Christ, I’m tired of the threatening-war-with-Iran news cycle of the past . . . forty years. It’s SO BORING. The world gets it: The United States feels threatened. Iran might build a bomb. We have reason to believe it wouldn’t but what if it did? Sanctions! Outrage! Resignation! Sanctions again!
After this many seasons, even Shonda Rhimes couldn’t breathe new life into this storyline. It’s the same thing over and over and over again. And here I am, an Iranian American, weighing in with my Iranian American take. Again.
The fact is, the administration of President Donald Trump doesn’t want the kind of diplomacy with Iran that might lead to a fruitful and peaceful resolution. It wants to maintain an atmosphere of constant tension. It needs Iran as an enemy—so much so that it had to pull out of the nuclear deal to ensure Iran’s enemy status. Pulling out of a multilateral deal that affected multiple countries and re-disturbed the world order shows real commitment to Iran-as-Enemy.
Now we’re mad that Iran doesn’t want to comply with a deal that we don’t comply with. We’re in some kind of circular logic hellscape.
Trump needs enemies because Hillary is gonna work for only so long.
Trump needs enemies because Hillary is gonna work for only so long. At some point, Trump rally-goers will realize they’re chanting “Lock her up!” about a middle-aged lady whose main activity is to walk her dogs in the suburban woods. Trump himself will eventually have to concede that Hillary is now just a random civilian.
But keeping the threat of Iran alive was complicated by its irritating compliance with the nuclear deal. So Trump had to get rid of the deal. Then, after blaming Iran for a tanker incident and for shooting down a $130 million drone, Trump actually ordered an attack on Iran, but changed his mind at the last moment.
There are legitimate reasons to be against the regime. The various human rights violations that Iran engages in every day. The journalists it detains, the general oppression of its citizens. There’s even a ban on walking dogs in public places in Tehran. But, for some reason, human rights violations don’t “land” with the administration or its perceived base. If human rights mattered, then Trump wouldn’t be trying so hard to befriend Russia and North Korea. He would have threatened “obliteration like you’ve never seen before” on Saudi Arabia instead. But human rights abuses are not a problem for Trump.
Is Iran an enemy because we want to spread democracy? Here again, that’s not a thing for this President. He’s in a five-way bromance with Kim Jong-un, Viktor Orbán, Rodrigo Duterte, and Vladimir Putin. They’re not sitting around talking about the beauty of democracy. If anything, Trump is annoyed that we’re a democracy, and doesn’t want to spread it.
Might Trump make his animus toward Iran about oil? That doesn’t work because the United States, as of 2012, was providing almost 40 percent of its own oil needs. Also, get solar panels and shut up. Even conservative economists who look five minutes past tomorrow know that oil will eventually be shelved along with the cassette tapes.
So is it all just about dominance in the Middle East? That would be against Trump’s many campaign promises about reducing foreign entanglements. The base doesn’t want to add Iran to a list that already includes Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Neither does the rest of the country—not that Trump cares what the rest of the country thinks.
Finally—and you can imagine what a relief this is to me—Trump is not rattling the saber against Iran because he doesn’t like Iranians. As he told the press after signing an executive order that imposed still more sanctions, “I know many Iranians living in New York and they’re fantastic people. I have many friends that are Iranian . . . .”
So why is Iran our enemy?
It’s probably easier to bang war drums than it is to maintain what made us a superpower in the first place. An awesome military was part of it, of course. But what really did it is that our manufacturing, innovation, and economic mobility became the envy of the world. We were a K-pop band and the rest of the globe was screaming about how hot we were.
We don’t need Iran to be our enemy. We have greater enemies that we should be dealing with: a globe that’s crumbling, flooding, and on fire; an aging citizenry; the threat of mass unemployment at the hands of robots; and again, that thing about the globe literally falling apart.
The United States has real enemies. Let’s stop wasting our energy on Iran.