Rome,
18 February 2014
‘MODERATION’ – THE NAME OF IRAN’S
NOT-SO-EASY DIPLOMATIC GAME
Moderation
will guide Iran’s diplomacy under President Rouhani, declared Gholamali
Khoshroo, a former deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs
and presidential adviser from 2002 to 2005, at a meeting in Rome on Tuesday. Known
himself as a moderate, Mr Khoshroo said that the government of President
Rouhani (elected in June 2014) is sincere in pursuing a moderate vision for the
Islamic Republic both at home and abroad. The Interim Agreement on the
country’s nuclear programme Iran signed late last year with the so-called ‘P5 +
1’ (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany) is a pledge
of that commitment to moderation and the first step on a path that could lead
to a new relationship between Iran and the rest of the world. Iran, it appears,
is ready to talk.
According
to Mr Khoshroo, Iran’s diplomacy of moderation will be a kind of ‘constructive
interaction’ that is based ‘neither [on] submission nor confrontation’. With
‘dialogue instead of monologue’ now serving as the Islamic Republic’s mode of
engagement with the outside world, he looked forward to an era of ‘active
diplomacy’ and to negotiations ‘on an equal footing’ with the rest of the
world. Isolation would be a thing of the past. Iranian foreign policy will no
longer play hostage to ideology or victimhood; ‘prudence and wisdom’ will
henceforth guide the country’s strategic calculations. A realistic assessment
of the Islamic Republic’s place in the world, ‘based on the facts’, he said, has
replaced ‘apocalyptic visions and ideologies’. If his views reflect thinking at
the top, this is a significant shift.
Indeed,
Mr Koshroo believes such a dispassionate, realistic assessment shows Iran is
endowed with a range of opportunities and confirms its regional importance. Rouhani’s
election means it can define itself with confidence as an ‘Islamic democracy’—and,
with almost a third of the population under the age of thirty, a dynamic and
youthful one. Its cultural and historical wealth gives it the potential to
become ‘one of the world’s major tourist destinations’. Then there’s the oil. While
its vast oil fields are well known, recent studies suggest its gas reserves are
‘possibly the world’s largest’. This will guarantee Iran a role as ‘one of the
world’s biggest energy suppliers’ long into the century. And bourgeoning oil
and gas production in the Caspian basin and Inner Asia will only augment Iran’s
importance: the most direct routes to the Persian Gulf from the Caucasus,
Central Asia and Afghanistan all cross Iranian territory.
Likewise,
Iran sits, geographically, at the centre of a host of regional challenges that
make it an essential partner for the West: NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is
approaching, insecurity in Pakistan increasing and Shia-Sunni violence across
the Middle East spiralling out of control. Unlike its troubled neighbours,
however, Rouhani’s Iran is entering a ‘new chapter of stability, security and
hope’; to Mr Khoshroo, it could serve as a ‘source of security’ throughout the
region. Iran in other words wants engagement, but the ‘Iranophobia’ widespread
in the West (and in his view ‘sponsored by the Israelis’) threatens to make
that impossible. Viewing his country only a threat and not a partner is dangerous:
any ‘failure to build trust’ between the West and Iran will ‘radicalize the
domestic situation’ and ‘marginalize moderate forces’ in the country. (A cynic
would say that in this sense, perhaps, Iran is saying to the West, ‘Engage, or
else…’)
Like
the country’s new diplomacy, Mr Khoshroo is for the most part amiable, urbane and
self-assured. But on Iran’s nuclear programme—the biggest test of trust around—he
seems to lapse into the defensiveness more readily associated with the Islamic
Republic’s recent past. When he called Iran’s nuclear standoff with the West a
case of ‘right versus might’, insisted on its ‘NPT rights to full access to
nuclear technology’ and pinned the blame for recent showdowns on the United
States’ determination to bring about ‘regime change one way or another’, his
tone was more prickly than constructive. While the Interim Agreement was the
‘biggest step forward’ in relations with the United States since the 1979
revolution, he was adamant that sanctions ‘only exacerbate tensions’ and denied
that they had played any role in bringing Iran to the negotiating table. (All
the same, he conceded that the only reasonable goal for both parties was a
‘mutually acceptable agreement’ that ensured that the country’s nuclear
programme was for ‘purely peaceful purposes’.)
Mr
Khoshroo ended his presentation by vaunting his country’s economic
promise. ‘Foreign oil and gas companies’, he said, were ‘welcome in all sectors
of production’. Here, he said, Iran looks especially to Europe, naming a list
of shared interests that none the less largely fails to go beyond the usual fare
of modern international cooperation—economic development, energy security,
terrorism, the environment. (Beholden to ‘Iranophobia’, the United States is apparently
less well placed to seize these opportunities.) Aware of the audience he was
addressing, but also doing justice to what appears to have been Rome’s
persistently pragmatic approach to his country, he thought Italy understood the
‘new Iran’ better than most. ‘Now is the golden opportunity’, he said, ‘for
realizing a new chapter in Iran’s history’; and together ‘Iran and Europe can create
a better life for their peoples and combat insecurity in the world.’
Such
cooperation is an admirable vision. And if the confrontations of the
Ahmedinajad era really are over, that can only be a good thing. But in the end,
Mr Khoshroo delivered a rendition of why Iran has always mattered so much to
the West. The fulcrum between East and West since antiquity, Iran’s location
makes it an indispensable element in strategic planning from the eastern
Mediterranean to the upper reaches of the Indian Subcontinent and Russia’s Central
Asian underbelly. Geopolitically, it can’t be ignored. And, whatever advances
are made in shale extraction and alternative energy technologies, Mr Khoshroo
is surely right to claim that his country’s impressive store of hydrocarbons
will make it an essential player in world energy markets for years to come. The
irony is that the combination of oil and a pivotal geographical location has always
troubled Iran’s relationship with the global power with the greatest interest
in both—the United States.
Iran’s
problem has never been that it doesn’t matter enough; it’s that it matters too
much. Under such conditions, ‘moderation’ seems to be a difficult path to
tread—and a sign perhaps that the Iranians still haven’t made up their minds
about how much of the world’s attention they really want and on what terms—the reliable
partner Mr Koshroo claims it wants to be? or the regional bully an independent
nuclear arsenal would make it? Stressing his country’s centrality, Mr Khoshroo
claims the ‘terrible consequences’ of the United States’ confused Middle
Eastern policies (read: Syria) are just a ‘bi-product’ of its confused policy
towards Iran. Perhaps. But the confusion would at least seem to be mutual: the
more Iran matters, the greater the pull it will towards even deeper engagement
with the ‘Great Satan’. For all the talk of ‘moderation’, the real question
remains unanswered: if Iran really wants to be the West’s strategic partner and
its natural endowments make it an energy superpower, what is its nuclear
programme for? To that, Mr Koshroo seemed to have no answer.
