This is ridiculous advice:
For its own interests, Washington must take a fundamentally different approach. President Obama needs to realign U.S. relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran as thoroughly as President Nixon realigned relations with the People’s Republic of China in the early 1970s. Simply “talking” to Iran will not accomplish this. ...
Accepting a rising regional power as a legitimate entity pursuing its interests in a fundamentally rational and defensive way is how Nixon and Henry Kissinger enabled the historic opening to China in the early 1970s. Their achievement was not to “talk” to Beijing; Washington had been doing that for years, through ambassadorial-level discussions. Their achievement was to accept – and persuade Americans to accept – the People’s Republic and its leaders as (in Nixon’s words) “pursuing their own interests as they perceive these interests, just as we follow our own interests as we see them,” and to work with them on that basis.
For brevity's sake, I'll just skip by their questionable assertions about the effect of our policies in the Middle East.
We oppose Iran because we find it unacceptable that an oppressive Iranian government sponsors terror and unrest in the region (with hundreds of Americans dead as a result), and because they are pursuing nuclear weapons. To say we require Iran to subordinate their policies to us because we oppose these policies is a strange way to describe our goals with Iran.
We have quietly and openly tried to talk to the Iranians for decades, and they refuse to engage in any talks that don't simply result in the acceptance of what Iran is doing.
The comparison to Nixon's opening to China is particularly dense when you consider that the 1972 opening was made possible by the fact that our main enemy was the Soviet Union. The opening to China took advantage of the growing split (including border clashes) between the Soviet Union and China. America and China thus had a common enemy to focus our cooperation. In addition, President Nixon's reputation for opposing communism gave him credibility that an opening to China was in our national interests and not just a disguised retreat.
So the Leveretts' grand opening to Iran lacks a common greater enemy to cement our proposed new friendship with Iran. And lacks a president with a record of resisting the Iranians that would inspire confidence that he is keeping our interests foremost in his mind as we works with Iran (Hagel, anyone? Kerry? The president himself?).
And it would be good to recall--even if we could find a common enemy that could restrain Iranian behavior we find unacceptable--that the opening to China and our friendship based on opposing the Soviet Union didn't stick after the common enemy dissolved.
In the end, their proposal is poorly disguised retreat in the face of Iran's pursuit of unacceptable interests as Iranians perceive them, garbed in the cloth of foreign policy realism. Sometimes professors inhabit a special echelon above reality that is just amazing.
