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Two Guys Walk Into a Summit in Singapore

From “fire and fury” to a “terrific relationship” in less than a year sound like a happy turn in the Trump-Kim dance around nukes and North Korea. Better news coming is implied in the Singapore ...

From “fire and fury” to a “terrific relationship” in less than a year sound like a happy turn in the Trump-Kim dance around nukes and North Korea. Better news coming is implied in the Singapore summit: an end of the North-South Korean War after 70 years,  on what could be a nuke-free peninsula. A win for de-proliferation, an end of US war-games in South Korea, developing games for the North instead, all in a deal that great neighbor China like a lot.
Question: why do so many in our opinion class not like it at all: a dictator’s victory, goes the liberal line, a bust for the US. Is that because Trump did it? Or is there a deeper dread out there that as China rises, the American century in the Pacific is coming to an end.

If there were a simple sports score—who won, who lost?—between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim, we wouldn’t believe the scorekeepers anyway. Imagine: If it were Barack Obama going face-to-face with Kim Jong-un for a de-nuclearized Korea, would Rachel Maddow not be swooning? The Fox guys would surely be saying: Barack got “snookered.”  But then, if Donald Trump had negotiated the no-nukes-for-Iran nuclear deal, wouldn’t Sean Hannity still be crowing at the sheer mastery of it. When politics gets so personal and so poisonous, the staging so obvious, the words so mechanical and indefinite. It’s Year 72 of the Nuclear Age, in Asia where the first furious mushroom clouds announced a surreal new era. Where are we really?

Our guides this hour are historians of different sorts: the diplomat Chas Freeman lived it, as translator between Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao in the breakthrough talks in 1972.  Jeanne Guilleman—in her Pulitzer-nominated history Hidden Atrocities—has written the germ-warfare horror story from the 1930s which East Asia doesn’t forget. The novelist James Carroll is reimagining our American bomb dilemma since the forties. And Richard Rhodes won all the big prizes for his 3-volume nuclear history.

August 18, 2015

Iran: Yea or Nay?

When reps return from Labor Day break, Congress has nine days to scuttle President Obama’s no-nukes bet on Iran. The president has momentum and 29 physicists on his side, but he lost Chuck Schumer, the leader ...

When reps return from Labor Day break, Congress has nine days to scuttle President Obama’s no-nukes bet on Iran. The president has momentum and 29 physicists on his side, but he lost Chuck Schumer, the leader of his own party in the Senate.

It’s folks who say John Kerry et al denied Iran the bomb versus those who think our diplomats just handed it over. Gravely, the president said the only alternative is war. But Iran’s human rights crimes and proxy terrorism have many wishing for an alternative to the alternative. Despite all the teeth-pulling and high-dollar lobbying, this is one D.C. debate that’s not all bad faith. For a change, maybe the going has been hard because this question is so hard.

So, we looked beyond the lobbying, boosterism and #IranDeal tweet war to ask the weighty one-word question with no easy answer: yea or nay?

Our guest Gary Samore was the arms control architect who made news when he quit a big lobby group that was against the deal — before he was for it. He’s no idealist:

…We were not going to convince the Iranian government that nuclear weapons were a bad thing. For reasons of their own, they see them as important — or at least the option to produce nuclear weapons — to defend themselves against the great Satan and to assert Iran’s primacy in the region. So our policy has mainly been based on trying to prolong their effort, to postpone their ability to produce nuclear weapons. And we’ve used a variety of tools, from sabotage, to sanctions, to export controls, military threats, and diplomacy. And I see this agreement as another element in a game of delay. Except, fifteen years is a pretty good delay — much better than we could achieve through most other instruments.

The administration, said Samore, reckons it’s buying more than time. When the deal expires, maybe a liberalizing, modernizing, Westernizing Iran will elect leaders who don’t want the bomb. Our friend Stephen Van Evera of MIT told us, chillingly, that the Middle East will be the last nuclear-free region on Earth. He said we should do this deal — it constrains Iran and lets us focus on the real nightmares:

The scariest scenario that we should focus on is that Iran will get weapons, and that will set off a domino effect in which other powers that, I think, are even less reliable as custodians of these weapons will get them. The Saudis have said very clearly, “if Iran moves towards nukes, we will do it, too.” I’m much more worried about the Saudis as a nuclear power than I am about the Iranians, because the Saudi state is shot through with radicals who have close ties to Sunni jihadists who have made clear they intend to take WMD against the West if they can acquire it — which Iran has not done.

How is it possible, though, that we made a good deal with bad people? Nader Hashemi reminded us that “Iran is the biggest backer of the Assad regime today” and the Islamic Republic will keep wreaking havoc in the region. But he’s a surprising “yea” vote on the deal, which could backfoot the hardliners and boost millions of Iranians who like human rights and hate Assad.

