U.S.-Iran Misperceptions

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U.S.-Iran Misperceptions

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U.S.-Iran Misperceptions A Dialogue Edited by Abbas Maleki and John Tirman

N E W YOR K • LON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Abbas Maleki, John Tirman, and Contributors, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editors. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data U.S.-Iran misperceptions : a dialogue / edited by John Tirman, Abbas Maleki. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62356-927-3 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-62356-936-5 (paperback) 1. United States–Relations–Iran. 2. Iran–Relations–United States. 3. United States–Foreign relations–Iran. 4. Iran–Foreign relations–United States. I. Tirman, John. II. Maleki, Abbas. E183.8.I55U574 2014 327.73055 – dc23 2013039394 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6927-3 PB: 978-1-6235-6936-5 ePub: 978-1-6235-6535-0 ePDF: 978-1-6235-6842-9 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printed and bound in the United States of America

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Contents Acknowledgments Contributors 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8

U.S.-Iran Misperceptions: Introduction to a Dialogue Abbas Maleki and John Tirman The United States and Iran: Perceptions and Policy Traps Robert Jervis Iranian Perceptions of U.S. Policy toward Iran: Ayatollah Khamenei’s Mind-Set Seyed Hossein Mousavian Interpreting the Implacable Foe: American Perceptions of Iran Steven E. Miller and Matthew Bunn Iran’s Perception of the U.S. Policy toward the Region Kayhan Barzegar America’s Perceptions of Iran’s Policy toward the Region John Tirman The Future of U.S.-Iran Relations Hussein Banai Improving U.S.-Iran Relations and Overcoming Perceptual Biases Abbas Maleki and Robert Reardon

Index

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vi vii

9 15

37 57 89 111 133 149 167

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Acknowledgments The editors thank the MIT Center for International Studies and its director, Professor Richard J. Samuels. The Center hosted Abbas Maleki, the Robert Wilhelm Fellow in 2011–12, and has been the home to John Tirman since 2004. We thank our contributors in Iran and the United States for their fine efforts. Our editor at Bloomsbury, Matthew Kopel, and his colleague Kaitlin Fontana were a pleasure to work with. The editors and Professor Banai were initially brought together and inspired by a long project examining missed opportunities in U.S.-Iran relations. The project has been supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Arca Foundation, and a generous MIT family, and to all of them and our other participants we are immensely grateful for your support and collegiality. It is fair to say that as a group we favor better relations between our two countries, and we hope that in our small way this book and related activities help to bring that about. John Tirman Cambridge, Massachusetts July 2013 Abbas Maleki Tehran, Iran July 2013

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Contributors Hussein Banai is assistant professor of diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He has also taught at the Naval War College and Brown University. He is coauthor of Becoming Enemies: U.S.-Iran Relations and the Iran–Iraq War, 1979–1988, and is a research affiliate of the MIT Center for International Studies. Kayhan Barzegar is the director of the Institute for Middle East Strategic Studies in Tehran, and chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Islamic Azad University in Tehran. He has been a visiting scholar at the Belfer Center of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and is a research affiliate of the MIT Center for International Studies. Matthew Bunn is a professor of practice at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. From 1994 to 1997 he was an adviser to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, working on nuclear materials, including their control and disposition in Russia and the United States. Previously he directed the work on the two-volume Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium for the National Academy of Sciences. Robert Jervis is the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics at Columbia University, where he has been teaching since 1980. He has also held faculty appointments at UCLA and Harvard. He is author of Perception and Misperception in International Politics, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, and Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Fall of the Shah and Iraqi WMD, among other books and several edited volumes and articles in scholarly journals. Abbas Maleki is professor of energy policy at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. From 1988 to 1997, he was a deputy foreign minister of Iran, and

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has been an adviser to several political leaders. He has been a visiting scholar at the Belfer Center of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and at the MIT Center for International Studies. Steven E. Miller is director of the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is editor-in-chief of the journal International Security, and coeditor of the book series BCSIA Studies in International Security. Seyed Hossein Mousavian is a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University. A longtime Iranian diplomat, he has served as ambassador to Germany (1990–97), had been the head of the foreign relations committee of the Supreme National Security Council (1997–2005), and had been part of the nuclear negotiating team (2003–05). Robert Reardon is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, having recently earned his Ph.D. in political science from MIT. He is the author of Containing Iran: Strategies for Addressing the Iranian Nuclear Challenge (RAND, September 2012). John Tirman is executive director and principal research scientist at the MIT Center for International Studies. He has written widely on Iran, including coauthoring the book Becoming Enemies: U.S.-Iran Relations and the Iran–Iraq War, 1979–1988.

