Reinventing Iran's foreign policy
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has opposed the description of his
country's nuclear issue as a crisis. Yet there are strong indications that this
is indeed an apt word to describe an increasingly volatile situation engulfing
all sides of Iran's foreign policy, including that toward Iraq and other Arab
states of the Persian Gulf. The situation warrants a serious review of the
course of action adopted by the new administration in Tehran.
Indeed, in addition to the nuclear problem portending a showdown at the UN
Security Council in the near future, there are alarming signs of trouble nearly
everywhere: Iran's relations with the United Kingdom have hit a low, with
London's accusation of Iranian complicity in the spate of attacks on British
soldiers in southern Iraq; the European Union going along with Washington's
march for UN action on Iran; India casting votes against Iran at the UN
atomic agency; Turkey and Pakistan, two critical neighbors of Iran,
openly embracing Israel, a country daily threatening Iran with military strikes
at its nuclear facilities; and, as if things were not bad enough, Saudi Arabia
leveling serious charges of Iranian meddling inside Iraq.
In terms of Iran's regional policy, the new tumult in Iran-Saudi relations is
unsettling, and untimely, and the announced postponement of Foreign Minister
Manouchehr Motaki's visit to Saudi Arabia only reinforces the suspicion that
the recent anti-Iran pronouncements by key Saudi officials have not been
aberrations but, rather, ominous signs of a growing rift in what has been a
pillar of stability in the turbulent Persian Gulf region.
Closer ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia in the post Islamic revolution days
had resulted in part from the 1999 landmark visit by then president, Mohammad
Khatami, paving the way to an agreement on low security cooperation with the
Saudis in 2000.
The roots of this rapprochement were hatched in the early 1990s during the
presidency of Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani who, in 1991, advocated the notion
of collective security in the Persian Gulf, that as part-and-parcel of a new
"pragmatic turn" in revolutionary Iran's foreign policy.
But it would take several more years of reciprocal confidence-building,
punctuated by the Kuwait crisis of 1990-91, when Iran opposed Iraq's invasion
of Kuwait, yet remained neutral during the conflict, ie, a "tilted neutrality"
by all indications, before the two countries could actually normalize their
relations.
These two "pillars of stability" in the oil-rich region have much in common -
within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the Organization of
Islamic Conference, the threat of al-Qaeda, etc - to risk a sour return to past
patterns of tension-filled competition, yet there are unwelcome signs of
trouble requiring creative diplomacy on both sides to prevent a further
deterioration in relations.
Unfortunately, it might take more than mutual diplomacy by Tehran and Riyadh to
set things straight, for a nub of the problem is the entwinement of their
diplomacy with the ebb and flow of the politico-military situation inside Iraq
and, clearly, there is no way to fully disentangle Iranian-Saudi relations from
the complicated web of relations within Iraq. These include the semi-civil war
between the Shi'ites and the Sunnis and the functional ties between Iran's
nuclear policy and its policy toward still-occupied Iraq.
Concerning the latter, various empirical signs indicate Tehran's recourse to
its influence inside Iraq as an indirect bargaining chip with Europe, above all
London, with respect to the nuclear issue, seeking to take advantage of the
soft support of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Iraq policy at home.
Coined as nuclear poker by certain analysts, Iran's multi-pronged policy is,
however, far from irrational, as seen through the prism of Iranian interests
and, what is more, shows the direct value of the "other linkage" dreaded by the
West, namely, Iran's linkage of its role in Iraq, positive or negative, with
the behavior of London and its other European partners vis-a-vis the nuclear
question.
After all, if the European Union has explicitly linked its nuclear and trade
policies toward Iran, why shouldn't Iran reciprocate by linking security with
the nuclear issue? This, at least, seems to be the rationale in Iran today.
But, as stated above, one of the negative side effects of this new Iranian
linkage policy has been on Iran-Saudi relations, and Iran's Saudi policy is
suddenly experiencing jitters that could well get worse, depending in part on
what happens inside Iraq and also what happens come the next IAEA meeting on
Iran and the current US-EU drive to send Iran's file to the UN Security
Council.
Concerning the former, Iran of course does not call most of the shots in Iraq,
and the growing rift between Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister
Ibrahim Jaafari (favored by Tehran) is yet another serious indication that the
Iranian script, or hoped-for scenario, for the post-Saddam Hussein Iraq cannot
be taken for granted and, perhaps, a fresh re-thinking of the policy is called
for. (See
The dilemmas of Iran's policy toward Iraq, Asia Times
Online, May 20, 2004.)
