No Sign of U.S.-Iran Breakthrough at U.N. General Assembly

At last week’s United Nations General Assembly opening, many observers were keeping a close eye on how the key players spoke of the Iran nuclear agreement and its implications for regional security and even world peace. Strikingly, both the U.S. and Iranian leaders were positive but precise in discussing the deal, with neither allowing any excessive exuberance to color their remarks. Meanwhile, their mutual accusations about which of the two countries is the source of regional instability suggest that no conceptual breakthrough in relations is about to occur.

Though Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and U.S. President Barack Obama both spoke to the General Assembly on the same day, there was no direct contact between them. (This is perhaps understandable—a casual handshake between Obama and Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, was not well-received in Iran, according to press accounts.) Both leaders praised the nuclear agreement overall, but there was little evidence from their remarks that it will, or was intended to, lead to a new era in U.S.-Iran relations. If the U.S. relationship with any country is likely to change soon, look to Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his speech to the U.N. on Oct. 3, sounded like he was eager to put the recent tensions between the U.S. and Israel over the Iran agreement behind him and focus instead on the areas in which there is a clear convergence of interests and deep cooperation between the two long-standing allies.

Obama spoke first, as is customary for the host nation of the annual General Assembly meetings. He expressed pride in the successful nuclear negotiations as a contribution to regional and world peace, and he acknowledged the vital role that the U.N. and its related bodies played throughout the process and will continue to play in its implementation, saying “that is the strength of the international system, when it works the way it should.”

But Obama’s language about Iran’s regional activities was blunt: He scolded Tehran for its support for nonstate proxies who “fuel sectarian conflict that endangers the entire region.” His most memorable line was that “chanting ‘death to America’ does not create jobs or make Iran more secure.” So the president held back from any suggestions of a brighter era in U.S.-Iran relations, instead keeping the burden on Iran to demonstrate its capacity to conform and comply with global norms.

The Iranian president’s annual address to the U.N. often provides a striking window into Tehran’s worldview, and at first glance, Rouhani’s speech signaled a new discourse. After all, his opening line was, “Today, a new chapter has started in Iran’s relations with the world.” He went on to praise the U.N. and the negotiators from all the six other countries that are party to the agreement for the successful outcome to the nuclear talks. And he expressed the hope that the win-win approach that characterized the deal might be applied as well to the regional tensions in the Middle East.

But Rouhani repeated past Iranian grievances about U.N. and unilateral economic sanctions, arguing that they were never justified and were not the determining factor in Iran’s policies or the approach Iran took in the nuclear talks. In an interesting parallel to how Washington describes Iran’s regional mischief, he portrayed the United States’ ties to Israel and Saudi Arabia as sources of regional instability. U.S. efforts to defend its regional allies, in Rouhani’s view, “only cultivate the seeds of division and extremism.”

Some observers of the General Assembly proceedings reported some relief on the part of other countries that Iran’s isolation is now over and that various bilateral meetings on general issues can take place free of the expectation that member states keep Iran in the “penalty box” over its nuclear activities.

As for other key regional actors, both Israel and Saudi Arabia praised the international community for the achievement of the Iran agreement, with varying degrees of acceptance of the deal’s merits. Saudi Arabia had earlier signaled its acceptance of the agreement, and Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir spent most of his speech focusing on the failures of the U.N. system to solve the Syria crisis and the organization’s inability to implement its own resolutions on an independent state of Palestine.

For his part, Netanyahu above all sought to signal a possible end to the acute rift with Washington over the deal, which he fiercely opposed. While he still believes that Iran’s true intentions are to develop nuclear weapons and that it would have been possible to negotiate a tougher agreement, he acknowledged in his remarks to the General Assembly that the “deal does place several constraints on Iran’s nuclear program, and rightly so.” He went on to identify areas where the U.S. and Israel are cooperating to reduce the dangers of extremism and to counter other regional threats.

Of course, the U.N. has at times been a subplot in the broader history of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, and vice versa. While the U.N. in effect created the state of Israel—alongside of what was intended to be a Palestinian state—the history of Third World and nonaligned antagonism to Israel as a neocolonial power has haunted the institution over the years. That often put the U.S. in the position of defending Israel, sometimes at the expense of Washington’s own declared policies toward an equitable solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. And debates over reforming the Security Council and the use of the veto by its five permanent members frequently invoke the U.S. track record on blocking resolutions related to the Israel-Palestine conflict that Washington considered unbalanced, which account for 40 of the United States’ 79 vetoes since 1970. So it seems fitting that Israel would attempt to correct course and restore some semblance of solidarity with Washington over regional threats at the U.N. podium.

The takeaway from the U.S. and Iranian speeches is pride in the achievement of the agreement coupled with mutual caution about moving too quickly to a transformed relationship. The two sides’ mirror-image portrayals about which of them is responsible for regional instability, coupled with what seems like an Israeli effort to get back “onside” with Washington without softening its line on Iran, suggests the difficulty of making progress on any larger agenda in the future, beyond what one hopes will be successful implementation of the nuclear agreement.

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/16863/no-sign-of-u-s-iran-breakthrough-at-u-n-general-assembly