Should U.S. President Donald Trump defy conventional wisdom and meet face-to-face with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, just as he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at an East Asia security conference last week? If Trump and Putin can temporarily put aside the animus between the U.S. and Russia by wracking their brains on some of the world’s most pressing security issues, then why can’t Washington and Tehran attempt a similar experiment when the opportunity presents itself?
Normally, a proposal like this would be viewed across today’s Washington as far outside the mainstream of acceptable statecraft. Part of the hesitancy or outright opposition is based on the misguided and dangerous view that diplomacy with adversaries is a concession in and of itself rather than a fundamental tool of meeting U.S. foreign policy goals. The other part, of course, is Iran’s track record; The domestic political repercussions for any president, let alone Trump, of initiating a direct, in-person dialogue with the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran would be severe. Iran is the most reviled antagonist in domestic U.S. politics today, and indeed has been a favorite punching bag for Republicans and Democrats regardless of how conservative or liberal they are along the spectrum. Tehran’s material support for regional terrorist groups, its bankrolling of Hezbollah in Lebanon, it’s intervention on the side of the Houthi rebellion in Yemen, and its backing of sectarian Shia militia groups in Iraq working alongside Baghdad's regular security forces are just the tip of the iceberg. One can only imagine the cries from the foreign policy establishment within both parties if a U.S. president were to sit down in the same room with such a senior-level representative of the Iranian regime.
But would such a meeting such as the one outlined above be as unprecedented, foolish, or dangerously naive as so many analysts, lawmakers, and television punditselites would make it out to be?
Contemporary history would suggest thatsuggests the disbelief, anger, and outrage that would accompany a summit between an American and Iranian president could actually result in the opposite of what the naysayers predict. Instead of a calamity, a dialogue may very well be open uppresent an opportunity for the United States to embark upon the long road of forming a rapport with an adversary — one that which could, over time, build into a concrete relationship that benefits U.S. national security and global Mideast stability.
Amidst a report from Iranian media that President Trump explored a consultation with President Rouhani on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly last month, and State Department confirmation this week that an offer of a senior-level meeting was pulled after Tehran's objection, we may be closer to a hypothetical, groundbreaking U.S.-Iran summit than we originally anticipated.
The United States has been at this point in the road before, when a similar dialogue between political and ideological enemies that was previously seen as unrealistic not only occurred, but also opened the way to new, pragmatic relationships that reordered the international community and strengthened America’s central place in it.
When President Richard Nixon was inaugurated in January 1969, nobody (with the exception of perhaps Henry Kissinger) believed that a summit meeting between Washington and representatives of communist China was feasible. The Chinese under Mao Zedong, after all, were delivering weapons and supplies to the North Vietnamese government and the Vietcong at the very same time that 500,000 U.S. troops were patrolling the jungles of South Vietnam to root out those very same insurgents. The U.S. was not only defending South Vietnam from a communist rebellion from the north, but also engaging in a violent proxy war with China over the political future of Vietnam. It’s not unrealistic to assume that Chinese weapons, tanks, and bullets were killing killed U.S. soldiers in the field.
And yet Nixon seized an opportunity to launch a cold-blooded diplomatic effort that would both split communist China from the Soviet Union and perhaps enlist Mao Zedong into accepting a negotiated end of the war in Vietnam. The thought of the fiercely anti-communist Nixon traveling to Chinese soil, talking with Mao, and even toasting drinks with him was almost so ridiculous as to render the premise unthinkable. But it happened — not because Nixon had an infatuation with Mao as a person or was curious about Chinese history, but because he calculated that creating a schism between two communist superpowers would increase U.S. geopolitical leverage and weaken an ideological alliance that served as the primary U.S. competitor.
President Ronald Reagan did very much the same thing with the Soviet Union during his second term, and he did it despite adamant complaints from his fellow conservatives that he was being soft on the Russians.
Reagan, too, was a fierce anti-communist who just two years prior referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” seeking to subjugate smaller countries and export its ideological dominance throughout the developing world. The arms buildup between Washington and Moscow, however, was getting so serious by the mid-1980’s that Reagan and many of his national security advisers were increasingly concerned that a minor mishap could kindle a nuclear war of Armageddon-like proportions.
When Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev proved to be sympathetic to a diplomatic opening of some kind, the Reagan administration and their counterparts in the Kremlin worked strenuously behind the scenes to schedule a high-stakes summit in December 1985. The 1985 meet-and-greet would be the first summit between a U.S. president and a Soviet chairman in six years, and the first time Reagan and Gorbachev were able to take each other’s temperature and assess each other’s demeanor. The political gamble would eventually paypaid off — the 1985 summit assisted in forming an arms control negotiation that would culminate in the 1987 signing (and the 1988 ratification) of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
The strategic arms reduction talks were anything but a political winner for Reagan, despite his unquestioned conservative bona fides among fellow Republicans in Washington. In addition to haggling with a Soviet delegation that would constantly demand more concessions, Reagan had to engage in a political knife-fight back home with his conservative supporters. Many of those high-profile conservatives were completely opposed to the Reagan administration’s diplomatic initiative with Gorbachev, perceiving it to be misguided and a victory for totalitarianism. Conservative activists would send 300,000 letters to American households attacking the very principle of an arms control negotiation and take out full-page ads comparing Ronald Reagan to Neville Chamberlain. Conservative intellectuals like George Will would write of the Reagan-Gorbachev diplomacy as a development that "accelerated the moral disarmament of the West...by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.” National Review founder William Buckley Jr. and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer strongly opposed talking with the Soviet premier, so much so that Reagan’s intellectual capacity was even questioned in the public sphere. In the words of Buckley: "To greet it [Gorbachev’s premiership] as if it were no longer evil is on the order of changing our entire position toward Adolf Hitler."
President Reagan, however, decided to withstand the political risk backlash of takingto take advantage of an opportunity with his Soviet counterpart that may have never appeared again. He, in effect, chose statesmanship over the political convenience of catering to a hard-right, vocal minority that formed the intellectual bedrock of his entire presidency. Working on a consensual arrangement with Moscow that would move the world a few steps away from a nuclear confrontation was too important to sacrifice for stronger approval ratings.
President Trump, of course, is no Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan. But a future Trump-Rouhani summit would not be unheard of, nor would it necessarily be a disaster.
Indeed, the same establishment-types in Washington who would reflexively blast such a discussion as a Munich moment would likely have been the very people who disavowed Nixon’s trip to China and Reagan’s overtures to the Soviets. They were proved proven wrong then, and there is at least a decent good chance they could would be proved proven wrong again.
In a speech to the American Foreign Service Association, the late George Kennan, the architect of U.S. containment policy against the Soviet Union, described how important the profession of diplomacy is to U.S. foreign policy. “The conduct of foreign policy rests today on an exercise in understanding, truly staggering in its dimension -–– understanding not just of the minds of a few monarchs or prime ministers, but understanding of minds and emotions and necessities of entire peoples.”
We canno’t even begin to arrive at that understanding and convert the knowledge gained into good deals for the United States if our leaders are too cautious or scared about the political consequences of talking with nations we strongly disagree with. Negotiating with the Chinese in 1972 and the Soviets in the 19800’s were certainly not politically popular in Washington circles, and . dDiplomacy with the Iranian government may be even more derisive in today’s political climate.
What is good politics, however, does not always correlate to good policy. In fact, sometimes the most unpopular decisions — like shaking hands with a foreign adversary — can turn out to be game-changing win for the U.S.
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Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities.