David Brooks breaks out his bag of deal-killing goodies and throws out all the reasons why the present Iran deal could be a failure. He implies that any final deal between Obama and Iran would amount to appeasement.
Dissecting the Ayatollah Khameini's recent speech, in which he expressed skepticism about the current deal, Brooks noted that the "Death to America" chants were there, meaning that Khameini still believes that America is still the enemy. However, Brooks is guilty of a non-sequitur, based on recent history. Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire" early in his term; however, it did not follow that Reagan was not interested in a deal with the USSR. In 1986, Reagan concluded a deal with Gorbachev that eliminated nuclear missiles and reduced the risk of nuclear war for the first time in a long time. Similarly, the fact that Khameini's supporters still chant "Death to America" does not mean that Iran no longer wants a deal with us.
In the very same speech, Khameini talked about the Saudi Arabia regime's air strikes in Yemen, which are destabilizing the region. The fact that we are supporting Saudi Arabia in this bombing campaign is undermining the chances of a final deal with Iran. Sure, Khameini is being an obstructionist jerk as Brooks points out. But he is being a jerk for a reason -- the fact that we are supporting Saudi Arabia, a country which beheads people regularly and whips people at the whipping post, and undermining Iran's interests in the process, means that (from his point of view) the US can't be trusted. In other words, Khameini believes there is a very real possibility that the US will sign a deal and then turn around and stab Iran in the back whenever we have no more use for the regime. After all, Khameini knows very well what happened to other "client states" such as Panama and Iraq, former allies who showed a little too much independence.
Brooks is right that the US and Iranian governments see two different realities. Khameini's own words:
They are always trying to deceive and break promises.
The problem for the US is that in foreign policy, reputation is based on the ability of each country to keep its word. Break your word and it is a lot harder to make deals with other countries. Break it enough times and other nations may sign it and then treat the document as not worth the paper it is printed on. All these concepts are in the PC game of Civilization. The consequences are a lot more severe in real life. The US has facilitated dozens of coups over the years, including one in Iran where they removed a prime minister who was showing too much independence. I suggest that Khameini, and many other Iranians as well, believe that if they cut a deal with the US which leads to the eventual restoration of full ties, the next step for the US will be to facilitate regime change like we did to Iran in 1953.
If Iran still believes in exporting its revolution, as the UAE Foreign Minister suggests (as quoted by Brooks), then it follows that they view it as a matter of national security. If Iran is able to take advantage of the current power vacuum in the Middle East and form a bloc of anti-Western states allied to Iran, then it would be a lot harder for the CIA to foment regime change than it was in 1953. It is not merely, as Brooks suggests, a clash of values and interests between the US and Iran. It is a matter of the US establishing itself over the last 60 years as a nation that simply can't be trusted.
In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Henry Kissinger and George Schultz wrote that there is no congruence of interests between the US and Iran. This piece ignores the fact that we have common enemies in Al-Qaeda and ISIS. This was the sort of thing in World War II that helped us discover that we had a lot more in common with the USSR, despite Stalin's brutality, than we realized. We put our fundamental differences aside with Stalin in order to defeat Hitler; the alternative would have been that we would have had to deal with two superpowers in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and a much higher likelihood of a nuclear holocaust given that they were both working on an atomic bomb.
Brooks is right to be concerned about a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. So, where is his concern about Saudi Arabia's nuclear program, which they also insist is merely for peaceful purposes? Their own news outlet states that Saudi Arabia is in the process of building 16 nuclear reactors by 2030. Are we going to turn on Saudi Arabia 10 or 15 years down the road like we did with Iraq because they suddenly started showing too much independence? After all, Saudi Arabia's nuclear program, whether or not it is being used for peaceful purposes, is much bigger than anything Iran ever dreamed of trying even though Saudi Arabia is much smaller in population than Iran.
There is one way we can smooth the groundwork for a deal with Iran -- renounce regime change as a weapon of diplomacy. As long as we continue to practice regime change, we will continue to have difficulties in achieving deals which would be good for this country and good for world peace in general. Change has got to come from the people themselves, not as the result of any outside interference. The other problem is that US support of Saudi Arabia's air strikes in Yemen, which is creating a humanitarian catastrophe on the ground, is undermining the chances of a final nuclear deal between the US and Iran. The US has no business getting involved in such conflicts. We would do well to return to Washington's admonition against excessive entanglements.