4/5/2015 The Iran Nuclear Talks: Is the U.S. Negotiating With a Totalitarian State? — The Atlantic

data:text/html;charset=utf­8,%3Ch1%20class%3D%22headline%22%20itemprop%3D%22name%22%20style%3D%22font­size%3A%2034px%3B%20margin… 1/4

PETERBEINART

APR 2 2015, 7:46 AM ET

Ask Iran hawks to describe the regime in Tehran, and you’ll likely hear the word“totalitarian.” “I do not trust inspections with totalitarian regimes,” BenjaminNetanyahu told CBS in March. In a speech last year to the Conservative PoliticalAction Conference (CPAC), Marco Rubio called Iran—along with North Korea,China, Venezuela, Cuba, and Russia—“totalitarian governments.” A few weeksago, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton declared that “there are nothing buthardliners in Tehran. President Obama, likes [sic] liberals throughout the ColdWar, keeps looking for the vaunted moderates in totalitarian regimes that neverseem to emerge.”

The above statements are factually false. Iran’s government, while brutal and

Is Iran a Totalitarian State?The answer has consequences for U.S. strategy in nuclear talks with Tehran.

Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters

4/5/2015 The Iran Nuclear Talks: Is the U.S. Negotiating With a Totalitarian State? — The Atlantic

data:text/html;charset=utf­8,%3Ch1%20class%3D%22headline%22%20itemprop%3D%22name%22%20style%3D%22font­size%3A%2034px%3B%20margin… 2/4

Related Story

The Reckless Man's Case forBombing Iran

tyrannical, is not “totalitarian.” And the fact that Iran hawks think it is helpsexplain why their strategy for stopping Iran’s nuclear program makes no sense.

“Totalitarian” regimes seek total control over how their people act, and eventhink. That’s not true of all dictatorships. All dictators suppress politicalopposition. But many allow their subjects a sphere of personal freedom so longas that sphere remains apolitical. In a run­of­the­mill dictatorship, the stateneed not control bowling leagues and gardening clubs so long as those bowlingleagues and gardening clubs don’t become vehicles for organizing against theregime. In an ordinary dictatorship, if you’re not against the regime, you canmaintain some autonomy from it.

In a totalitarian regime, by contrast, not opposingthe regime isn’t good enough. You must activelysupport it. Your bowling league and gardening clubcan’t be apolitical. They must serve the state. “Iftotalitarianism takes its own claimseriously,” wroteHannah Arendt, “it must come tothe point where it has ‘to finish once and for all withthe neutrality of chess,’ that is, with theautonomous existence of any activity whatsoever.”Jeane Kirkpatrick, who would later become Ronald

Reagan’s UN ambassador,made a similar distinction when she contrasted“traditional autocrats” who “do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work andleisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personalrelations” and “revolutionary communist regimes” that “claim jurisdiction overthe whole life of the society.” (Conveniently, Kirkpatrick classified third­worlddictators who backed the U.S. as “authoritarian” and those who backed theU.S.S.R. as “totalitarian.”)

Which brings us to Iran. The regime in Tehran does make some effort to controlpeople’s personal, non­political affairs. Women must dress modestly in public,for instance, and it’s illegal to sell liquor. But these efforts, while ugly andrepressive, are nowhere near as intrusive as the behavior of more genuinelytotalitarian regimes like the Taliban, which banned flying kites, playing cards,keeping pigeons as pets, listening to music, hanging paintings even in privatehomes and yes, chess.

Even more importantly, Iran allows competitive elections, something a trulytotalitarian regime never can. In totalitarian regimes, the state must speak withone voice, thus maintaining the pretense that because they are agents of History

4/5/2015 The Iran Nuclear Talks: Is the U.S. Negotiating With a Totalitarian State? — The Atlantic

data:text/html;charset=utf­8,%3Ch1%20class%3D%22headline%22%20itemprop%3D%22name%22%20style%3D%22font­size%3A%2034px%3B%20margin… 3/4

Iran concedes what atotalitarian statecannot: That there is noone correct path forgovernment policy.

or agents of God, its leaders have access to absolute truth. Politicaldisagreements can only occur behind closed doors.

By holding elections, by contrast, Iran allows public political argument. Ofcourse, those elections take place within narrow ideological limits, amongcandidates vetted by Iran’s ruling clerics. Still, the outcomes are notpreordained. Thus, Iran concedes what a totalitarian state cannot: That when itcomes to government policy, there is no single correct path to which everyonemust pledge fealty.

Why is this relevant to the nuclear negotiations? Because when Netanyahu,Rubio, and Cotton call Iran “totalitarian,” they conjure a homogenous, uniformregime. That regime, they claim, entered nuclear negotiations because of thepain of sanctions. Thus, if America imposes more sanctions, the regime willmake greater concessions.

But because Iran is not totalitarian, differentfactions inside the ruling elite disagree, evenpublicly, about the wisdom of a nuclear deal. In2005, when he served as President MohammadKhatami’s nuclear negotiator, current PresidentHassan Rouhani favored a deal that cappeduranium enrichment at 5 percent, prevented thereprocessing of plutonium, and allowed forintrusive international inspections of Iran’s nuclear

facilities. When Rouhani won the presidency in 2013, he initiated negotiationsalong these lines.

Yes, sanctions mattered. They caused popular discontent, which Iranian voterstook out on Rouhani’s hardline opponents. But the sanctions only matteredbecause they brought Rouhani and his pro­nuclear deal faction to power. Inthewords of Harvard Iran expert Payam Mohseni, “The victory of anothercandidate, such as [hardline] former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, would nothave produced such a change in foreign policy despite the presence of the samesanctions regime.”

If Iran really were a totalitarian regime, it’s possible more sanctions might bringmore concessions. But because it’s actually an authoritarian regime in whichdifferent factions jostle, privately and publicly, for power, more sanctions willlikely have the opposite effect. Just as prior sanctions sparked popular angeragainst Rouhani’s hardline predecessors, new sanctions will likely spark popular

4/5/2015 The Iran Nuclear Talks: Is the U.S. Negotiating With a Totalitarian State? — The Atlantic

data:text/html;charset=utf­8,%3Ch1%20class%3D%22headline%22%20itemprop%3D%22name%22%20style%3D%22font­size%3A%2034px%3B%20margin… 4/4

anger against him. They will make the agenda on which he won the presidency—improving Iran’s ravaged economy—a failure. And thus, they will strengthen hisopponents who want no accommodation with the West at all.

Words matter. And so long as Iran hawks keep mischaracterizing what Iran is,they’ll keep offering bad advice about what America should do.