Ignoring Engagement’s Impact On The Green Movement

There is a new conventional wisdom developing that Obama’s engagement policy has failed. Stories on Iran in the mainstream press frequently assert that engagement has failed and the right gleefully boasts that engagement was naïve in the first place. These claims are wrong on two accounts. One of which the Administration argues, in noting that engagement has opened the possibility for international sanctions, something that was impossible during the Bush administration. The other argument however has not really been made, yet it is the most important: the policy of engagement played a critical part in the development of the Green Movement.

This may sound like an argument that is just shrilling for the Obama administration, but without the shift to engagement from Obama it is highly doubtful that such a movement would have materialized. With the Bush administration in office, the United States was not seen as a potential partner. While Iranians may have still supported the concept of engagement with the West during the Bush administration, reformists could hardly motivate large crowds on behalf of engaging with the Bush administration. The bluster-based policy of the Bush administration which described Iran as evil, threatened to bomb them, and invaded both of their neighbors, made it quite easy for the Iranian regime to demonize the United States as the Great Satan and argue plausibly that the obstacle to better relations with the west was a crazy United States not the regime. Being despised matters for US foreign policy.

However, Obama’s election and his calls for engagement, deprived the regime of this argument by making it clear that the United States was not the obstacle to better relations. Obama’s election was met with tremendous hope and optimism globally, including Iran. The President’s outreach to Iran with the address on Iran’s new years and his repeated calls for engagement in his first six months in office, gave momentum to reformists. It sent the signal that a new relationship between Iran and the West was possible.

During the Iranian election there were clear calls to embrace this change, as the Moussavi campaign was filled with slogans and imagery that drew from Obama’s own presidential campaign. Moussavi during the campaign expressed an eagerness “to push for Iran to embrace President Barack Obama’s offer of dialogue after a nearly 30-year diplomatic freeze.” Moussavi noted that “the taboo in this country (Iran) about talking to America has been broken.” During the election, there were numerous reports of Iranians saying they were voting against Ahmadinejad because they wanted better relations with the outside world. For example the LA Times quoted a school teacher saying, “I’m not coming here to vote for anyone. I’m voting against someone. I want a change in the situation. I want better relations with the outside world.” Nick Burns, who served in the State Department under the Bush administration said that engagement put Ahmadinejad “on the defensive” during the election.

After the fraudulent election, the Green Movement became a new force, a force that has had little to do with the actions of the Obama administration. However, what engagement as a policy did in the first six months of 2009 was raise expectations among reform-minded Iranians that there was a chance for a new direction in US-Iranian relations. These raised expectations combined with the fraudulent elections proved a combustible combination.

Hence, US policy of engagement has not failed at all. As Judah Grunstein at World Politics Review argued, “Iran failed, not engagement.” Engagement has made clear to Iranians that it is not the United States, the once Great Satan, keeping them down, but their own regime. Shifting the spotlight from the actions of the US to the actions of the regime may in fact be Obama’s biggest foreign policy accomplishment to date.