The New York Times has an op-ed by Roger Cohen today about the future of American Middle East policy under Barack Obama. To start with the end, Cohen concludes that
Obama’s new Middle Eastern diplomacy and engagement will involve reining in Israeli bellicosity and a probable cooling of U.S.-Israeli relations. It’s about time. America’s Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy has been disastrous, not least for Israel’s long-term security.
I always love it when certain Americans advocate the “cooling of U.S.-Israeli relations” as a way of advancing “Israel’s long-term security.” It’s usually a pretty clear flag that the writer is engaging in transparent demagoguery. Cohen’s main thesis is that Iran no longer should be isolated, threatened, or in any way excluded by America. On the contrary, Cohen has discovered that “confrontational American high-handedness has been a disaster; that facile analogies between the Iranian regime and the Nazis dishonor six million victims of the Holocaust; that the regime’s provocative rhetoric masks essential pragmatism; and that the best way to help a young, stability-favoring population toward the reform they seek is through engagement.”
What led him to this conclusion? “I was in Iran in January and February.” He spent time there, and spoke to people there, and this is what they said.
Why does this sound so familiar? Probably because it’s exactly what people who visited the Soviet Union a generation ago tended to say. Yet to take this position with Iran today requires a far greater degree of naivete, if only because (a) Iran is much smaller, and (b) the West has already seen through the Cold War to its end. Ah yes — experience, you ruthless spoiler!
To make his case, Cohen is forced to take a position against none other than Shimon Peres, Israel’s President and no lackey of Netanyahu. Peres, who can be accused of many things but not of deafness to the dream of normalization and peacemaking with tyrants, said in a speech to the Iranian people that he hoped they would rise up and topple a regime led by “a handful of religious fanatics.”
This is the wrong way, says Cohen.
The basic problem with his approach, however, is that it really does not matter what people tell you after a two-month visit to a nasty enemy country. Inevitably you will be told you’re making a grave error by isolating, defaming, dishonoring, and alienating their people. And the more successful a confrontational policy is, the more they will tell you to knock it off.
But to believe them — to “go native” as the diplomats say — is to ignore the logic of the regime in question. Other than Israel’s democracy, the Middle East has three kinds of regimes. There are those whose legitimacy is based on monarchy. They tend to be stable and at least carry the pretense of moderation over the long haul. Then there are one-man personality cults, such as Nasser in Egypt or Qaddafi in Libya. These can often be bought, given the right combination of carrots and sticks. Finally you have the ideological revolutionary regimes, the Baathists, the Palestinian nationalists, and Islamic fundamentalists.
Such regimes can moderate or reform a bit at the margins, but will never switch sides when fighting you is the core of their ideology. And since fighting you is always at the core of their ideology, as long as you are a Western democracy, any signal you give them for friendship inevitably ends up being interpreted as a sign of weakness, a proof that the revolution can win. It does not weaken the regime, it strengthens it.
Perhaps a victory for reformists in the Iranian election in June will slow down the nuclear weapons project. But to think that any government under the ayatollahs will cease to be a source of violence, terror, and anti-Western hatred, is to misunderstand the core of their beliefs.
Some day, the Iranians may well replace their regime, as they did a generation ago. When they do, they will find a great deal of support from the democratic West. They know that, even if they don’t say it to Roger Cohen.
