"Obama rhetoric can boost engagement strategy"

Excerpts from OXFAN:

SOS Hillary Clinton on June 28 said that President Barack Obama was taking the situation in Iran "a day at a time", carefully calibrating his diplomatic and policy responses. Obama has faced pressure from across the US political spectrum to direct more rhetorical firepower against Tehran. However, recent US experience in dealing with authoritarian governments suggests that such pressure requires careful calibration to be effective.... 

Cold War experience. The US experience in seeking to influence authoritarian regimes during the Cold War suggests that while critiques have merit, they are incomplete and flawed:

• Forceful rhetoric deployed injudiciously, without reference to the society in question and in the absence of engagement, is likely to be futile -- at best.
• However, strategic public communications that seek to hold an authoritarian government accountable to its own professed standards, accompanied by diplomatic engagement, can sometimes support US policy objectives.

The Reagan legend. The most powerful proponents of strong US verbal condemnations of authoritarian regimes, particularly on the Right, usually point to the example of former President Ronald Reagan:

• The 'evil empire'. ....verbal interventions supposedly helped precipitate the collapse of Moscow's influence, the fall of the Soviet Empire, and the end of the Cold War.
• Reagan in Berlin. Reagan's most celebrated rhetorical intervention, in this respect, came in a 1987 speech before the Brandenburg Gate,........ to "tear down this wall".....

However, the argument that Reagan, by resolutely confronting Moscow in rhetorical and military terms, was the primary agent of the fall of the Soviet Union, has significant problems. This is because it:

• is overly US-centric, underrates or ignores developments within Eastern Europe and, especially, the Soviet Union itself that had a more direct bearing on events;
• suggests that Soviet attempts to match Reagan's military spending brought about economic instability, forcing Moscow to undertake destabilising reforms (scholarship shows compellingly that even extreme economic distress does not necessarily prompt collapse of authoritarian regimes);
• underrates the ability of authoritarian regimes, such as the Soviets, to maintain their political grip by deploying massive coercive force (Moscow chose not to); and
• discounts the crucial role played by Gorbachev. ........ 

Obama's Iranian strategy. The administration has declared that it will continue its strategy of engagement with Iran, notwithstanding the regime's post-election repression. Indeed, Obama has long used Reagan's tough negotiations with the Soviets to justify his own approach. The president also seems to have taken Gates's advice, and sought to criticise the regime in terms not limited to a US or Western perspective. For example, he has frequently invoked "universal" or "global" norms in urging Tehran to tolerate dissent and eschew brutality. 

However, Iranian law and the expressed ideals of the 1979 revolution may give him further rhetorical ammunition:

• Article 27 of the Iranian constitution guarantees the right to freely hold "marches and public gatherings" as long as "arms are not carried" and the marchers observe "the fundamental principles of Islam".
• Reformist former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami yesterday described the presidential election as a "coup against the republicanism of the system"; opposition leader Mir Hossein Moussavi has levelled similar charges.

This suggests that Obama may have an opportunity to use the Islamic Republic's own founding documents as basis for future criticism of the regime's repressive tactics. Like the Helsinki accords, the disconnect between an authoritarian government's expressed ideas and its behaviour in practice gives the president an opening he could exploit to his advantage, in the context of an engagement policy. ..."