Iran-US relations: Behind the smiles

Handshake or no handshake, relations between the US and Iran have shifted decisively over the past week.

Demonstrating a deft touch with both America’s old and new media, Iran’s recently elected president, Hassan Rouhani, was the big draw at the UN General Assembly.

Of course, his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad also used to be the centre of attention at the UN but mainly because he questioned the Holocaust and made crude attempts to bait western governments. Instead, Mr Rouhani, through a series of interviews, speeches and tweets, has gone out of his way to present the image of a pragmatist eager to strike an atomic deal with the US.

Enemies since the Iranian revolution in 1979, the two countries are now taking the first wary steps towards some form of détente that has the potential to alter the politics of the Middle East fundamentally. Ultimately, the two presidents did not shake hands when they were both at the UN on Tuesday, as had been mooted. However they did talk on the phone on Friday afternoon when Mr Rouhani was on his way to the airport in New York, the first conversation between an Iranian and an American president since 1979.

“It is early days and it will require a lot of testing but Mr Rouhani has been more ambitious than I would ever have hoped,” says Suzanne Maloney, a former US state department official and now an expert on Iran at the Brookings Institution. “His PR has been masterfully orchestrated, even if his speech at the UN was a dud.”

US and western officials still remain doubtful about the prospects of reaching a deal that would stop Iran from being able to build a bomb. But they are aware of the huge benefits of a rapprochement with Tehran.

For a start, a nuclear deal would lessen the danger of the US going to war with the Islamic Republic, an unpredictable venture that some US military officials fear could drag on for years and cause enormous disruption to the global economy.

For Iran, an agreement with the US and the other major powers offers it the prospect of both relief from many of the sanctions that have been strangling its economy and a path out of its international isolation.

From Washington’s point of view, a rapprochement would put strain on its relations with Saudi Arabia, which sees Iran as a rival bent on regional hegemony, and with Israel, which could feel compelled to launch air strikes against Iran if it thinks the deal is weak. But a robust nuclear agreement with Tehran could make it easier to push for a political settlement to Syria’s civil war. If better relations with Iran reduced Tehran’s support for Hamas, it would help the peace process in Israel. Washington and Tehran would also rediscover that they have common enemies in the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

“It is not getting carried away to say this is an extraordinary moment because rapprochement with Iran would be the biggest positive shift in global affairs since the end of the Cold War and the normalisation of relations with China,” says Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “But if the US does not take this opportunity, it would be the biggest strategic error since the Iraq invasion.”

So far, this week has offered more style than substance but, given the layers of mistrust that separate the US and Iran, diplomatic theatre can play an important role.

Suspicion about the motives of the Great Satan have long run deep in Iran. Washington was a robust ally of the autocratic Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and an Anglo-American-led coup toppled Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953 after he had sought to nationalise the oil industry. For its part, the US has not forgotten the 1979-81 embassy hostage crisis or Iran’s links to the bombing of a barracks in Beirut in 1983.

Mr Rouhani tried to win the favour of a US audience by appealing for an end to “blood feuds” and by calling for “results-oriented talks to build mutual confidence”. Having used twitter to send out a Rosh Hashanah message to Jews, he tried to further distance himself from his predecessor by describing the Holocaust as a “massacre that cannot be denied”, even if some US critics still accuse him of fudging the truth.

In their speeches to the UN neither president broke new ground but Mr Obama did throw some rhetorical nods towards Tehran. He mentioned the victims of Iraqi chemical weapons and he adopted language favoured by the Iranians when he called for “mutual respect” between the two countries. “We are not seeking regime change,” he said.

After the high expectations, the harsher realities will become apparent when real negotiations begin on October 16 in Geneva. For all the goodwill, there are still likely to be substantial divisions on what action should be taken. Tehran will want to see swift relief from sanctions. The US and others, however, will have a long list of demands, including suspension of enrichment at the higher level of 20 per cent, closure of the Arak heavy water facility that western governments fear could produce plutonium and potentially freezing activity at the Fordow enrichment facility.

Beyond that, both governments will have to manage some strong political opposition at home if they are to secure a deal. Most of the US sanctions are the result of laws passed by Congress and many senior lawmakers are as deeply sceptical about Iran as the Israeli government. Mr Rouhani appeared plausible to many of the US foreign policy experts and newspaper editors he met in New York but he changed few minds this week on Capitol Hill. “Many of us believe they really have not changed a bit,” said Mike Rogers, the Republican chair of the House intelligence committee.

Rather than lift sanctions, the House has already passed a new round of measures, which the Senate is analysing. If the talks bring few early signs of success, Mr Obama will soon find himself accused of being duped by Tehran as it tries to buy time. Even if international inspectors can ensure that Iran’s facilities only produce atomic fuel for peaceful purposes, Tehran’s history of not disclosing the full extent of its nuclear plants means that many will suspect a parallel military programme.

In Iran, the more radical elements appear to be under control, for the time being, especially after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called for the government to adopt “heroic flexibility” in any nuclear talks. However, there are fears among the president’s allies that fundamentalists, who were severely defeated in the June presidential election, are waiting for the right moment to fire back.

“Rouhani has six months to deliver on nuclear talks before election campaigns for Iran’s parliamentary election [in early 2015] begin when radical forces will kick off a huge campaign against the president,” says Amir Mohebian, a professor of western philosophy at Azad University. “If Rouhani fails in the nuclear talks, then we will see a next president even more radical than Ahmadi-Nejad.”

As it happens, on the same afternoon Mr Rouhani spoke at the UN, leaders of the Revolutionary Guards were boasting in Tehran that their commitment to martyrdom would be enough to defeat the US. Brigadier General Ali Fadavi, commander of the Guards’ naval forces, gathered reporters on Tuesday to assert that Iran’s speedboats were far more efficient than “big and slow US warships” in the Gulf. The Guards were also more motivated, he said. “When it is a question of life, all calculations change, unless martyrdom is a bigger blessing [than life],” he added.

Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, strikes a cautious note on the possibility of a breakthrough. “The most difficult negotiations may not be between Obama and Rouhani, but between Obama and Congress and Rouhani and Ayatollah Khamenei. Both presidents are constrained by their domestic politics,” he says. “For longtime observers of US-Iran relations this appears to be a rare and propitious moment. Yet you have to manage expectations, mindful of the fact that the last 35 years has been littered with hopes of breakthroughs which never came to fruition.”

Despite all the political opposition, however, both leaders should be highly motivated to reach an agreement. Mr Rouhani was elected because he promised to get sanctions lifted in order to revive an economy where even the official figures put inflation at 39 per cent and youth unemployment at 28 per cent. “Iran’s economy is on a downward slope,” says an Iranian economist. “We fear that Iran may fall into a poverty hole and become like Bangladesh.”

At the same time, Mr Obama knows that if he does not reach a nuclear agreement with Iran, at some stage in the next three years he could find himself facing a perilous political choice – either to launch a war that he desperately wants to avoid or to accept a nuclear Iran. If he did the latter, it is not only Republicans who would label his presidency a foreign policy failure, just as Iran destroyed President Jimmy Carter’s reputation.

“The roadblocks may prove to be too great,” Mr Obama said at the UN. But both governments have powerful political reasons to do everything they can to reach a deal.