January 1998
Planet Politics
Eldon Griffiths
Let's Treat Iran Like China
The subject of this column is Iran, but I take as my text a phrase that came leaping out of the verbiage surrounding last October's summit between Bill Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin. "Engagement doesn't mean endorsement," intoned Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Her meaning was crystal clear. The U.S. will continue to protest when China behaves badly toward its own people or its neighbors. But with the exception of military material, the U.S. has abandoned trade sanctions. Why? Because China is too big, too important for American exports, too critical to the stability of Asia, and, in the next century, to the future of the world, for the U.S. any longer to seek to isolate, contain, or otherwise try to bend the Chinese government to its will. Far better to keep up our defenses and let loose the magic of free trade that undermined the totalitarians of the Soviet Union.
Does this sea change represent a defeat for American values? For me it was a victory for American common sense. The same logic ought now to apply to U.S. trade policy elsewhere. In particular, to the other strategically vital and potentially rich marketplace that Washington is striving -- unsuccessfully -- to punish and isolate.
Iran is the country that, along with Cuba and Libya, Congress loves to hate. The reasons are not hard to find. The ayatollahs who in the 1970s held 50 American diplomats captive for 14 months, scuppered any chance Jimmy Carter might have had for re-election. No Democrat in the Congress will lightly forgive that. In the 1980s, terrorist groups supported from Teheran were responsible for kidnapping Americans and bombing the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. No elected Republican is going to forget that either. Iran has since been charged with undermining the Middle East peace process, sponsoring the destruction of the U.S. barracks in Khobar Tower in Saudi Arabia, reaching out for nuclear weapons, and building missiles that could threaten Tel Aviv, Ankara, and Budapest. How can any self-respecting American contemplate ending the U.S. embargo on Iran in the face of this grisly record?
Scroll back to China. Millions of peasants were slaughtered by the Communists during the Great Leap Forward. Millions more were killed by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. In Tiananmen Square, the government of which Jiang Zemin was a prominent member turned its tanks loose on student protesters. China, too, is still exporting nuclear technology that the U.S. claims Pakistan and Iraq are using to build their own bombs.
So where is the difference? Is Iran morally worse than China? The question is absurd. If Iran is ruled by theocrats, China is ruled by Marxist Leninists. If Teheran imposes Islamic penalties on its people, Beijing oppresses Christians and Buddhists.
The U.S. approach to Iran should now follow a similar route to the one that's now working with China: Engage but don't endorse. The test should be U.S. national interests. Thus, Richard Nixon played the China card because he needed China as a counterweight to America's greater enemy, the Soviet Union. Bill Clinton looked to China to broker a deal over North Korea. Iran could be no less important in tomorrow's Middle East than China today is in Asia.
Is there any one in Washington brave enough to reassess U.S. policy toward Iran with the same degree of common sense as the State Department, belatedly, is now applying to China? There are pressing reasons to do this:
- First, the embargo on Iran has failed, just as surely as it did against China. Finding non-American buyers for its oil and non-American investors in its offshore and onshore gas fields has not been easy -- but Iran has done this.
- Second, the Iranian economy, though suffering from inflation and high unemployment, in most respects is healthier under U.S. sanctions than those of many developing countries to which the U.S. gives aid, e.g. Egypt and Mexico.
- Third, the U.S. embargo has isolated Washington from its allies. Iran's trade is increasing with Germany, France and Japan. Its relations with the European Union are businesslike.
- Fourth, diplomatically, too, the nation that America's highest officials call an "outlaw state" has been invited to lend its good offices to solve disputes between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Sudan, and Uganda. Iranian envoys mediate between ethnic factions in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Bosnia (to which the Clinton administration surreptitiously encouraged Tehran to send modern weapons for the Moslems!)
Congress is still ratcheting up America's unilateral sanctions. Can anything be done to extricate the U.S. from this dead-end policy? Richard Nixon was able to open the door to China because his anti-Communist credentials were impeccable. No one could accuse Nixon of "mollycoddling dictators." And the same is true -- hear this -- in the case of New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato, co-author or the Iran sanctions bill. D'Amato is one of the "great Satans" in Tehran's eyes.
That is precisely why the senator can take the risk of paying a visit to Iran. No senior U.S. official has visited Teheran for 20 years. Let the senator therefore go and test the ground for himself. Suppose that D'Amato were to detect some small signs of movement on Iran's part? Maybe he'd have the courage to suggest on his return that the U.S. should review its policy and treat Iran like China. "Engagement" doesn't mean endorsement.
Griffiths, a onetime foreign correspondent for both Time and Newsweek and a 27-year member of Britain's House of Commons, directs the Center for International Business at Chapman University in Orange, California
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