By Patricia H. Kushlis
Teheran's Olive Branch
It’s clear that the Iranian government wants to talk directly with President-elect Barack Obama about a number of issues. Or why would President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have sent a congratulatory letter to Obama – the first to a new US President-elect from an Iranian leader since before the 1979 revolution? Or, for that matter, why would Ali Akhbar Javanfekr, a senior advisor to Ahmadinejad, have engaged in a lengthy Internet contretemps with an unnamed blogger or bloggers from the State Department’s Digital Outreach Team in mid September? Or why would the US be discussing the opening of an US Interests Section in Teheran if the Iranian government didn’t want to improve relations?
Seems to me there’s likely a lot more here than meets the public eye.
In my view both countries – largely for their own domestic political reasons – have boxed themselves in for far too long. The Iranians must understand that the US retains great power status in the region.
US foreign policy decision makers must certainly realize that the Iranians have been a regional power for centuries, that they have ages old interests in increasing their influence in the Middle East and Southwest Asia but that cultural and historical differences with their neighbors are likely to be among the most significant restraining factors to achieving their goals. The US also needs to accept the reality that Iran is not going to vaporize into thin air just because we don’t like its form of government or its leaders and all that flows from them.
The good news is that Ahmadinejad’s letter to Obama may contain a beginning for the new U.S. president come January who – given the seemingly intractable problems we have in the region and with the Iranians in particular - should want to work with them rather than against them as we reduce our military presence in Iraq regardless of how the Israeli right wing or others see it.
The negotiating table, after all, is a far cheaper and healthier way to deal with one’s adversaries than through the sites of an M-16 or the employment of long distance bombers and it sure looks to me as if the Iranians are offering that opportunity.
Russia’s “post imperial funk” and bluster continues
Unfortunately, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s initial reaction to Obama’s electoral victory veered in a different direction from that of Teheran’s. Instead of offering an olive branch – or perhaps even just a half of one - as the Iranians did, the immediate Russian response was negative.
Harking back to Cold War days, Medvedev laid down a gauntlet by announcing to the world that the Russian government intends to install short range missiles in Kaliningrad – the tiny Russian military enclave on the Baltic Sea between NATO members Lithuania and Poland - if the US goes ahead with its Missile Defense plans for Poland and the Czech Republic supposedly to protect the US against missiles from Iran.
I’m no fan of Missile Defense or what used to be called Brilliant Pebbles and hopefully the new administration is not either. It’s a pie-in-the-sky idea favored principally by the neocons, the US right and the parts of the American defense industry that are attempting to build the system which, heretofore, has proven both costly and unworkable. It also drives the Russians crazy because, regardless of what the US says, the Russians believe it is aimed at them with all the implications of having to embark upon another round of missile development which, despite the oil revenues, they can ill-afford. Given the fact that all the Russian Iskander missiles indentified for Kaliningrad are, according to the BBC, deployed near the Georgian border, one has to question the seriousness of the threat – at least in the short term.
Russians normally think strategically and in a tit-for-tat fashion. This makes them great chess players. The tit-for-tat is crystal clear in this instance even though it is more likely tit-for-bluster.
But what ever happened to Russia's strategic vision?
I think Medvedev, Putin and company could have, and should have, stepped back Tuesday night, taken a deep breath and engaged in a little more strategic thinking than Wednesday’s knee-jerk reaction suggests. Do they really want to play “neighborhood bully” just to get the new administration’s attention? Or what was their goal? If neighborhood bully was the intent, is such an empty threat – even if targeted at shoring up the home front - really in the Russian government’s interest? Or wouldn’t it have been smarter to wait and see the line up of Obama foreign affairs advisors and his views on Missile Defense before waving the Potemkin Village red flag and thereby possibly cutting off the proverbial Russian nose to spite the proverbial Russian face with the new US administration?
Map Source: Perry-Castaneda Map Collection, University of Texas.