Jane Eisner, editor of the progressive Jewish daily The Forward, rounded out our roll call, voting a well-informed “present”. Eisner’s reporter Larry Cohler-Esses — the first Jewish journo welcomed in Iran since 1979 — came back with hopeful news about middle Iran. But the mullahs remain the mullahs, and Eisner can’t be sure what will happen during this fifteen year experiment:

It was a mixed bag. You like to believe that this is a country that is interested in moving ahead, in dealing with the problems of its citizens and opening up to the world. It’s very educated, very urbane in many ways. And you think, “OK, this could work.” And then there are other interviews which left me chilled left me really, really concerned about who is going to be in charge and what are they going to be doing in the future with weaponry and nuclear capability. That distinction, between the people and what Larry [Cohler-Esses] calls the “deep state” is really difficult.

Moments like the Greek bailout and Ireland’s marriage question have us wondering what would happen if we all got to vote on the new path with Iran. Tell us, then: yea or nay? And, either way, are you voting with a hopeful or heavy heart?

July 24, 2015

Behind the Persian Curtain

After two years, three “final” deadlines and a cabinet-level bike wreck, we have a deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Tehran, Boston, and the Security Council chamber it felt like a time to ...

After two years, three “final” deadlines and a cabinet-level bike wreck, we have a deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Tehran, Boston, and the Security Council chamber it felt like a time to celebrate. This week, we asked just what does a deal mean?

Our friend, the journalist/historian Stephen Kinzer, has dreamt of a “reset” that would change the strategic chess and bring Iran and the United States back together. He said that both sides are fighting a long and traumatic history, but new restraint (informed by that history) seems possible:

This Iran operation in 1953, in which the CIA destroyed forever — at least up until now — Iranian democracy seemed like a success at time. We got rid of a guy we didn’t like, Mohammad Mossadegh, and we replaced him with a guy, the Shah, who would do everything we wanted. So, it seemed like the perfect solution at the time. Now when we look back, and we see that the Shah’s increasing repression caused huge problems inside Iran. It led to the explosion which produced the mullahs’ government and produced another 35 years of repression. We’re slowly coming to realize that these interventions hurt us in the long run… [Obama’s] biggest failures in foreign policy have been times when he’s been seduced into intervening, whether it’s South Sudan or Libya. And his greatest successes have been places where he’s restrained himself… What I’m worried about is what happens after Obama. Is the pendulum going to swing back?

Kelly Golnoush Niknejad is the Iranian-American editor-in-chief of the Tehran Bureau, an independent organization delivering honest, anonymous news and comment from inside Iran via (of necessity) Niknejad’s Newton home. She said that domestic change may come gradually as the regime co-opts and catches up with two different post-revolutionary generations:

A lot of young people do not remember the revolution. Those who came of age with the Internet and satellite television and the reformist administration of Khatami in the 1990s — where there was a brief period of about two years where there was a lot openings in terms of cultural freedoms and newspapers printing — a lot of people became very political and idealistic during that period. And we also have another generation coming about that wasn’t really part of that. They came about during Ahmadinejad. They have very different political awareness, and I think most of their ideas of freedom are probably what they see on satellite television.

“Slow” was the keyword of our Iran talks. The anthropologist Narges Bajoghlid, who wrote recently about hiphop as Rouhani’s latest propaganda tool, said that those young Iranians want reform, not revolt. Kinzer agreed: having weathered their own revolution and witnessed the excesses of the late Arab Spring, Iranians prefer the devil they know.

And Chas Freeman, our favorite US Foreign Service wiseman, cracked that the negotiations stopped an Iranian nukes program that didn’t exist, solving a problem we didn’t have. But the exercise was worth it anyway if it underlines the folly of military interventions. We should have been learning, too, that sanctions stiffen resistance and strengthen target governments — in Cuba as in Iran. And we should be learning patience and restraint long-term and short.

For one thing, the opening to China, strategically important and useful as it was, did not produce Sino-American cooperation on any level for about six to seven years. It took time to begin to make it possible for us to cooperate. So, I wouldn’t hold my breath for a major improvement in US-Iranian relations. We have to be patient, and we have to be creative. But the lesson…is that statesmanship, skillfully conducted, can really make a difference.

So tell us: Are you ready to walk through the Persian curtain?

The Sound of the US-Iran Relationship

How did America and Iran get to yes? A relationship defined by a CIA-backed coup, a revolution, and a hostage crisis seemed permanently poisoned — even before President George W. Bush placed Iran in his “Axis of Evil.” There was more than a little venom and proxy violence over half a century. The sound of this relationship is more than tough talk though. These bites (most from a brilliant 2009 BBC documentary) reveal a sad game of geopolitical phone tag between two rivals who should probably be friends. Whenever one calls, the other isn’t ready to talk. And vice-versa, for forty years — until now.

Head to our SoundCloud page for more info on each track.
—Pat Tomaino.