Realism and Iran
George Packer
The New Yorker
The brutal apparent fraud taking place in Iran puts the Obama Administration, and anyone who cares about both American security and human rights, in an extremely difficult position. For eight years, George W. Bush maintained that there was no tension, let alone contradiction, between “our interests and our values.” The result of this simplistic thinking was to turn American foreign policy into a sustained exercise in hypocrisy and double standards: we declared ourselves the world’s guarantor of freedom, while ignoring or explaining away Mubarak’s repression in Egypt, the Central Asian dictatorships that gave us basing rights, and our own misdeeds and misbegotten policies in the war on terror. We told struggling democrats across the globe that we were on their side, raising their hopes only to disappoint them, while refusing on principle to take the necessary steps toward negotiating with odious regimes like Ahmadinejad’s in Tehran. Bush’s soaring second Inaugural in defense of freedom everywhere turned out to be an exercise in moral narcissism: it made the Administration sound righteous while doing precious little to advance rights. By the time Bush left office, we had the worst of all outcomes: a policy that paralyzed American diplomacy, crippled the pursuit of our own interests, offered a token support for human rights only where we saw fit, and earned the world’s cynicism and scorn.
Obama inherited this self-defeating mess and has quickly moved to clean it up: the Cairo speech, the balancing rhetoric on Israel and Palestine, and the initiative toward Iran. His secretary of state downplayed human rights in Burma, pointing out that a more strident approach had failed utterly to change the regime’s behavior. The new President understood that the U.S. could no longer take a high-handed approach: the world had long since stopped listening, and the language of freedom and democracy had been so deeply tainted that the cleansing will take years. That’s why the passages in the Cairo speech on human rights and women’s rights came after extremism, after Israel and Palestine, after nuclear weapons, and had a careful tone. There’s too much wreckage to sort through before an American President can tell other countries to live up to a standard set by us.
(Continued here.)
The New Yorker
The brutal apparent fraud taking place in Iran puts the Obama Administration, and anyone who cares about both American security and human rights, in an extremely difficult position. For eight years, George W. Bush maintained that there was no tension, let alone contradiction, between “our interests and our values.” The result of this simplistic thinking was to turn American foreign policy into a sustained exercise in hypocrisy and double standards: we declared ourselves the world’s guarantor of freedom, while ignoring or explaining away Mubarak’s repression in Egypt, the Central Asian dictatorships that gave us basing rights, and our own misdeeds and misbegotten policies in the war on terror. We told struggling democrats across the globe that we were on their side, raising their hopes only to disappoint them, while refusing on principle to take the necessary steps toward negotiating with odious regimes like Ahmadinejad’s in Tehran. Bush’s soaring second Inaugural in defense of freedom everywhere turned out to be an exercise in moral narcissism: it made the Administration sound righteous while doing precious little to advance rights. By the time Bush left office, we had the worst of all outcomes: a policy that paralyzed American diplomacy, crippled the pursuit of our own interests, offered a token support for human rights only where we saw fit, and earned the world’s cynicism and scorn.
Obama inherited this self-defeating mess and has quickly moved to clean it up: the Cairo speech, the balancing rhetoric on Israel and Palestine, and the initiative toward Iran. His secretary of state downplayed human rights in Burma, pointing out that a more strident approach had failed utterly to change the regime’s behavior. The new President understood that the U.S. could no longer take a high-handed approach: the world had long since stopped listening, and the language of freedom and democracy had been so deeply tainted that the cleansing will take years. That’s why the passages in the Cairo speech on human rights and women’s rights came after extremism, after Israel and Palestine, after nuclear weapons, and had a careful tone. There’s too much wreckage to sort through before an American President can tell other countries to live up to a standard set by us.
(Continued here.)
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