Is Obama’s Iran overture like Nixon’s opening to China?

By Washington Post

In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, President Obama defended his overture to Iran and other foes by citing President Richard Nixon’s opening to China in 1972.

“In light of the Cultural Revolution’s horrors, Nixon’s meeting with Mao appeared inexcusable — and yet it surely helped set China on a path where millions of its citizens have been lifted from poverty and connected to open societies,” Obama said. “No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door.”

 

With three weeks left to negotiate a framework for limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities, Obama hopes that Iran’s leaders, like former Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong, will put aside mistrust and step through “an open door” that could alter the geopolitics across the region.

But Obama is not Nixon, and Iran is not China, and the comparison — made in newspaper columns and by some foreign policy experts — is illuminating largely because of important differences it exposes.

 

Nixon’s visit to China was a powerful symbol — a longtime anti-Communist president strolling along the Great Wall and dining with senior party leaders. Unlike Nixon, Obama lacked a political record that would shield him from criticism for reaching out to a longtime foe.

China also welcomed Nixon’s visit, whereas Iranian leaders still harbor suspicion of the United States. The detailed nuclear accord with Iran, if it can be cemented, could lower tensions over nuclear weapons, but no one expects a presidential visit to either country; the cultural, political and strategic gaps will likely remain wide.

 

“This opens the door in a different way from the way the China door was opened to follow-on activities,” said Thomas R. Pickering, a five-time U.S. ambassador. “Nobody is talking about establishing diplomatic relations.”

 

From the very start of the Obama presidency, reaching out to Iran has been more difficult than reaching out to China had been for Nixon. In early February 2009, the U.S. women’s badminton team was invited to take part in an international tournament in Tehran, an echo of the ping-pong team that visited China in one of the first signs of a thaw.

 

But the possibility of shuttlecock diplomacy fell apart when the Iranian foreign ministry said there wasn’t enough time to approve the visas.

The business community has provided little support. While U.S. corporations had long pined for access to the Chinese market of then nearly a billion people, Iran has a population of just 80 million people and the economy is already developed. An opening with Iran would mostly interest a handful of big oil companies.

 

Iran also continues to hold in prison Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian; in 1971, there were no U.S. correspondents based in China.

 

Yet, like China and the United States in the early 1970s, strategic issues have driven Iran and the United States into direct contact under President George W. Bush as well as Obama. Iranian nuclear weapons would pose a dire threat to Israel and other countries in the region, and Iran has supported Hezbollah in Lebanon, President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Iraqi government, Hamas in Gaza and Shiia factions in Yemen. Yet Iran wants to ease broad economic sanctions.

In 2009, Obama had said “that sanctions without outreach — condemnation without discussion — can carry forward only a crippling status quo.”

 

Talks over Iran’s nuclear program intensified in the fall of 2013 when a new Iranian negotiating team led by foreign minister Javad Zarif reached a Joint Plan of Action with the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany. As a self-imposed deadline approaches, some details have leaked; the deal is described as covering more than 10 years and limiting, but not eliminating, centrifuges needed to make bomb-ready enriched uranium.

 

Nixon relied on secret advance talks between his national security adviser Henry A. Kissinger and Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. In those meetings, the two sides hammered out everything from terms over the status of Taiwan to the wording of the Chinese invitation to Nixon.

 

In the public glare, Taiwan could have been a stumbling block. China claimed the self-governing island as its own territory and the United States had long treated Taiwan as the legitimate government. Nixon finessed the issue, without having to worry about a revolt in Congress like this week’s letter to Iran signed by 47 GOP senators.