"Trump in Tehran!" This is the name of an operetta imagined by some American advocates of realpolitik calling themselves the Council on Foreign Relations, rather than the sobriquet that G.K. Chesterton would have suggested: The Club of Queer Trades.
The "real" part of the English-German cliché is misleading; what is offered has nothing to do with reality but a fantasized perception of it. The realpolitik crowd looks at a country, decides who is Big Cheese at any given time, and tries to make a deal with him regardless of ethical, idealistic or even geostrategic considerations.
One prominent advocate of the approach was Hans Morgenthau, a German-American academic. Like his fellow German Karl Marx, who looked for "laws of history," Morgenthau tried to find "the laws of politics" as applied to international relations. In his worldview, the concept of power was the overriding goal in international relations as it defined national interests.
Morgenthau's analysis had found echoes in President Franklin Roosevelt's administration, even in the final phases of the Second World War. It was in that spirit that Roosevelt, through what was to be marketed as Track-II diplomacy, tried to find alternatives to Adolf Hitler inside Nazi Germany. Later, realpolitik inspired both George Kennan and Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger's détente roadshow with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China became textbook examples of successful realpolitik. The same method was also used to "solve" the so-called Palestinian problem, to rein-in the Kim gang in North Korea and persuade the mullahs of Iran to enter the tent at President Barack Obama's invitation, and do their pissing from inside.
In all those cases, the realpolitik tribe high-fived its success but helped prolong the life of regimes doomed to crumble under the weight of their ignorance, error and crimes.
For peddlers of realpolitik, Kissinger's China experiment has become the referential point for successful diplomacy, with the operetta "Nixon in China" as its Broadway narrative. According to it, the US president forgot and forgave almost half a century of enmity and went to Beijing, had a few rounds of mao-tai with the "Supreme Helmsman" and made the world a safer place for everyone, including America.
In the same vein, why shouldn't another US president go to Tehran to drink some fizzy water with the "Supreme Guide" and close the nearly 50-year-long history of hostage-taking, terrorism, vicious propaganda, sanctions and military confrontation?
The question was first raised during Obama's tenure, with hangers-on like John Kerry musing about an "Obama in Tehran" operetta that would send "Nixon in China" into oblivion.
The Broadway rendition of "Nixon in China" suffered from the speeding-up technique that made the Keystone Cops reels funnier. Seeing the operetta, one might think that President Richard Nixon flew to Beijing in a jiffy, waved a magic wand and, hey presto, Red China became as white as snow.
That isn't what happened.
The first contact between the Nixon Administration and Red China was established with the help of Iran and Pakistan early in 1970, and led to Kissinger's first visit to Beijing in 1971. That was followed by Nixon's visit in 1972.
Nixon sent one of his most senior diplomats, the future President George W H Bush, to Beijing as a semi-official envoy for a year of monitoring China's compliance with the deals made step by-step. It was only at the end of a seven-year-long probation that the US extended full diplomatic recognition and normal relations to the People's Republic in 1979.
In those years, China changed the way the US wanted it to change. To start with, the fear of a hardline military clique emerging as Mao's successor was removed with the "accidental" elimination, only six months after Kissinger's secret visit to Beijing, of Field Marshall Lin Biao, the standard-bearer of the anti-American faction in the Communist Party.
Next, the Chinese leadership moved fast to conclude the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that regarded the "American paper tiger" as the arch-enemy of global revolutionaries.
The Gang of Four consisting of Mao's wife Jian Qing, Shanghai Mayor Yao Wenyuan and self-styled theoreticians Zhang Chunqiao and Wang Hongwen were booted out of key positions and, later, even put on trial for "crimes against the revolution."
In 1971, covering a visit to China by Empress Farah and Premier Amir-Abbas Hoveyda of Iran, I had an opportunity to talk to Mrs. Mao in Beijing and Yao Wenyuan in Shanghai, both of whom were still adamant that "American Imperialism" would be defeated across the globe.
During those seven eventful years, China steadily moved away from its status as a vehicle for global revolution to reshape itself as a normal state behaving as normal states, good or bad, do.
The US wanted China to abandon its proxies in Angola, Mozambique, southwest Africa and South Yemen, which the Beijing leadership did as quickly as it could. That helped Iran crush the guerrillas operating under the label "People's Front for the Liberation of Occupied Arabian Gulf" (PFLOAG).
With Hua Guofeng becoming Prime Minister and Deng Xiaoping emerging as "strongman," China adopted a clearly pro-US profile as both nations regarded the Soviet Union as a rival if not an actual threat.
The Nixon-in-China episode was about hard-nosed diplomacy, which had little to do with realpolitik.
The Americans told the Chinese: If you want us to do something that you want, first deliver what we want. The Chinese complied and were rewarded.
Applying the Chinese model to normalization with Iran's mullahs will have to start with a long laundry list that Iran has to deal with in domestic and foreign policy fields.
Is "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenei ready for a seven-year ordeal in the hope of securing relief at the end? Does he have the clout that Mao had when he agreed to dramatically change course? Will he even last that long?
Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987.
Gatestone Institute would like to thank the author for his kind permission to reprint this article in slightly different form from Asharq Al-Awsat. He graciously serves as Chairman of Gatestone Europe.
