US President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear gamble

Repercussions of the nuclear deal may take years to become clear.

A head-to-toe veiled Iranian woman, walks past a satirized drawing of the Statue of Liberty, painted on the wall of the former US Embassy in Tehran, Iran, at the side line of an annual state-backed rally, on Friday, Nov. 4, 2011, marking anniversary of the seizure of the US Embassy by militant students on Nov. 4, 1979, when militant Iranian students who believed the embassy was a center of plots against the Persian country held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The US severed diplomatic ties in response, and the two countries have not had formal relations since. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

In reaching a historic agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program, President Barack Obama effectively shredded the foreign policy playbook that had guided the US for three decades.

Obama has come to an understanding with a country that has been perhaps Washington’s most troublesome adversary since 1979 — so estranged that US officials wouldn’t even meet their Iranian counterparts just a few years ago.

Now Obama will seek to capitalise on his personal investment in this transformation by pivoting from Tuesday’s nuclear deal to try to resolve other regional problems.

It is a significant gamble.

With the Iran agreement, Obama could alter decades of foreign policy precedent, as president Richard Nixon did in warming US relations with China more than 40 years ago.

Obama also may have created a more unstable Middle East and, in the process, torn apart longstanding US ties with traditional allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The course ahead depends in large measure on the attitude and behaviour of Iran, making the prospects even harder to predict. The outcome may be impossible to gauge until long after Obama has left the White House.

Obama specifically hopes the nuclear agreement paves the way for working, at least indirectly, with Iran on finding a resolution to Syria’s civil war that includes the ousting of Tehran’s close ally President Bashar al-Assad, and on building a stronger international alignment in the fight against Islamic State militants, according to senior administration officials.

Syria’s civil war and the rise of Islamic State are at the heart of the region’s problems today, and Iran could play a significant role on both fronts.

“Time and again I have made clear to the Iranian people that we will always be open to engagement on the basis of mutual interests and mutual respect,” Obama said from the White House.

“Our differences are real and the difficult history between our nations cannot be ignored. But it is possible to change.”

Yet the obstacles to further engagement are large.

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“The record is very likely to be mixed and the President is going to have to defend that,” says Jon Alterman, a former US State Department official, now Middle East analyst at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. “The number of things that Iran does that antagonise the United States and its allies is a very, very long list.”

Indeed, Iran is one of three countries the US designates as a state sponsor of terrorism, along with Syria and Sudan, and Tehran continues to detain Americans over Washington’s objections.

Some Iranian officials have expressed an openness to co-operating with the US on other issues in the wake of a nuclear agreement. Already the US and Iran have tacit co-operation in the fight against Islamic State militants in Iraq. White House officials also have suggested Assad’s closest allies — Russia and Iran — may be warming to the idea of his exit.

But any broader US rapprochement risks further straining alli­ances in the Middle East that have defined America’s engagement in the region for most of the past century. Israel and Saudi Arabia have been rattled by the notion of emboldening Iran. Riyadh is involved in a proxy conflict with Tehran in Yemen, and Iranian leaders continue to publicly denounce the existence of the Jewish state.

“Many of our allies fear that ­focusing on proliferation is a huge distraction from what really matters, which is Iran’s regional behaviour,” Alterman says. “The President’s bet is you can link the two once you have a nuclear agreement. But that’s a bet. It’s not a sure thing.”

The financial windfall Iran is set to receive in coming months under the terms of the deal is another concern for US allies, who fear Tehran will use the money to fund proxies in the region.

The administration in May promised a host of new security and military guarantees to members of the six-nation Gulf Co-operation Council to mitigate these concerns and reduce the prospect of an arms race in the Middle East.

Obama offered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assurances in a phone call on Tuesday that an Iran deal wouldn’t threaten his country’s security.

Critics of the nuclear deal are perhaps most sceptical about White House suggestions that such moves will lead to a softening in the Iranian leadership.

It is a calculus top administration officials used to express only privately, but increasingly articulate in public.

“In a world of a deal, there is a greater possibility that you will see Iran evolve in a direction in which they’re more engaged with the international community and less dependent upon the types of activities that they’ve been engaged in,” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said recently at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Obama underscored the point in his 15-minute statement, saying: “I believe that we must continue to test whether or not this region, which has known so much suffering, so much bloodshed, can move in a different direction.”

But the re-entry of Iran to the world stage raises the spectre of a new Iranian hegemony and unsettles the nervous rulers in the Gulf.

The deal ends more than 35 years of international isolation that has impoverished Iran and exacerbated domestic tensions. It draws a line under the humiliation of the 444-day captivity of US diplomats and more than three decades of Tehran’s vituperative denunciation of the “Great Satan”.

It will unleash pent-up Iranian hopes for a new beginning, give a boost to the economy, encourage a younger generation frustrated by the stranglehold of the clerical establishment and undercut the power of the conservative extremists determined to halt normalisation of relations with the West.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 that threw out the shah and brought to power a militantly Islamist government under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was one of the biggest shocks to global security since World War II. It exacerbated the split between Sunni and Shia Islam, encouraged the export of extremism and gave open support to terrorist movements.

Above all, the humiliation of the US was intended to tell the world’s one billion Muslims that the West was the main enemy of Islam. Iran almost single-handedly made Islam the greatest ideological challenge to American power after the fall of communism.

For decades after the 1979 revolution, US policy on Iran was based on isolation. The tough economic sanctions and the regional alliance with neighbouring Gulf states were intended to blunt Iran’s aggressive anti-Western policies, curb its influence in the Middle East and foment internal opposition to the clerical hardliners. However, isolation did not halt Iranian efforts to produce a nuclear bomb, nor did it prevent the spread of militant Islam.

The British and the Germans were among the first Western powers to attempt a diplomatic solution. In 2003, British foreign secretary Jack Straw and the foreign ministers of France and Germany undertook the first high-powered visit to Tehran by Western foreign ministers.

Their attempts to end the stalemate were thwarted by the election of hardline populist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

However, his fraudulent re-election in 2009 and subsequent split with clerical hardliners reduced his influence.

It was the newly elected Obama who offered a breakthrough. In 2009, in a speech offering better relations with the Muslim world, he said he was “willing to extend a hand” to those who clung to power by deception if they were willing to “unclench their fists”.

But regional critics say the nuclear pact appears to reward Tehran for a series of interventions in conflicts that have ratcheted up sectarian tensions, from Syria to Iraq to Yemen. The conflicts have fuelled perceptions (shared by Israel) in Sunni-dominated countries that Shia Iran is waging stealthy proxy wars to widen its role as a regional powerbroker and check Saudi Arabia’s influence.

Pleas have now become open censure. Netanyahu reiterated his denunciation of the deal, describing it as a danger to world peace. But increasingly his warnings are discounted by Obama, whose administration’s relations with Israel are at an all-time low.

Although Turkey welcomed the nuclear deal, its Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu expressed the hope it would present an opportunity for Iran to change what he called its “sectarian-driven policies” in the region.

The deal poses a challenge to the authority of the hardliners in Tehran.

They know that public opinion wants an end to Iran’s isolation. They also know the younger generation is pro-Western.

The hardliners fear that if they can no longer credibly warn of a threat posed by the “Great Satan”, their monopoly of power will be challenged and their corruption exposed.

Iranian officials have pledged to use freed-up funding from sanctions relief to revive the domestic economy and restart projects that had stalled for lack of funds during the sanctions era. But these officials, including Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, recently have underlined Iran’s continued support for regional allies, particularly Syria.

The Wall Street Journal

Additional reporting: The Times