in Brussels. Several European parliamentarians protested the visit. Struan Stevenson, a British conservative, called Mottaki’s visit the equivalent of hosting Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister, in the European Parliament. The president of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, Gabriele Albertini, dismissed the criticism, saying, “The choice is either to confront opinions that may be different from our own or to ignore them.”52 That dichotomy, however, ignores the costs and the complexities of engagement with rogue actors.
“The United States and Iran held their first official high-level, face-to-face talks in almost 30 years,” reported the Washington Post in 2007. The State Department celebrated the meeting between the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, and his Iranian counterpart; but in reality, diplomacy between the two sides was nothing new. Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979 did not end U.S.-Iranian engagement.1 The United States and Iran have never stopped talking. While the Obama administration sought to reinvent U.S. policy with outreach, there is little Obama proposed that did not have precedent.
How Diplomacy Prolonged the Hostage Crisis
Iran was an important Cold War ally for the United States—in Jimmy Carter’s words, “an island of stability in a sea of turmoil.”2 Iran’s linchpin status led successive American administrations to paper over differences with the shah. Carter, however, was unwilling to turn a blind eye to his human rights abuses.3 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had long been unpopular among diplomats,4 and as Iranians took to the streets to protest his dictatorial ways, many in the State Department counseled abandoning the pro-American leader. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor, explained that “the lower echelons at State, notably the head of the Iran Desk . . . were motivated by doctrinal dislike of the Shah and simply wanted him out of power altogether.”5 They got their wish.
On February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini arrived in Tehran on a chartered Air France flight and was greeted by three million Iranians. The Islamic Revolution was unprecedented in its scale: in an age before the Internet and Twitter, Khomeini mobilized fully 10 percent of the population. John Limbert, an eyewitness to the revolution, recalled how Iranians were possessed by “rage and the thirst for revenge for real or imagined grievances.”6 They projected upon Khomeini what they wished him to be. So too did Americans.
Richard Falk, a Princeton political scientist who was influential in the Carter administration, urged the White House to embrace Khomeini. “The depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false,” Falk asserted, adding that the ayatollah’s “entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals . . . who share a notable record of concern with human rights.”7 It was what Carter wanted to hear, and there was no shortage of experts to tell him the same story. Richard Cottam, a diplomat and Iran scholar, reported that the ayatollah’s inner circle was “afraid of the Soviet Union and desirous of relying on the U.S. for Iran’s defense.”8
Even as Khomeini launched a reign of terror, the State Department announced that it would maintain relations with the new government.9 The American embassy went into overdrive. Because jockeying for power among Iranians was so intense, American diplomats met with any Iranian official they could. There were several months of low-key diplomacy, but revolutionary leaders stymied Carter’s hope to engage at a senior level. When the president recalled William Sullivan, his ambassador in Tehran, in April 1979, Iran’s revolutionary government rejected Carter’s new nominee in pique over American criticism of its human rights violations.10
Protestors might chant anti-American slogans outside the U.S. embassy and revolutionary firing squads might work around the clock, but senior State Department officials reported that bilateral ties were improving.11 Steven Erlanger, a young journalist who would rise to become the chief diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, asserted that although the revolution was not over, “the religious phase is drawing to a close even as it is becoming formalized.”12 American diplomats in Tehran continued to speak hopefully of moderates within the revolutionary coalition.13 The way forward seemed clear to the diplomats: they wanted to meet with Khomeini. To sit publicly with the ayatollah, they believed, would signal that Washington respected his authority.14 L. Bruce Laingen, the senior American diplomat in Tehran, never got permission.
Brzezinski did not ask. Visiting Algiers on November 1, 1979, he met Mehdi Bazargan, revolutionary Iran’s prime minister, at a reception to celebrate the Algerian independence day.15 Brzezinski told Bazargan that the United States was open to any relationship and partnership the Islamic Republic wanted.16 Brzezinski may have been well-meaning, but his initiative was a case study in how ill-timed diplomacy worsens relationships. Instead of grasping an outstretched hand, adversaries can respond with provocation to reinforce their ideological credentials. This is what happened in Iran.
The day after newspapers published photographs of the Brzezinski-Bazargan handshake—and the day after Erlanger filed his optimistic dispatch—protests rocked Iran, culminating in the seizure of the American embassy by outraged students.17 Khomeini endorsed the hostage takers and their paranoid worldview, in which the United States would recruit Iranian traitors to collapse the revolution from within. “Our young people must foil these plots,” he blustered.18 Khomeini’s son embraced the captors, underscoring the regime’s contempt for international law.19
The hostage situation defined the Carter administration. Harold H. Saunders, assistant secretary of state for the Near East and South Asia, recalled internal debate about how the United States should respond:
The challenge facing members of the American crisis team . . . was how to bridge the gulf between the Iranian and American worlds. How could we deal with people like this? How could we make them see that it would best serve their revolutionary agenda to release our people instead of holding them? Should we hit them hard in a quick, sharp, punitive blow? Should we ignore them? Should we search out Iranian leaders who wanted the hostages freed for their own political reasons and try to find ways of maneuvering so as to make it more feasible for them to do what they wanted to do . . . ? What approach would the American people support? 20
The Carter administration settled on a two-track policy. First, they would maximize communications and keep the door to negotiation open; second, they would raise the cost to Iran of holding hostages.21 Rather than keep American options open, however, the administration decided to limit them. Two days after the embassy takeover, Gary Sick, a National Security Council official, reportedly leaked word that there would be “no change in the status quo—no military alert, no movement of forces, no resort to military contingency plans.”22 Perhaps the White House believed that taking military action off the table would enable diplomacy; but by removing the threat of force, it forfeited its leverage.23 Carter’s assurances convinced the hostage takers they had nothing to fear.24
Carter’s desire to talk to rogues broke with tried-and-true strategy. During both the Black September hostage crisis in 1970 and the Khmer Rouge’s capture of the SS Mayaguez in 1975, the United States had quietly deployed forces to augment its leverage, even while muting its public rhetoric. Carter’s aides could easily have leaked word of military preparations, but the president chose not to—a choice that undercut both diplomacy and policy options.
Compounding the difficulty of resolving the crisis were the cross-purposes of Americans and Iranians. Carter saw the hostage crisis through an American lens and accepted the captors’ declared grievances at face value, even as he denounced the embassy takeover as a violation of international law. For Khomeini’s followers, however, capturing the “Den of Spies” could be a tool to prevent the reconciliation that they saw as the greater threat to their nascent Islamic Republic.25
The