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U.S.-Iran Misperceptions: Introduction to a Dialogue Abbas Maleki and John Tirman

An impartial observer who surveys the ruined landscape of relations between the United States and Iran since 1979 would marvel at the level of invective and, at the same time, wonder why the two have not ironed out their differences. For it has long seemed apparent that the two countries should not be the mutual enemies that each country’s rhetoric holds. Indeed, they share many common or overlapping interests. Yet their perceptions of the other are septic and highly counterproductive, so much so that for nearly a decade they have seemed poised on the brink of war. How did it come to this? We know the regrettable history. The overthrow of Mossadeq. The support for the repressive Pahlavi monarchy. The hostage taking. The manipulation of oil prices. The support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran–Iraq War. The rallies against the “Great Satan.” The human rights violations, jailings, and executions. The acts of terror. The skirmishes in Iraq and the Gulf. Sanctions and threats. The list is long. The list of attempts to improve the bilateral relationship is also significant— small meetings, gestures, expressions of goodwill, actual cooperation, favors done, channels for discussion opened. Most of these were squandered. Even mutual interests—an Iraq free of Saddam, an Afghanistan free of the Taliban, the defeat of al Qaeda, a state for Palestinians, and so on—seem to be overwhelmed by ill will. One of the many unfortunate ironies of U.S.-Iran relations is that the first time most Americans became aware of the existence of a country called Iran was during the hostage crisis in 1979–81, when American viewers were treated every night to televised images of Iranian crowds chanting anti-American

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slogans in the streets and burning U.S. flags, as bound and blindfolded American Embassy personnel were paraded before them. In turn, the first significant Iranian encounter with the United States resulted from the CIA coup of 1953 that deposed the elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, and the subsequent U.S. support of the Shah. It is hardly surprising then that U.S.-Iran relations are fraught not just with policy disagreements, but also with mutual suspicion and perceptions of perfidy, which have collectively resulted in a lack of basic communication and a consistent failure to recognize common interests to resolve or at least contain disagreements. Despite the fact that Iran is important to the resolution of various Middle East conflicts involving the United States or its allies, in addition to overlapping concerns on a wide variety of issues, dialogue, communication, and compromise are scarcely attempted between Tehran and Washington. That might change with the June 2013 election of Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran. The role of individuals in history who step outside the patterns and habits to which their societies have been accustomed is often encouraging. In his early days, Rouhani is making gestures of conciliation that appear to be aimed at breaking the United States’ jaundiced view of the Islamic Republic. Among them is the appointment of Mohammed Javad Zarif as foreign minister, since Zarif not only is a seasoned diplomat but is also very well acquainted with the United States, having studied in America and having spent five years (2002–07) as Iran’s representative at the United Nations. Zarif ’s appointment is particularly noteworthy given the theme of misperceptions, since he is the most knowledgeable, high-ranking official of the Islamic Republic’s history with regard to the United States. Much of the challenge for Rouhani, and the reciprocal challenge to the Obama administration, is tackling the nuclear issue prior to other matters of concern (turmoil in the Middle East, for example). Rouhani, an adept nuclear negotiator in the early 2000s, understands the technical issues and the economic and political trauma visited upon Iran by international and unilateral sanctions. The question for Rouhani (as indeed as it remains for Obama) is whether the effort to compromise to achieve an acceptable international agreement on Iran’s nuclear development can avoid or even vitiate the barriers imposed by the spoiling perceptions and misperceptions that have long encumbered the bilateral relationship.

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Introduction to a Dialogue

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Until that happens, the estrangement continues (as evidenced by Congress’ lopsided votes to impose more sanctions even after Rouhani’s popular victory at the polls). The interim nuclear agreement negotiated in Geneva in late November 2013 certainly augurs well for a change in the U.S.-Iran relationship. If a comprehensive accord is reached, the changes could be profound for every issue besetting ties between the two countries. Within days of the Geneva agreement, however, one could see the old tropes of misperception rise and potentially sour the talks. Charges of Iran being untrustworthy, devious, bent on regional dominance, and dedicated to Israel’s destruction were sounded widely. Commentators from the American right wing constantly belittled the accord as “Munich.” Conservatives in Iran spoke of the process as being “oppressive” and the West forcing a weak Iran to its will. While many of them were positive, reactions tended to follow the familiar contours of national narratives and misperceptions. If the nuclear negotiations, in any format, fail to produce a final agreement; or an agreement proves contentious in implementation, it will increase the self-perpetuating cycle of mutual distrust and animosity. Overcoming these differences and exploring mutual commonalities is made all the more difficult when few Americans travel to Iran and few Iranians can visit the United States, and when neither country has diplomatic representation in the other country. While a great many books have been written on the subject in the West, very few have directly included the views or contributions by the Iranian side. As a result, much of what is written about Iran tends to merely confirm and perpetuate pre-existing conventional wisdom, however ill-founded, and thus contributes to the cycle of mutual distrust and animosity. As the stakes are raised with each iteration of this cycle, each side must step back from the brink and recognize the costs of the inevitable outcome of this cycle’s prolongation.

