Obamas Amoral Foreign Policy

In an early 2007 lecture Richard Holbrooke, now President Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan, claimed to delineate the differences in how Republicans and Democrats approach international relations. Democrats, Holbrooke said, are “idealists” who care about the rest of the world and wanted to make it better, while Republicans are “realists” and “isolationists”, who take an amoral approach to America’s foreign policy that is governed only by a narrow vision of America’s American national interest.

So how are these idealistic Democrats behaving now that they are returned to power? Last weekend, in a speech to a security conference in Munich, Vice President Biden declared, "We are willing to talk to Iran. Continue down your current course and there will be pressure and isolation; abandon the illicit nuclear program and support for terrorism, and there were will be meaningful incentives." President Obama echoed these sentiments at his news conference on Monday night. "My expectation is, in the coming months, we will be looking for openings that can be created where we can start sitting across the table, face to face; of diplomatic overtures that will allow us to move our policy in a new direction." So, if Iran abandoned its efforts to obtain nuclear weapons and its material support for terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, the United States would be willing to talk to and provide other “meaningful incentives” to its rulers.

Meanwhile, Iranfocus.com reported on Monday that 59 men had been executed in Iran during January. At least two of them were stoned to death for adultery. The same website reported last week that the Iranian Supreme Court had ordered that a man be blinded with acid because he had himself blinded a woman several years earlier. On top of all this, there is Ahmadinejad’s association with Holocaust denial, which was highlighted in 2007 when the Iranian president hosted a conference for pseudo-scholars who share his psychopathic view of history.

A regime so obsessed with the hatred of Jews and Israel, is unlikely to be persuaded by either polite dialogue or a combination of economic and diplomatic incentives to forgo its belligerent behavior.

The very fact that the Obama administration has so heavily promoted its willingness to engage Iran leads me to suspect that the administration will find some way to let Iran evade the conditions that it has set for the establishment of diplomatic contact. The Obama Administration cannot acknowledge the failure of its efforts to entice Iran to change its behavior without looking foolishly naive for trying to embrace the Ahmadinejad regime at all. Moreover, perhaps more than incoming administration, the Obama team has tried to trash its immediate predecessors. An admission that Iran had not changed its ways would also imply that George Bush's instincts were right in attempting to isolate the Iranian regime.

Therefore, Obama is more likely to soft-peddle Ahmadinejad's nuclear weapons program as well as his support for terrorism, and press ahead with his upgrading American relations with Iran. This is exactly how the Clinton administration, from which Obama has taken many of his advisers, handled its Middle East policy. Throughout its time in office, Clinton doggedly pressed ahead with an Israeli-Palestinian "peace process", in spite of overwhelming evidence that the Palestinian negotiators had no intention of concluding a genuine peace with Israel.

But even if the improbable did happen, and Ahmadinejad did stop trying to acquire a nuclear weapon and providing arms to Hamas and Hezbollah, should anyone feel comfortable with the prospect of the leader of the free world, or anybody representing him, sitting down for a friendly chat with a Holocaust denier like Ahmadinejad? Wouldn’t any such meeting confer unprecedented legitimacy on the Iranian president’s brutal rule and his vile pronouncements about Jews, Israel and the Holocaust?

In any case the outreach to the Ahmadinejad regime may be pointless. Iran is holding presidential elections in June. The president is being widely blamed for the country's severe economic distress; and, last week, Ahmadinejad's popular predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, announced that he would run for the office. Khatami has been widely portrayed as a reformer and an advocate of a more moderate foreign policy. There is some reason for hope. According to Israel's Ynet News, "Khatami told a group of supporters that Iran needs an active diplomacy 'to decrease “international pressures and isolation.” He warned that without change Iran's "social capital and international reputation would be damaged even more". In a Time magazine article, Khatami conceded that the Holocaust was "historical fact". Yet, Khatami refused to talk to Israeli reporters who attended the sixth Eurasian Media Forum in Kazakhstan during 2007. At the same conference the former Iranian president skipped a panel on his country's nuclear program.

Anyway, the odds are stacked against Khatami winning the election. Ahamadinejad already controls the public purse, and the state media. The Financial Times reported on Friday that he is counting on the support. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is Iran's supreme leader and ultimate decision maker. Hardline organizations, like the Revolutionary guards which are loyal to the Ayatollah, can mobilize millions of voters. On the other hand, groups that have supported reformers like Khatami, like student organizations, have been the target of repression in recent years, the Financial Times story says.

This uncertainty argues for the Obama administration to proceed with caution. Iran's economic chaos suggests that Iran may need more from the United States than the US needs from Iran. Why could not the Obama Administration explicitly make an upgrade of relations conditional on the election of a new regime and more significant changes in policy?

President Obama has declared that, “America is ready to lead once more.” But the United States cannot provide real moral leadership in the international arena, unless it firmly establishes that it will avoid contact with truly evil regimes.