U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East: Fostering Stability and Addressing Security Challenges : หน้า 37/52

policy in Iraq and of the Palestinian–Israeli peace process. The United States needs to recognize that terrorism is not the result of blind hatred of Western civilization, as the Bush administration insists, but rather an extreme response by a few to U.S. policies that most Arabs see as hostile. Similarly, the free flow of oil depends politically on U.S. policy toward Iran and re-establishing the balance of power in the Gulf. There is no way for the United States to protect the two critical interests of curbing terrorism and protecting the flow of oil without addressing the region’s salient political issues. Thus, the immediate tasks for the United States are: 1) finding a modus vivendi with Iran and limiting nuclear proliferation; 2) disentangling from Iraq without leaving an ungoverned territory behind; 3) getting serious about the peace process and the two-state solution to Israeli and Palestinian concerns; 4) seeing the re-establishment of a regional balance of power that can be maintained mostly by regional actors without the need for a massive U.S. presence with all its negative repercussions; and 5) in the context of a new balance of power, de-escalating the confrontation with Syria and defusing the crisis in Lebanon. Dealing With Iran and the Nuclear Issue Due in no small part to Bush administration policies, Iran is now integral to critical U.S. interests, namely, Iraq, Afghanistan, nuclear nonproliferation, energy security, terrorism, and Arab–Israeli peace. No matter how unpalatable the behavior of the Iranian regime, refusing dialogue with Tehran will not ameliorate any of these issues, and confronting it militarily will exacerbate all of them. An approach that seeks to foment regime change in Tehran is similarly counterproductive. In a race between the “regime change clock” and the “nuclear clock,” the latter will almost surely prevail. The Iranian government is not on the verge of collapse, and in the event of an abrupt political change the only groups that are currently both armed and organized are not liberal democrats but the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Bassij militia. A policy that keeps the threat of regime change implicitly on the table also gives Iranian leaders, sensing an existential threat from the United States, more, not less, reason to pursue a nuclear deterrent. Instead of shunning Iran, confronting it militarily, or attempting to change its form of government, the United States should attempt to formulate a nuanced engagement policy in concert with European allies—and, ideally, Russia and China. This policy must seek diplomatically to modify Iranian policy by weakening the country’s hard-line minority and strengthening its moderate majority—at present, U.S. policy plays into the hands of hardliners. Pragmatic Iranian officials need to be able to argue with plausibility that a moderate Iranian approach will trigger a more conciliatory Western response. They cannot do so today. Given recent history and the Bush administration’s frequent evocations of the military option, calls for moderation are easily dismissed as naïve and irresponsible.