Obama's Overture to Iran: Why Khamenei Won't Budge

Tony Karon in TIME, here

"...The Ayatollah's haste to get an answer into the public realm, and the cold-water tone of that answer, may be aimed at a domestic audience, with the purpose of holding the line and preventing the new, more open U.S. posture from causing divisions within Iran's power structure. The fact that Khamenei emphasized Washington's continued "unconditional support" for Israel as among the examples of continued U.S. hostility underscores his domestic political intention. Previous diplomatic initiatives from Iran's leaders suggest that they don't seriously imagine that Washington will alter its support for Israel, but Khamenei, by citing one of the ideological pillars of the Islamic Revolution (hostility to "the Zionist regime"), was in effect admonishing Iranian leaders to keep the U.S. at arm's length. (The Supreme Leader's efforts to discredit the U.S. initiative by invoking Washington's ties with Israel would have been helped by Israel's President Shimon Peres issuing a scolding New Year's message of his own to Iran's people hours after Obama's.)

Ayatollah Khamenei appears to have been well briefed on some of the thinking in the Obama Administration on how to handle negotiations with Iran. "For you to say that we will both talk to Iran and simultaneously exert pressure on her, both threats and appeasement, our nation hates this approach," Khamenei said. That, of course, is precisely what has been advocated by some key voices in Washington, most notably Dennis Ross, recently named the State Department's top adviser on Iran. Ross and others have strongly argued that imposing harsher penalties on Iran is the key to changing its behavior in the nuclear standoff, but that those penalties should be tied to a diplomatic outreach that includes more incentives and allows Tehran to back down without being humiliated. (They've also argued that such outreach will help the U.S. win support from reluctant allies for harsher measures should Iran fail to respond positively.) So, even as President Obama courts the Iranians with talk of a new relationship, the U.S. is keeping existing sanctions in place, and moving to win support for harsher measures — for example, by offering concessions to Russia on other issues in order to win its cooperation in pressuring Tehran.

Khamenei appears to be signaling that he knows what Washington is up to. And that he has no intention of backing down. Thus the new diplomatic game between the U.S. and Iran: Neither side wants to negotiate from a position of weakness, which is why the U.S. is keeping in place, and trying to increase, its leverage in the form of economic pressures on Iran to desist from enriching uranium. But Iran sees the U.S. game plan, and believes that Washington won't be able to muster the levels of economic pressures necessary to force the hand of the Iranians — and it can much less afford to initiate hostilities with the Islamic Republic because it needs Iran's cooperation in Iraq and Afghanistan. A dialogue has clearly begun, but on current indications, that dialogue will — at least for now — remain just another theater in the ongoing battle of wills between the U.S. and Iran."