A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran

Abstract

A SINGLE ROLL OF THE DICE: OBAMA'S DIPLOMACY WITH IRAN by Trita Parsi New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012 (ix + 240 pages, notes, index) $27.50 (cloth), $17.00 (paper)With the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the White House in 2008, expectations ran high for a major shi in US-Iranian relations from the stando of the Bush era to a new period of diplomacy. Trita Parsi's A Single Roll of the Dice details what became of those expectations for a foreign policy reboot. Relying primarily on interviews with negotiators and diplomats- from the United States, the European Union, and Iran, as well as Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Brazil, and Turkey-and secondarily on news media coverage and leaked classied documents, Parsi oers an exhaustive account of the Obama administration's Iran policy that reads at times like an investigative journalist's thriller, a la All The President's Men.Parsi heralds Obama's arrival to the scene as wiping the slate clean: he contests the dominant Western media narrative that the United States and Iran are headed inevitably toward military confrontation. Such fatalism, he argues, is a false premise if the political will for a diplomatic solution truly exists. In contrast to the supercial coverage in the US mainstream media, Parsi delivers a substantive play-by-play account of the Obama administration's policy toward Iran that begins with the possibilities for a peaceful resolution to the current crisis. His analysis of events during the rst two years of Obama's presidency asks whether the potential for real diplomacy between these two states existed. He discusses the circumstances that led to diplomatic failure and provides a framework for what he believes is necessary for meaningful diplomacy to occur.Unlike others writing on US-Iranian relations, and specically the nuclear issue, Parsi does not undertake a serious discussion of Iran's nuclear history, its cooperation or lack thereof with the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA), or its compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nor does he spend much time weighing the likely consequences of war- or continued sanctions-for Iran's nuclear program. Instead, he focuses his research on policy decisions. It could be argued that in choosing this approach Parsi presents a dangerous framework, whereby the facts have little to no relevance to policy-making. Yet with this framing Parsi is able to show how the substance of the issues falls prey to the politics of each state, thus placing negotiations in constant peril.The book begins with the negotiations that started in the fall of 2009. Parsi describes the US political climate in which Obama's policy was formed, introduces the political actors (both domestic and international), and plumbs the three-decade-long abyss that has dened US-Iranian rela- tions. He concludes that Obama's push toward diplomacy was sincere and suitable for the political moment in which he came to oce, when it was obvious that Bush-era threats and belligerence had failed to slow down Iran's nuclear program, let alone broker a nuclear deal. But though he takes Obama's stated intention to pursue diplomacy at face value, Parsi contends that what awaited the new president was a series of obstacles that would render diplomacy nearly impossible.In the following chapters, Parsi lays out the various interests that overshadowed Obama's will to diplomacy, adding a new dimension to the story that previous accounts have failed to capture. First, he describes the European Union's, and particularly France's, inammatory rhetoric toward Iran, as well as EU support for harsher sanctions as a precursor to negotiations. Second, he demonstrates the lack of support for diplomacy from Iran's Arab neighbors, like Saudi Arabia, in part due to their fears of growing Iranian power in the region. He also describes at length the inu- ence of Israel and Israeli advocacy groups, which staunchly opposed Iran attaining any nuclear know-how and insisted on keeping the military option on the table. …