Amid querying President Joe Biden about this fitness for office, I wanted reporters to ask him a question about American relations with Iran. It would have gone something like this: "Iran has recently elected a new President Masoud Pezeshkian who has said he will try to improve relations with the West. Are you willing to meet him halfway?"
Biden's first mistake upon taking office was breaking his campaign promise to re-enter the Iran nuclear arms agreement. Biden had described Donald Trump's policy as a "self-inflicted disaster." But in response to pressure from Israel and opposition not only from Republicans, but also from Robert Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden backed off. At a campaign rally in November 2022, Biden pronounced the deal "dead."
Biden's failure to act has made it more likely that Iran will acquire a nuclear weapon -- which could precipitate a nuclear arms race and eventually a war in the Middle East. And along with Biden's unstinting support for Israel's assault upon Gaza, which went beyond retaliation for the October 7 massacre, and which has destroyed the country and killed off many thousand innocent civilians, it has solidified an "axis of resistance" in the Middle East and an alliance among Iran, Russia and China against the U.S.
Pezeshkian's election could provide an opportunity to undo this damage, but the administration's initial response was not promising. "We are not expecting any changes in Iranian behavior," White House spokesman John Kirby declared. The White House's stand was seconded by two members of the foreign policy establishment who had opposed the Iran nuclear arms agreement in 2015. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations and Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies described Pezeshkian's election as a "tranquillizer" that will lull Iran's unhappy populace and "seduce" gullible Westerners into believing relations can be improved.
Takeyh, Gerecht and other diehards insist that whoever is elected President is simply irrelevant to Iran's foreign policy, which is dictated by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but the history of US-Iranian relations over the last twenty-five years suggests otherwise. Instead, it shows a pattern of Iranian reformers or moderates being elected president only to have their efforts at diplomacy rejected by the United States, leading to their being discredited and succeeded by hard-liners.
In 2003, Javad Zarif, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations under reform-minded President Muhammed Khatami, proposed talks on nuclear arms and Iranian-Israeli relations. President George W. Bush rejected Khatami's overture. Khatami was then swept out of office by hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dashing any hopes for diplomacy. In 2013, Iranians elected Hassan Rouhani who, with Zarif as his foreign minister, negotiated with the nuclear arms pact with the United States, the European Union, Russia, and China. But in 2018, President Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement, and Rouhani, whose efforts at diplomacy had been repudiated, was predictably succeeded by hard-liner Ebrahim Raisi.
Will this pattern be repeated? Pezeshkian's candidacy was endorsed by former President Muhammed Khatami, and he was advised on foreign policy by Zarif, who is not allowed to leave Iran. That would certainly suggest an opening for diplomacy with the United States. But Biden, burdened by a cratering election campaign, seems unlikely to pursue an opening, and Trump, if he wins in November, is even more unlikely to do so.
I don't know why you are so pessimistic Harris could change things but really Iran now has to do a ton of things for the US to undo sanctions, which Iran is unlikely to do...
You'd think after our experiences in Iraq, the U.S. would be more reluctant to conduct military interventions in the Middle East, but we just can't seem to stop. I would not be surprised if a Trump administration pulls the U.S. out of NATO but continues to employ military force in the Middle East, just to look "tough."