Ever since his election in November, the mainstream media and blogosphere have been abuzz over president-elect Barack Obama's plans to initiate some sort of diplomatic dialogue with Iran. The general consensus among journalists and foreign policy cognoscenti now seems to be that engagement with Iran is no longer a question of "if," but of "when."
Perhaps I'm missing something. All this talk of dialogue assumes that there has been a material change in the nature of the Iranian challenge now confronting the U.S. — or that there could be, if both sides would just come to the negotiating table. But if recent history is any indication, that is simply not the case.
It's useful to recall that the Clinton administration — certainly not the White House best known for its hard-line stance toward the Islamic Republic — defined its policy toward Tehran based on "three noes": no development of weapons of mass destruction, no support for international terrorism, and no obstructionism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The unofficial stance in Washington at the time was that even peripheral movement on some of these fronts would be grounds for a thaw in U.S.-Iran ties.
But such a thaw did not materialize. Despite high-minded talk of a "dialogue of civilizations" with the West, Iran's leaders failed to substantially alter their regime's position on any of these issues, and the prospects for dialogue fizzled.
Fast forward more than a decade, and the situation is even less encouraging. After more than two-and-a-half decades of development and billions of dollars of investment, it's hard to believe that Iran's nuclear program would be on the table in any meaningful way in the event of dialogue with Washington. Neither would Iran's support for terrorism, since "exporting the revolution" is a cardinal regime principle that is enshrined in the country's 1979 constitution, and — in keeping with that directive — Iran currently provides tremendous financial and logistical support to groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. As for interference in Israeli-Palestinian affairs, officials in Jerusalem have been sounding the alarm over Iran's expanding strategic footprint in the Palestinian Territories for years. And, absent a comprehensive Israeli operation to root out the influence of Iran's chief terrorist proxy, Hezbollah (something which currently seems highly unlikely), Iranian influence in the Territories appears to be there to stay.
All of which begs the question: what, exactly, is there for Washington and Tehran to talk about? And what could the Obama administration possibly offer Iran's ayatollahs that would be so enticing that it would spark a fundamental change of behavior in a way that the Clinton administration's determined overtures could not?