"We now enter an era of negotiations with the Soviet Union," he said. Whoever is president, he continued, "must proceed on the assumption that negotiations with the leaders of the Soviet world... must take place. This is change that has come about and therefore your policy must change."
How Obama Channeled Nixon
Sounds familiar? It should. Barack Obama spoke virtually the same sentiments, if not the same words, regarding Iran in his "new day" message to that country in March 2009.
As Nixon explained his change of heart, Czechoslovakia was in the eighth month of its "Prague Spring" as Alexander Dubček was liberalizing the country in the face of communist rule. Two weeks after Nixon's news conference, Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia, crushed the grass-roots revolt, and imposed communist rule anew.
Restraint in the Face of Repression
Nixon did nothing. "He has no intention of making Czechoslovakia a major campaign issue," was the first response by an aide as Nixon basked in the Florida sun for a few days, recuperating from post-convention campaigning. "For now," The New York Times reported on Aug. 25, 1968, "Mr. Nixon is saying publicly that he deplores the brutality of Moscow's actions and hopes that the crisis resolves itself in a way that will permit negotiations with the Soviet Union to go forward."
Sure enough, Nixon and Henry Kissinger made accommodation and "detente" with the Soviet regime a priority of the administration. They didn't need to calculate what was then obvious: the Soviet Union wasn't about to fold. Containment was a better approach. Time, in any case, was on the United States' side. The Soviet regime would crumble from within, as it very much did two decades later.
All of that should sound familiar, too.
Obama's Balancing Acts
Toward the end of June, 2009, as the Iranian regime was crushing dissenters in the wake of the fraudulent re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President Obama decided to throw reactionaries a little bone and term himself, the United States and the international community "appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings and imprisonments" in Iran. "I strongly condemn these unjust actions." But that's all it was: words, and words meant less (and least) for Iranian ears than for the political brew back home. There's nothing else he can do. He can't send in tanks into Tehran anymore than Johnson could send tanks into Prague. He can't take too belligerent a position. That would be a favor to the Iranian regime, which desperately needs a foil to reassert its tattered authority. Obama is playing it almost right, though his subservience to right-wingers' hypocritical bluster (they, too, know there's nothing to be done) is disquieting.
Iran's Crackdown Worked
In any case the crackdown worked. Protesters have been decisively silenced. Mir Hossein Mousavi, ostensible leader of the opposition, was virtually under arres as the regime blamed him for what deaths it's inflicting in Iran's streets. And Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, of course, responded to Obama's outrage with outraged intransigence of his own: "I had insisted and will insist on implementing the law on the election issue," he said. "Neither the establishment nor the nation will yield to pressure at any cost."
How Nixon Enabled the Shah's Brutalities
A necessary postscript: Let's not downplay the Nixon-Kissinger build-up of and love affair with the brutal, Soviet-like repressive regime of the shah of Iran in the late 1960s and early 70s. It was that American-enabled brutality that paved the road for the ayatollahs' revolution in 1979. Yet here they were, Nixon and the shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, during one of the shah's visits to Washington (in July 1973), and Nixon saying, "We welcome you here as not only an old friend, as a progressive leader of your own people, but as a world statesman of the first rank." Rank was right--rank disgust, that is, at those so-Nixonian words.
A few months earlier, Iran had contracted to buy $2 billion worth of weapons from the United States, what The Times described as "the biggest single arms deal ever arranged by the Pentagon." Between 1950 and 1973, the United States had sold $800 million worth of weaponry to the shah.
All that firepower would come in handy in the years of American-sponsored repression, and would, if Americans cared to understand the context of Iranians' fury, explain why Iranians took to the streets in 1978 and overthrew the shah a year later. They were not planning to replace one kind of brutality with another. They did. Now they have second thoughts.
Bad Blood and American Interference in Iran
That's why the worst mistake Obama and the reactionaries in the United States could do is interfere in any way. American interference in Iran has a long and revolting history. Iranians' fate is theirs to decide. The more the United States interferes, the stronger the reigning mullahs become. Engagement, even (and especially) with the mullahs, is the way.
As Stephen Walt wrote in his Foreign Policy blog, "As we learned during the Cold War, the proper response to thuggish authoritarian regimes is containment via deterrence, combined with hardnosed diplomacy on specific security issues and a sustained effort to win over their societies by showing them that we know how to produce a better way of life. That strategy won the Cold War without the manifold dangers of preventive war, and probably saved millions of lives in the process. The clerics and their front man may hang on for now, and they might even get a few (unusable) nuclear weapons one day. But time is on our side, and we can afford to be patient."
