In 2007, John McCain, then seeking the Republican Party nomination for the United States presidency, sang “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ hit version of Barbara Ann at a campaign event in South Carolina. He also suggested during that era that North Korea should be threatened “with extinction” and that he was happy for US troops to remain in Iraq “for 100 years”.
McCain embraced what his friend William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, labelled “national greatness conservatism”. McCain’s stridency raised questions as to whether his hawkishness would leave even George W Bush, then US president, in the shade.
The maniacal Donald Trump likes to take things to another level with his reality-TV foreign policy, which does not actually merit the description “policy”. His preferred insult in 2017 was to call the Persian Gulf the “Arabian Gulf”. The following year, he announced US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.
His original idea of “maximum pressure” on Iran has now become one of “epic fury”. In 2019, political scientist Marco Overhaus said: “Trump’s Iran policy looks like a pressure cooker without a release valve.” Now the cooker has exploded.
READ MORE
In her 2022 book The State of Resistance, Assal Rad, a historian of US-Iran policy, said the Iranian responses to Trump’s denigrations followed “several patterns in the Iranian national psyche which recall the fears of land loss, pride over the homeland, historical significance and resistance to foreign force”.
There was a time when Iranian nationalists, dealing with the imperialism of Britain and of Russia, captured the Irish nationalist imagination.
John Dillon of the Irish Parliamentary Party was a particularly vocal supporter of the Iranian-constitutional nationalist camp during the Iranian constitutional revolution of 1906-11. He joined the Persia Committee, formed in London in 1908, to oppose British policy towards Iran.
The founder of Sinn Féin, Arthur Griffith, and Irish socialist leader James Connolly wrote in support of Iranian independence. The Iranian nationalist press reciprocated by embracing the nationalist martyrdom of Roger Casement, executed after the 1916 Rising.
Historians should not be in the business of defending regimes but rather understanding the currents that run through them. So should politicians.
Bruce Riedel, who served for nearly 30 years in the CIA and was a senior adviser on Iran to three US presidents, was blunt in 2008 in asserting “with a weak and erratic understanding of the dynamics of Iranian politics, history and culture, US presidents have lurched from one failure to another in trying to deal with Iran ... all too often American leaders have relied on the warped views of third parties with their own agendas”.
Former US president Barack Obama’s embrace of dialogue in dealing with Iran may not have had the desired outcome, but the strategy of diplomacy and economic pressure with the hope of mutual long-term accommodation at least sought to move beyond the callowness of US “national greatness” hubris.
The dual strategy is believed by many to have contributed to Tehran’s acceptance of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA): “We will engage” with diplomacy, Obama said, but “preserve all our capabilities” militarily. His assertions made clear he was not in the business of regime change and that a deal might assist more moderate political forces in Iran. But his approach was above all about avoiding war, even if that involved alienating the Gulf monarchies.
Trump’s alternative during his first term was to insist that Iran should become a “normal nation”. What is that? The theme of resistance permeates historical accounts of Iran; it is something, Assal Rad notes, “rooted in Iranian culture”, and “while the Islamic Republic wielded and exploited that culture of resistance for its own use, Iranians before and after the revolution resisted their own authoritarian states as well”.
Nikki Keddie, formerly professor of history at the University of California and author of Modern Iran, a 1981 book updated in 2003, noted she strove for balance, but made “no secret of my dislike of clerical rule but also of any plan for outside intervention to overthrow it. I have confidence in the Iranian people’s abilities to manage their own affairs in the long run”.
What struck her, in looking at centuries of Iranian history, was “the propensity of Iranians to mount mass movements that challenge, often successfully, the powers that be”.
It has long suited Iranian militants to seek to prolong confrontation by drawing its enemies in to proxy battles, leading to the quagmire of protracted immersion in regional conflicts.
The infantilism of the US approach was apparent in 2020 when Frank McKenzie, then the most senior US commander for the Middle East, said: “Nothing makes a potential adversary think twice about war than the presence of an aircraft carrier and the strike group that comes with it”.
Nothing there, of course, about what comes after it.
