A Quick Post-Mortem, and Something Left Out of the Analysis of the US Response
Now that the demobilization of the opposition rallies has generally occurred, we can try to make sense of what was a most chaotic event. I am not implying that anything is back to normal … let’s just say it is back to quasi-normal. 2009 will be remembered as an historic year in Iranian history, whatever happens hereafter, to join 1906, 1953, 1979, and 1997 in the annals.
The social movement that just occurred in Iran was highly innovative and added many tricks to the general repertoire of protest movements, some of which became fetishized in the Western press, but it also borrowed from socio-cultural norms and symbols in Iran that run deeply through its history. This is how most effective social movements operate, and we should not be surprised that the coming together of hundreds of thousands in a highly charged emotional setting directed towards a single goal would generate such a development.
Its leadership, if one can use that term with the variegated reform politicians in Iran, was not so impressive. The protests and rallies are falling off, but not only due to state sanction. The opposition and its representatives’ strategies still seem to reflect politics as such in Iran over the last 30 years – every man for himself. Last week, on the same day, Karoubi, Khatami, and Mousavi’s people made three different calls for rallies. The problem was that they were proposed for three different places in Tehran. Nothing demobilizes a social movement like the perception of incompetence and disorganization at the top. Obviously they are under duress. But a nonviolent movement requires very good organization and discipline, and this will hopefully be part of the post-mortem as they consider what could have been done differently and move ahead.
What may be interesting for US-watchers, rather than Iran-watchers, is the US response to these events. Many have attacked the Obama administration for “not doing enough.” The European Union is even more perturbed about its lack of involvement, and is meeting constantly to ruminate on its enervation. The remarkable thing about the entire event, though, can be gleaned via a comparison with the Clinton era. During the triumphant 1990s, where a hyperpower United States supposedly existed during its unipolar moment, President Clinton would never have declined an opportunity to discuss a foreign election, and, of course, its relevance to the US or the US’ role in the world. The US was the yardstick by which all other events were judged, and Clintonian foreign policy was full of liberal clichés about the direction the world was going and if a particular country was acting “responsibly,” and thus along for the ride.
Both Clinton and Obama are intelligent people, yet Obama has basically declined to involve the US in the Iranian election. This may be called part of the “realist” strategy of Obama, coming after the messianic Bush years. But, this is not your father’s realpolitik. Unlike Nixonian/Kissengerian foreign policy by proxy, where the US actively engaged its spheres of influence and triangulated its rivals against each other, Obama’s realpolitik is the strategy of a country that (sometimes) realizes that this is not the 1990s. The long term trend is that the US in decline vis-à-vis the rest of the world.
“Managing decline” is not a great bumper sticker, but it is what a responsible US foreign policy would be in the present moment. The opposite course, repudiating decline in the face of reality, was tried for the past 8 years. Like the British 40 years after World War II, the US may have some Falkland moments to bring back the memories of the good old days (Iraq War I and II probably belong to that category). Also, there is no guarantee that the “declinists,” who probably do not go by that moniker, will win out against US hawks of the liberal type to effectively corral Obama’s ear. It is far from clear that the US could have accomplished anything positive with a different strategy on Iran over the past month – those who say otherwise should lay out what they think would have happened. Yet this reluctance to “do anything” may be a sign of the coming multipolar world that, while less predictable, contains the seeds of a more balanced world political system.
