August 05, 2010

Kagan: Sticks, not carrots, focus of Obama Iran briefing

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Robert Kagan came away from President Barack Obama’s Iran briefing to a small group of journalists and columnists Wednesday convinced that some of the other reporters there had got it wrong.

The main thrust of Obama’s message Wednesday was not of hope for a new diplomatic opening to Iran, Kagan says, but that the current strategy of pressure and sanctions is working.

“Some of the journalists present, upon hearing the president's … point about the door still being open to Iran, decided that he was signaling a brand-new diplomatic initiative,” Kagan writes at the Washington Post.

“They started peppering Obama with questions to ferret out exactly what ‘new’ diplomatic actions he was talking about and, after the president left, they continued probing the senior officials."

“This put the officials in an awkward position: They didn't want to say flat out that the administration was not pursuing a new diplomatic initiative because this might suggest that the administration was not interested in diplomacy at all,” Kagan continues. “But they made perfectly clear -- in a half-dozen artful formulations -- that, no, there was no new diplomatic initiative in the offing.”

“I left feeling sympathy for this and every administration,” Kagan wrote. “The ‘news’ out of this briefing was that the administration wanted everyone to know how tough it was being on Iran.”

Both things may be true. While as per Kagan's account, Obama and senior administration officials were focused on showing their dual track strategy got international buy-in for tough and effective sanctions that have got Iran's attention, it also seems to be true the administration continues to lay the groundwork for the possibility of renewed international engagement with Iran through two existing channels, the P5+1 and the Vienna Group.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, representing the permanent five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, is in contact with Iranian officials about renewed talks on Iran’s nuclear program in the coming weeks, U.S. and European officials say. Diplomats say a separate track of negotiations is also being pursued between Iran and the so-called Vienna Group, composed of the U.S., Russia and France and the International Atomic Energy Agency, on a possible nuclear fuel swap deal.

The administration is “making clear that they are convinced that there will be two sets of conversations with Iran," the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Patrick Clawson told POLITICO Tuesday. The Obama administration "is over the moon," Clawson continued. "They got the sanctions resolution, they are feeling good" about their Iran strategy.

Obviously, the administration still wants a diplomatic solution with Iran, Kagan told me Thursday by phone, adding that he too wants a diplomatic solution with Iran.

“I am just saying, the mood and body language and language-language of the meeting” was not about optimism over some new diplomatic initiative with Iran, Kagan said, but that the White House has “no high expectations for those meetings.”

Also at the Wednesday meeting were the Washington Post’s David Ignatius and Jackson Diehl, Carol Giacomo of the New York Times editorial board, ABC’s Christiane Amanpour, NBC’s David Gregory, the Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder, and the Economist's Peter David.

(David's, Goldberg's and Ambinder's accounts of the briefing lean to Kagan's sense of the 'tough' message, while Ignatius's is more focused on door to diplomacy with Iran still being open, and may be informed by other interviews than the Wednesday White House powwow.)

The White House has not provided a transcript of the Wednesday briefing. But, perhaps bolstering Kagan's take, it sent around a factsheet Thursday summarizing existing Iran sanctions to date.

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