Unthinkable (20 page)

In fact, during the second half of 2009, after Iran's disputed presidential election in June, the birth of the Green Movement and its brutal suppression by the regime in the summer of that year and on into the fall,
the Obama administration was noticeably (even reprehensibly) quiet about Tehran's gross violations of human rights. As many commentators observed, the administration barely condemned the events there, and was criticized by conservative Americans, liberal Europeans, human rights groups, and Iranian opposition figures for its silence. This reticence was not accidental but deliberate. As senior administration officials explained, they believed that they had to convince the Iranian regime that the United States was not trying to overthrow them if they were going to get Iran to accept the offer of engagement and agree to a deal on the nuclear program. They said that they felt bad for Iranian oppositionists being killed, tortured, and imprisoned by the regime, but they were not going to make a bunch of “empty statements” condemning the human rights abuses and so jeopardize engagement and a deal on the nuclear issue.
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As Karim Sadjadpour and others have pointed out, Iranians recognized this American choice, too; many in the Iranian opposition were “concerned that the U.S. has focused far too much on the nuclear issue and far too little about their plight.”
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The administration was so intent on securing a nuclear deal that they were willing to condone the regime's brutality to get it.

In the spring of 2010 I traveled to Beijing to meet with a range of Chinese officials to discuss Iran. What I found most striking about these conversations was that, unprompted, many of the officials I met with volunteered that they felt that the Obama administration had “done everything that Iran needed if it wanted a rapprochement” with the United States.
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Several of them pointed out that, given China's own history of having engaged in the difficult process of rapprochement with the United States in the 1960s and '70s, they knew what a genuine change looked like and what each side needed to make it work. They believed that the Obama administration was sincere and had done what was necessary if Iran were interested. They indicated then that if Iran were not willing to accept the American offer, Beijing would take this recalcitrance as a sign that Iran was not sincere and so China would join the West in imposing heavy sanctions on Iran through the UN Security Council. Less than two
months later, Beijing made good on that threat, stunning the Iranians by voting in favor of UNSC Resolution 1929, which banned all weapons sales to Tehran and enabled the financial and oil sanctions on Iran that have proven so crippling to the Iranian economy. It had been assumed that Beijing would continue to oppose sanctions on Iran on principle, because China has extensive trade with Iran and because the Chinese government feared giving the United States a precedent to go to war with Iran as it had done with Iraq. China's decision to support Resolution 1929 demonstrated which party the Chinese felt was trying to resolve the impasse, and which was not.
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FROM ENGAGEMENT TO SANCTIONS.
In late 2009, the Obama administration all but gave up on its initial bid at reconciliation with Tehran. It remains official U.S. policy that Washington will begin direct talks with Tehran aimed at resolving the nuclear impasse and, in the longer run, restoring good relations between Iran and America. Obama administration officials continue to indicate that this preference is real. But the events of the fall of 2009 convinced American officials that neither a resolution nor a rapprochement was likely, at least not in the short term, and not until Tehran became convinced that its stubbornness would prove costly.

In October of that year, representatives of the P-5+1 countries (the five permanent members of the UN Security council—the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China—along with Germany) met with Iranian officials first in Geneva and then later in Vienna. The P-5+1 proposed a confidence-building agreement in which Iran would agree to ship out 80 percent of its stockpile of LEU. In return Iran would receive processed uranium in the form needed to produce medical isotopes by the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR). At that time, Iran was claiming that it needed the LEU to fabricate new plates to refuel the TRR, while the rest of the world feared that Iran would take its stockpile of LEU (which was approaching the amount needed for a single nuclear weapon) and begin enriching it to bomb-grade purity for use in a weapon. Thus, the deal would allay international concerns and meet Iran's ostensible desire to
refuel the TRR. In Vienna, the Iranian representative, Saeed Jalili, agreed. But when he reported back to Tehran, his superiors quashed the deal. The TRR proposal appeared to the international community to be a “no-brainer.” If Iran was just interested in civilian uses, why not ship out the LEU in return for fuel for the TRR, which would be difficult to enrich to bomb grade? Tehran's refusal convinced Washington and its international partners that Iran was not looking for civilian uses.
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The Iranians claimed, both at the time and since, that they turned down the TRR deal because they did not trust the international community to make good on its pledge to provide Iran with the uranium assemblies for the TRR. In the past, both Germany and France have reneged on nuclear agreements with Iran for diplomatic and security reasons, so Iran does have reason to fear depending on the West for its nuclear needs. Others have opined that Iran's refusal said less about the intentions of its nuclear program and more about the Supreme Leader's paranoid obsession with the United States, to the extent that any deal that the United States favors must, ipso facto, be bad for Iran—even if he may not be able to see how it would be.
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Along these lines, in the summer of 2010, after the passage of Resolution 1929, Khamene'i dismissed a deal with the United States by declaring, “The change of behavior they want—and which they don't always emphasize—is in fact a negation of our identity. . . . Ours is a fundamental antagonism.”
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Indeed, Iran later accepted a very similar proposal worked out by Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but the West rejected that deal, both because by then Iran's stockpile of LEU had grown to the point that the amount to be shipped out represented barely half of the Iranian stock, and because the P-5+1 concluded that this was merely a desperate bid by Iran to avoid the impending blow of UNSC Resolution 1929, the most powerful sanctions resolution measure imposed on Iran, and a direct response to Iran's intransigence both in refusing Obama's offers of reconciliation and the TRR deal.
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In response, the administration shifted its energy, attention, and diplomatic efforts to the sanctions track. Here they excelled. In large part
because so many countries around the world were convinced by the sincerity of their peaceful overtures to Tehran, the administration found widespread support for adopting harsh new sanctions on Iran. Moreover, the administration proved deft in its approaches to countries such as China, Russia, India, and Japan, all of which had voiced their opposition to Iran's nuclear program in the past but had done little about it—at least in part because they did not trust the intentions of the Bush 43 administration. Likewise, Obama's diplomats convinced the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs to use their economic clout in support of the case for sanctions against Iran in ways that no other administration had ever been able to do.
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As a result, by the summer of 2012, Washington could boast of having put together an unprecedented coalition of states determined to put pressure on Iran, which in turn produced unprecedented levels of international sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

