Chris Mumford
On the day people around the world celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a career diplomat spoke to students about the next great foreign policy challenge: Iran.
Former U.S. ambassador to Greece Nicholas Burns, who has served in a range of diplomatic capacities under multiple presidents from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, enumerated the challenges posed by Iran on Monday at a Hinckley Institute of Politics forum.
Burns also said the Soviet Union presented a much bigger, more intractable threat and that the liberation of millions of Europeans that followed the fall of the wall was one of the most momentous events in history.
“(The collapse of the Soviet Union) was our deliverance as well, as Americans, from the specter of nuclear war that would have killed hundreds of millions,” Burns said.
Burns said, however, that the threat Iran presents is serious, and he outlined three principal concerns involved in America’s approach to the insular country: Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, its sponsorship of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas and its meddling in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They represent some of the most pressing concerns facing the Obama administration as it tries to engage the country diplomatically and avert military conflict, he said.
If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it will be the strongest state in terms of military in the Middle East, Burns said.
“That’s not in our interest8212;not when we have a strong friend in Israel, not when we have strong friends in the Arab world,” he said.
Burns defended the Obama administration’s efforts to engage Iran in talks, speaking out strongly against the view held by many on the political right that such talks betray weakness and that military intervention is the only way to approach the Iran problem.
“If you’ve never tried to talk to someone before, if you’ve had this frozen state of relations for 30 years, doesn’t it make sense to have a series of conversations?” Burns said. “At least to inform yourself better about what they think, about whether or not there’s a possibility for productive negotiations and for movement forward.”
He said Iran and the United States share a tortured history, with the former holding U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days 30 years ago and America supporting the coup of a democratically elected Iranian leader in 1953. That is something the two countries will have to get past if any progress is to be made, he said.
“We’re never going to be able to convince each other who was right and who was wrong,” he said. “We’re both going to hold to our national histories, our interpretations of what happened in this very complicated relationship.”
Furthermore, Burns said, ignoring Iranians’ particular circumstances in favor of military aggression is a formula that would likely land the United States in another drawn-out war with unpredictable consequences, much like its conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I actually think it would be morally indefensible to use force right now, if you haven’t tried diplomacy first,” he said.
As an alternative to outright force, Burns said he supports engaging Iran diplomatically, combined with economic sanctions to halt the country’s nuclear ambitions and support of terrorism.
In the event that sanctions fail, Burns proposed that the United States pursue a policy of containment, building up military forces in allied countries neighboring Iran and increasing the Navy’s presence in the Persian Gulf as a deterrent.
Burns said he believes such an approach would give anti-government elements within Iran, which came out in force following June’s disputed presidential election, time to change Iran from within, without outside intervention.
By contrast, a premature military strike by the United States could potentially drive these dissident forces to rally around the central government in the country’s defense, he said.
Although the problems Iran presents seem highly complex, Burns stressed the need for Americans to study the country and its language in order to establish bridges between the two cultures. The benefits of doing so might not be immediate, he said, but would go a long way toward diminishing mistrust between the two countries.
“We ought to have confidence in ourselves and in our system,” he said.