Hence, on a broad level, Iran's overall foreign policy can be reasonably
described as in a situation of uncertainty and tumult, caught in the
bureaucratic wheel of political transition, wherein the new cadre of political
advisors with little or no foreign experience find themselves parachuted into
the shark pool of international and regional politics, with signs of danger
lurking at every corner.
Thankfully, there is continuity in terms of foreign policy personnel - the new
foreign minister was picked from the Foreign Ministry and several policy-makers
and diplomats from the previous administration have retained their posts,
although it is far from clear that they will exert the same influence on the
direction of policies as they did before.
Indeed, the whole riddle of Iran's foreign policy right now is how to strike a
working, and delicate, balance between continuity and discontinuity or, said
otherwise, to promote a reordering or restructuring of foreign policies and
priorities when there is little or no guarantee of success by doing so.
It is, of course, way too early to draw a conclusive balance sheet of the
foreign performance of the new administration, but a tentative one may be
called for. Take the case of Ahmadinejad's recent trip to New York for a
meeting of the General Assembly. Was it successful or not? A number of policy
experts consider it as either less than successful or "counter-productive" for
one reason or another, their argument being, to the extent that one can
summarize, that the Iranian president failed to add to Iran's friends and to
sway the undecided in Iran's favor and, instead, antagonized potential friends
by his fiery speeches rekindling the memory of revolutionary Iran a quarter
century ago.
Needless to say, it is difficult to coin an act in a process successful or
unsuccessful, and we have to see how the actors use their own criteria, ie, in
terms of the president's home-based constituents, his UN performance was a big
hit that added to his popularity as a no-nonsense, tough politician who cannot
be coerced into compromising the principles.
Yet, the horn of the dilemma of Iranian foreign policy is that what may be good
or functional for domestic purposes may not actually be so good on the foreign
front, and vice versa. And add to this the paradoxes of Iranian preferences,
such as for simultaneous trade expansion with Europe while confronting the EU
head-on over the nuclear issue.
It would be one thing if all the components of foreign policy, and the
underlying interests, could be advanced simultaneously, but in a situation of
(proto) crisis there is usually a sacrifice involved, and this where the
foreign and domestic priorities do not meet eye to eye.
Nor is the solution a return to the past, and the policy experts who only see
the negative in Iran's resort to a more hardline politics ignore the importance
of this shift with respect to US-Iran geopolitical competition in the region,
for the fact is that Iran is now better poised to meet US pressure than a year
ago, by unifying its political structure and thus achieving greater
cohesiveness, albeit while exacting prices with respect to rules of political
pluralism.
By the same token, and this forms the core of our puzzle, this internal
re-orientation faces structural limits by the foreign policy prerogatives
dictating the need for policy continuity with respect to the past, for the most
part that is, including with respect to Iran's neighbors in Central
Asia-Caucasus and the Persian Gulf, the two main orbits of Iran's foreign
policy. Having said this, continuity does not necessarily preclude creative
adjustments, and even experimentation and the latter can be most vividly
observed in the actions and announcements of Iran's new top nuclear negotiator,
Ali Larijani.
Larijani has "shaken the bowl" by trying to increase the pool of nuclear
interlocutors beyond the European three (EU-3 - Germany, France and Britain),
and by resorting to an Iranian version of carrots and stick - the stick being
the threat of an oil embargo on the West if it misbehaves on the nuclear rights
of Iran, the carrot being continued Iranian cooperation with the IAEA and the
ratification of the Additional Protocol.
Ultimately, the Iranian carrots or the sticks will gain the upper hand and,
before that transpires, we can hopefully discern a new strategic outlook
operating behind such tactical initiatives that could conceivably come to
naught if not played with adequate political acumen.
As the nuclear "game" goes on and the various players act and react to the
other side, and as the clock ticks closer and closer to a final decision
tilting Iran's nuclear issue toward the Security Council, possibly next month,
rational foreign policy decision-making in Iran has increasingly turned into an
exceedingly complex agenda dealing with the tricky question of how to correctly
tabulate the other side's responses to Iran's initiatives and to solicit the
kind of reaction desired and not the opposite, and that is one criterion of
success on which everyone agrees.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-authored
"Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", The Brown Journal of World Affairs,
Volume X11, issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
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