Concrete Steps

Simon Jenkins writes:

An old maxim holds that you trust a man by what he does, not what he says. The charm offensive in New York of the new Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, is testing the maxim to destruction. It has become a diplomatic cliffhanger, with the potential to rank with Nixon in China and Thatcher in Russia.

Rouhani has released political prisoners, promised civil rights, called the Holocaust a crime and stated that Iran's nuclear programme is "exclusively peaceful". He calls America not a great Satan but "very dear and near to our hearts".

This has clearly caught off guard the sabre-rattlers of London and Washington. They skulk in the corner and call for "concrete steps", as if Iran were a repentant but disreputable schoolboy.

The maxim holds that they may be right. But another maxim holds that Iran is no monolith but a country of 80 million people whose politics were sophisticated when Britons were still wearing woad. It deserves a hearing.

Western policy towards Iran has mirrored the hysteria of the clerical fanatics who have run that country since the fall of the Shah in 1979.

US and British leaders have vied with each other in hectoring and threats. They supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988, and for the past decade have sanctioned the country because of its nuclear programme.

This aggression greatly aided the populist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with his anti-western, antisemitic speeches.

The speeches in turn aided western strategists in plotting naval manoeuvres, targeting missiles and setting red lines.

Iran policy became a cauldron of blood-curdling warmongering, with the Iranian and US military-industrial complexes singing in joyful unison.

Since 1995 Iran has been a victim of the favourite weapon of the armchair interventionist – the "tough and targeted" sanction.

This has been counterproductive as ever, turning the regime in on itself while debilitating Iran's urban middle class from which future opposition might emerge. The chief sufferers have been the poor.

Although Iran's economic woes are largely the result of governmental ineptitude, the UN curbs on trade and finance hardly help.

Most outlawed regimes – North Korea, Cuba, Libya, Burma, Iraq, Iran, now Syria – have become more intransigent and entrenched under sanctions. Every serious study has questioned the weapon's efficacy.

The Chicago academic Robert Pape reckons perhaps five of the 115 instances of economic aggression over the past century show any degree of real effectiveness. Many were counterproductive or merely led to war. This evidence has had absolutely no effect on policy.

Sanctions make the west's rich feel good while the victim's poor pay the price. With each passing year, sanctions are said to be "working" merely for having created poverty. They always seem to need "a further twist".

Some victims even come to revel in them. Cuba is a tourist venue after half a century of isolation has rendered it a lifestyle time warp. The same appears true of Burma, as it slowly recovers from ostracism.

Rouhani has spoiled the interventionists' game. He came to power in June on the back of a genuine election victory, albeit among a list of approved candidates.

He brought with him two substantive advantages: a career as a practised diplomat and the backing of the hierarchy's "supreme leader", the ageing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He is an ally of such Tehran power brokers as Hashemi Rafsanjani and the Larijani family.

Rouhani and Khamenei have openly warned the Revolutionary Guard to stay in their barracks and have begun to open up the anti-market siege economy created by Ahmadinejad.

But they need trade to build a secure urban middle class to counterbalance the reactionaries. That Rouhani avoided shaking Barack Obama's hand this week shows his sensitivity to domestic opinion.

There is no point in pretending that Iran has no interest in nuclear weapons, any more than in pretending that Assad of Syria did not use chemical ones. As in North Korea, the nuclear programme is a totem of the country's militaristic power structure.

But, as the former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack says in his exhaustive study of Iran and the bomb, Unthinkable, there is not much anyone can do about it.

For Israel, Russia, Britain and the US to lecture Iran on the subject seems to many Iranians sheer hypocrisy. Why should they endure poverty for wanting to join the club?

As Pollack points out, neither sanctions nor missiles will ultimately stop Iran's uranium enrichment. Constructive engagement might do so.

The immediate strategy should be to back Rouhani to the hilt. There is simply no advantage in treating him as a liar or a bluffer.

There is certainly none in confirming the paranoid scepticism of his reactionary enemies. If the outside world is seriously worried about a "Shia bomb", it should do everything possible to assist Rouhani against the forces trying to create one.

Economic sanctions are most likely to influence politics in a victim state in the rare event of that state being responsive to domestic opinion. Hence US sanctions against Britain over Suez in 1956 "worked", as possibly did sanctions against South Africa in the late 1980s.

If they had any impact on Iran, it was in goading voters to choose Rouhani against more conservative candidates. If that is sanctions working, the interventionists should be cheering.

For the west now to turn its back on Rouhani's apparent about-turn would be to deny the entire purpose of sanctions. Israel's boycott of Iran's hand of friendship is madness.

For diplomats to demand "concrete steps" and offer none in return suggests they secretly hope the opportunity for rapprochement will fail.

That would show the soul of western diplomacy as gripped by cynical belligerence. Osama bin Laden would be laughing.