudi Arabia has been rather more subtle, at least officially. The House of Saud certainly does not have an interest in being on the wrong side of history. But both Israel and Saudi Arabia are anxious about the legitim­acy that the accord has lent to the Islamic Republic. States thrive in a social environment. External recognition by a superpower (in this case the US), in the form of diplomatic engagements and agreements such as the Geneva accord, are crucial ingredients in the political mix that delivers political legitimacy to rulers. The jubilations at the airport after the return of foreign minister Mohammed Javad Zarif to Tehran exemplify this boost to legitimacy. What a difference to 2009, when thousands of Iranians demonstrated against the re-election of Ahmadinejad, not least because of his confrontational rhetoric in international affairs.

It is too early and analytically premature to speculate about a larger strategic settlement between Iran and the US. Yet it seems to me that the taboo against closer diplomatic relations has been broken on both sides. The more liberal American political elite seems to have changed their perspective of world politics after the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Slowly, these actors who play various roles in the Obama moment in American history seem to realise that a military success does not necessarily yield a strategic gain. In Iraq, and to a lesser extent in Afghanistan, the US may have won militarily—it toppled the Saddam and the Taliban regimes—but these ‘successes’ on the battlefield did not yield strategic gains. On the contrary, in both countries, insecurity has been heightened, and political factions close to Iran were emboldened. Indeed, in the regional make-up after the ‘war on terror’, Iran has emerged as an even more important player than before 2001. This was certainly not the aim of the neo-conservative engineers of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.

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So it is a simple reality in the region that none of the major conflicts can be solved without Iranian participation. If Rouhani and Obama continue to be successful in warding off the enemies of peace (right wing elements in both countries), and if the US manages to stay on course despite Israeli efforts to jeopardise the diplomatic opening, we may be in the process of witnessing a brave new world where Iran assumes the place it has claimed for centuries now, and where the country speaks and acts as a responsible member of a reconstituted international community.

(Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is director of the Centre for Iranian Studies at SOAS, University of London. His newest book, On the Arab Revolts and the Iranian Revolution: Power and Resistance Today, has just been published by Bloomsbury.)

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