The endless search for Iranian moderates
By Peter Feaver The last line of Christian Brose’s post on Ali Larijani bears repeating for emphasis. Larijani is the darling of the "if only we sat down and talked with them, Iran would see the light" crowd. He is, we are told, the moderate with whom we can supposedly do business. He is the ...
By Peter Feaver
By Peter Feaver
The last line of Christian Brose’s post on Ali Larijani bears repeating for emphasis. Larijani is the darling of the "if only we sat down and talked with them, Iran would see the light" crowd. He is, we are told, the moderate with whom we can supposedly do business. He is the sensible pragmatist. The good cop, to Ahmadinejad’s bad cop. When there are news reports of feelers from Iranian moderates about talks there is a better than even chance the report originated with a probe to or from Larijani.
Now, it is at least theoretically possible (so someone in the Intelligence Community will doubtless speculate) that Larijani’s tirade is in fact him posturing for domestic audiences so as to carve out diplomatic maneuvering room. This might even be true. There is no way the mullahs would trust a "good cop" to deal with the United States alone.
And it must be said that the tirade Christian documented is roughly what one would hear in any seminar in American foreign policy in your typical European university. Heck, it is what you would hear in most American universities. So it would be a mistake to over-react, and I am confident the uber-unflappable Obama will not over-react.
But it is a timely and useful reminder of the double-standard that frames discussion of American diplomacy abroad. Tough talk from Americans is denounced as undiplomatic and divisive. Tough talk against Americans is dismissed as boilerplate.
Peter D. Feaver is a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University, where he directs the Program in American Grand Strategy.
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