The tyranny of misperceptions In this collection of essays, we work from Robert Jervis’ observation in his seminal 1976 book, Perception and Misperception in International Politics, that “it is often impossible to explain crucial decisions and policies without reference to the decision-makers’ beliefs about the world and their images

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of others.” In the case of the U.S.-Iran relationship, misperception—particularly accepting the worst-case assumptions about the other’s intentions—is the coin of the realm. Domestic politics and interest groups tend to reinforce these misperceptions to the point that stepping out of this reinforcing cycle seems to be nearly impossible. The belief in worst intentions has indeed become part of each national narrative, or fulfills pre-existing national narratives, which braces the distrust. So, the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 reinforced Iran’s sense of American encirclement and designs for regime change in Iran, while Iran’s support for certain militant factions in Iraq during the U.S. war from 2003 to 2011 reinforced American views of Iran’s reliance on terrorism. Neither could appreciate the other’s separate interests. This is the framework for this volume, the interplay of misperception and policy making, and we build this with Americans and Iranians in equal measure. In conceiving this book, which one of us, Dr. Maleki, began when he was a Robert Wilhelm Fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies, we thought it important to represent both countries through leading intellectuals who could be reasonably objective about their own country’s behavior. By doing so, we start arguments that are critical and exploratory, avoiding the conventional shibboleths of most discussions of Iran and the United States. Our approach recognizes the great asymmetry between the two. The United States has an economy that is about 15 times the size of Iran’s, has four to five times the per capita purchasing power, has 4.2 times the population of Iran, and, notably, spends one hundred times as much per year on its military. The United States controls or has immense influence over most of the world’s multilateral organizations; Iran has been marginalized from all but the United Nations. And while America has been a focus of Iranian foreign policy thinking since the 1979 revolution, Iran is only one of several key global issues for U.S. policy makers. This profound imbalance reinforces the narrative of America’s malevolent intentions fostered by the Iranian state, while Iran’s peripheral (if occasionally urgent) place on America’s foreign policy agenda means that U.S. policy and opinion elites rarely entertain the need to re-examine their prejudices about the Islamic Republic. This volume is intended to prompt readers to re-examine their perceptions of the Iran-U.S. relationship through a series of essays on specific areas

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Introduction to a Dialogue

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of tension. The authors in this book, Iranian and American scholars of international affairs, together attempt to put aside the rhetoric and sloganeering that has characterized much of the debate thus far and address this failure of communication by engaging with each others’ points of view with the goal of establishing common ground and identifying misperceptions and misunderstandings that can be resolved. Naturally, some areas of disagreement emerge, but it also becomes possible to see where there are common interests, and where differences can be managed so that neither side takes steps that could lead to a costly conflict, which can only ultimately harm the interests of both nations.

The structure of the book We seek to engage the most important issues that separate the two countries without dwelling on the history of the relationship specifically, which is handled adeptly in a number of books. We focus here on perceptions of each other—the perceptions in Iran of the United States, and the perceptions in the United States of Iran. This inevitably involves the nuclear issue, the relations with neighbors in the Persian Gulf, and other urgent issues. We begin with an overview, in Chapter 2, by the distinguished international relations theorist Robert Jervis, whose scholarship has provided the framework for understanding the role of perceptions and misperceptions among the world’s decision makers. Professor Jervis surveys the nuclear issue in particular in assessing the perceptual issues dividing the two countries. Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who was one of Iran’s principal nuclear negotiators in the 2000s, provides in Chapter 3 a fresh understanding of Iran’s view of the United States through the eyes of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and one that has been assumed in the West as being unremittingly hostile. Mousavian’s understanding is considerably more nuanced. We then turn to a discussion of American views of Iran’s policy toward the United States, and here again return to the nuclear issue and the general sense of hostility and threat. Mathew Bunn, a former White House adviser on nuclear issues, and Steven Miller, who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School, argue in Chapter 4

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that a basic lack of knowledge of Iran is one key determinant of the U.S. view. Chapter 5, by Iranian scholar Kayhan Barzegar, regards Iran’s view of U.S. policy in the region, which has in the three-plus decades since the founding of the Islamic Republic been quite active—the tilt to Saddam in the 1980–88 war, Operation Desert Storm, invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq in 2003, deep involvement with Pakistan, and so on. These security challenges to Iran shape many of their perceptions of the United States and its intentions. In Chapter 6, John Tirman regards Iranian activism in the region through America’s eyes. Iran’s alleged threatening posture toward the Gulf oil monarchies in particular has become an article of faith in Washington and has been used as a cardinal reason for U.S. aggressiveness toward Iran, but the actual threat to Saudis and others is found wanting. In Chapter 7, the future of U.S.-Iran relations is taken up by Hussein Banai, an Iranian-Canadian who has lived in the United States for several years and is one of the bright young scholars in the field. Using the past as prologue, he maps out three scenarios for the relationship in the coming years. The final chapter, by Abbas Maleki and Robert Reardon, is an argument for understanding and overcoming perceptual biases to improve the bilateral relationship. What all the participants in this discussion agree is that it is time to think beyond the confines of the current status quo. A different Middle East is dawning, as religious and nationalist passions, oil, the Internet, terrorism, the Arab transitions, a new moderate administration in Tehran, and the influences of powers such as Russia and China all bring new forces to bear on a region that links Europe, Africa, and Asia, and contains most of the world’s known energy reserves. The need and the urgency to move beyond the rigid and hostile perceptions that have beset the relationship from the beginning are apparent. The question is how, and how soon, that can be accomplished.

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