It was a remarkable diplomatic performance. Of course, Washington did not do it all on its own. It had help from a number of other countries, including France, Britain, Germany, Canada, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Denmark, and Israel, to name the most active. Three of these deserve fuller mention. For decades, the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have shared a close strategic relationship, agreeing on nearly everything—at least everything big—under the Middle Eastern sky. However, it has been a constant frustration of American diplomats that the Saudis rarely do anything to advance our common strategic purposes. Typically, Washington and Riyadh agree on what needs to be done, and then the Saudis leave it to the United States to do it. It was a constant source of frustration throughout the 1990s, whether the matter was Iran or Iraq or forging an Arab-Israeli peace. Not so this time around. This time the Saudis came through big. They went to the Chinese and guaranteed Beijing that they (and the Kuwaitis and Emiratis) would see to all of China's oil needs if the Chinese joined the sanctions on Iran—a major source of Chinese oil.
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It proved to be a key piece of the international diplomatic effort against Iran.

The second diplomatic key was Israel. Since 2002 the Israelis have been
panicked about the Iranian nuclear program. Every few months Jerusalem, particularly in the figure of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has gone on a media rampage, decrying the Iranian nuclear program as the four horsemen of the apocalypse rolled into one. The Israelis, and Netanyahu in particular, have been reproached for “crying wolf” over the Iranian nuclear program by many, and accused of worse by some. Many Americans, Europeans, and others find Israel's endless warnings annoying, frustrating, even maddening. Even some of the most perspicacious now blame Israel itself for the problems, accusing Jerusalem of having engineered and “distorted” American policy on Iran. But had it not been for the Israelis' beating the Iran drum, the world—and probably the United States—would have forgotten about the Iranian nuclear program long ago. Most countries did not care, and for much of the past ten years, the United States wanted to focus its attention on other matters, whether that was Iraq under Bush 43 or domestic priorities under Obama. Moreover, much of the willingness of European and East Asian nations to take unprecedented steps and impose unprecedented sanctions on Iran was driven by their fear that if the Israelis did not see other countries doing everything they could to stop Iran's program peacefully, then Jerusalem would try to do it militarily and the result would be a catastrophic war across the Middle East. Had it not been for the Israelis' repeatedly sounding the alarm, enraging though that may have been, the Iranians probably would have crossed the nuclear threshold long ago.

As important as the Israelis were in rousing many European states to action, there was one that moved on its own and played a critical role by doing so: France. Since the 1960s, France has insisted on pursuing an independent foreign policy, even withdrawing its military forces from the common NATO framework at the height of the Cold War. In so doing, Paris became the darling of the Third World and the bête noire of Foggy Bottom. I am not going to defend French foreign policy for those long decades (the French drove me to madness with their coddling of Saddam Husayn when I worked in the U.S. government). However, in spite of that—or perhaps because of it—no one has played a more helpful role on
Iran than France. Early on, the French government under Jacques Chirac, but continuing through the administrations of Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, applied a principled nonproliferation stance to Iran's nuclear program. Paris decided that Iran could not be allowed to have nuclear weapons or even the latent capability to make them and there could be no exceptions to this position. Since then, France has been the staunchest member of the anti-Iranian coalition, taking the hardest line in negotiations. It has been France, not Britain, that has demanded that Washington not “go wobbly” on the Iranians. Moreover, the French have proven themselves creative, flexible, and adroit in their diplomacy. By consistently taking much harder-line positions than those of the United States, they have been invaluable in allowing Washington to look moderate on Iran. In many ways, France has been spending all of the diplomatic capital it saved up from five-plus decades of thumbing its nose at the United States, and the United States and many other countries have been the beneficiaries. For numerous governments, the fact that France has been taking a harder line on Iran than the Americans has brought them around to the view that it must be right to follow Washington's more reasonable lead. It is hard to know just how many countries lined up with the West because of French exertions and Paris's principled stance, but it was no small number.

THE SANCTIONS.
As a result of all of this diplomatic energy to make Tehran pay a price for its noncompliance with the binding resolutions of the UN Security Council, a range of powerful sanctions now hobbles Iran. While a complete list would require more space to enumerate than it would be worth, even a summary of these restrictions is daunting:

• The UN Security Council has banned the supply of all materials and technology related to ballistic missiles, nuclear energy, or nuclear weapons to Iran. It has banned the export of all major weapons systems (tanks, warplanes, helicopters, artillery pieces) to Iran. It has frozen the assets of key individuals associated with Iran's nuclear program and
prohibited their travel abroad. It has banned all financial ties or the provision of financial services to a list of Iranian entities involved in Iran's nuclear program, including Iran's Central Bank and other major financial institutions. As a specified element of the ban on financial transactions, it has prohibited insurance companies from providing insurance or reinsurance to Iranian ships—another major hindrance to Iranian oil exports. It has frozen the assets and prohibited all interaction with a number of designated Iranian entities associated with its nuclear program.

• For the United States, a number of laws and executive orders dating back to the Bush 43, Clinton, and earlier administrations bans virtually all U.S. economic interactions with Iran. Americans may only export food, medicine, and a short list of other humanitarian goods to Iran. In effect, all imports from Iran, all financial transactions, all services, and all investments in Iran are prohibited.
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