Over at the essential Beltway insider publication The Hill, sixteen of the eighteen front page headlines are about either the looming government shutdown or the shutdown as it relates to the Affordable Care Act. Only two have nothing to do with the politics of the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours. One concerns Syria and chemical weapons.
The other amounts to an almost goofy footnote in what may well be the earliest days of Obama’s biggest foreign policy victory yet — including overseeing the killing of Osama bin Laden and the winding down of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. The story is that decades of diplomatic stalemate with Iran appear to have broken.
This news first began to creep into the cycle with some significance around the time President Obama addressed the United Nations last week. To be sure, President Obama will reap the nearly incalculable political rewards should regular diplomatic talks with Iran resume. If, as experts believe, peace with Iran is the key to settling Israeli-Palestinian differences — ie, peace in the Middle East — then you may as well start carving a spot on Mount Rushmore.
But it is Iranian President Rouhani who seems to have taken the first real steps to normalize relations with the United States.
Why?
I’m no foreign policy expert, but it seems to me the answer, at least in part, may lie in the geography.
Iran is on the northeast end of the Persian Gulf, with America’s strategic ally, Saudi Arabia, on the other side of the water. Iraq is squished in between. Another key strategic ally of the U.S., Turkey, is a border as well. On the eastern side, the largest border is with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
American interest can either lie all around Iran… or the interests of our nation can be Iran.
Iran is making all the right moves. In an important nod to Israel — and Jews, and, well, common sense and decency world-wide — the Iranian foreign minister has said that the holocaust was not a fabrication. In a first since 1979, Obama himself and Rouhani spoke on the phone. In that front-page piece in The Hill, the Senate is playing the role of diplomatic stick-in-the-mud. What can you say? We’re approaching a mid-term election year. That’s politics.
There is much well-deserved skepticism, and not just in the Senate. Israel will slow-walk this (rightfully so; after all, it is the year 2013, and the country of Iran is only just now acknowledging that the Holocaust actually happened). There are politics to be had in Iran, too. President Rouhani is leading a divided government, and he may discover that his internal challenges outweigh his desires for a partner in peace in the west.
Back in this country, it should be noted that since 2002, the politics of foreign policy have had a different — and substantively greater — impact on our elections since 9/11. In 2002, Republicans swept to power by painting Democrats as running scared in the face of terrorism. It is one of the stranger political evolutions that the president who ignored a memo entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” and was in charge for the worst attack on American soil, ever, won re-election in 2004 by presenting himself as tough on terror and as a man who would “keep America safe” (you can still find talking heads to eerily, creepily, and outrageously insist George W. Bush kept America safe).
Yes, the 2008 election was largely about the economy, but the overtones of preparedness and who would best keep America safe were felt and seen throughout.
2012 was the most economy-driven campaign in ten years. The only real foreign policy news that was made were Mitt Romney’s disastrous foreign policy miscues. Indeed, in nominating Mitt Romney, the Republican Party effectively ceded foreign policy to Democrats for a cycle. This may prove to be their undoing on the issue if President Obama can do more than just declare a war or execute a successful military operation in some far off land. If he can build a successful alliance with a strategic country in the Middle East that no one would have thought of five years ago, foreign policy may be off the table for Republicans for a generation or more.
