Why Doesn’t the Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Like Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett?
Such a suggestion, while increasingly relevant, is not actually new. A noted foreign policy expert proffered an identical view in 2006, explaining, “First of all, this is not a unique historical moment for the United States. We’ve been in this position before. If you look back in the late 1960s, early ‘70s, we were in a position in East Asia where our power was declining because of the Vietnam War, and the Chinese power was increasing because of China’s own capability and declining American power. And then there was certainly antagonism between the two countries.”
Lamenting the “conceptual divergence” of Iranian and American negotiating positions, the analyst continued, “I think you have to accept certain basic realities. Iran is an important power with influence in the region, and the purpose of the negotiation would be how to establish a framework for regulation of its influence. Therefore, in a perverse sense, negotiations [are] a form of containment. We’re negotiating as a means of containing Iran’s influence, surely as we negotiated with the Chinese in the early 1970s as means of coming to some arrangements to rationalize U.S.-Sino American relations as a means of regulating Chinese power.”
He further insisted that the United States must take a bold step to enter into “comprehensive negotiations on all of Iranian concerns and all of our concerns. Our concerns are human rights, terrorism; they have their own grievances and so forth. And these negotiations will take place ultimately without precondition,” just as negotiations with China in 1970 were not preconditioned.
Again making the explicit analogy to Nixon’s overture to Beijing, he stated, “The purpose of these negotiations would be to foster an arrangement where Tehran’s relationship with Washington is more meaningful to it than various gradation of uranium or potentially its ties with Hezbollah.” This way, he concluded, an “end point” would be reached “by creating a new framework and a new basis for U.S.-Iran relations,” which would, in order to be at all successful would have to recognize Iran’s position in its own neighborhood. “[I]n all these discussions and negotiations,” he affirmed, “we have to appreciate that in a sense we are legitimizing Iran’s at least Persian Gulf if not larger regional aspirations.”
That analyst was Ray Takeyh. He was addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of the 109th Congress. Sitting on the Committee at the time of his statement were John Kerry and Chuck Hagel. Its ranking member was Joe Biden. Also on the committee? The junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama.
Just six months later, Takeyh wrote in Foreign Affairs that no U.S. policy regarding Iran in the past thirty years has worked. Noting the impossibility of regime change, military action, isolation and obstinacy, Takeyh wrote the U.S. government must abandon these “incoherent policies” and “must rethink its strategy from the ground up.”
He continued, “The Islamic Republic is not going away anytime soon, and its growing regional influence cannot be limited. Washington must eschew superficially appealing military options, the prospect of conditional talks, and its policy of containing Iran in favor of a new policy of détente. In particular, it should offer pragmatists in Tehran a chance to resume diplomatic and economic relations.”
He added, “The sooner Washington recognizes these truths and finally normalizes relations with its most enduring Middle Eastern foe, the better.”
This is literally what Going to Tehran is about. Literally.
By attacking the Leveretts’ new book, Takeyh is attacking the very ideas he himself has espoused so confidently, both in a leading policy journal and to a Senate Committee that included the current administration’s President, Vice President, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense themselves.
But he doesn’t want you to know that.
