It was brought up in a class of mine that Obama was being hypocritical in his recent SOTU speech. A student in my International Security class mentioned that Obama had stated that “all options are on the table” when dealing with the threat of a nuclear Iran. Another student stated that the sentence right after that (I didn’t watch as I have a ridiculous amount to reading to do) was that “…the United States is still open to engagement with the Iranian regime.” The discussion then revolved around Obama’s supposed hypocrisy, Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism, and the difference between what politicians say and what politicians do (particularly in the US).
Alright…so first off, I’ve been in school for just about…umm…forever. I started, stopped, started again, moved, started again, changed majors, etc, etc…In all this time, I seriously can not remember the last time that I actually spoke up in class. It’s really not something I do. I’m a little bit more of a writer or a small-group participant type of a guy. Anyway, that’s more about me than you probably needed to know but that is a little background into why I didn’t speak up at the time and am now writing this out here.
Okay, so I’m not going to sit here and defend American foreign policy of the past. If a person wanted to look for examples of hypocrisy, he or she would only need to glance at anything that William Blum, Noam Chomsky or Chalmers Johnson has written to see the full extent of American hypocrisy. We have a long history of saying one thing and doing another. However, with that being said, Obama (O) has been pretty clear about his policy towards Iran. I mean, if one wants to see hypocrisy in the O administration, just look to Guantanamo or the increase in (quite possibly illegal) drone activity. But lets leave Iran out of it, alright…?
What has O said was his policy towards Iran during his entire presidency? Well, the Brookings Institute puts it this way, “Since taking office in 2009, the Obama administration has patiently pursued a two-track policy which seeks to persuade the Iranian leadership to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions by creating a series of reinforcing positive and negative incentives.”[1] O has consistently pursued a two-track approach with Sanctions on the one hand and Engagement on the other. Carrot and stick in its simplest form; keep your enrichment program – get isolated further, stop your enrichment program – get invited to the fabulous party the rest of the international community is having, hey, look , there’s Kanye!
As for the ‘all options on the table’ comment, name me one president in the last 30 years who has not said that same thing when talking about Iran, DPRK, Iraq, etc. On one side, O has SER working non-stop to build a consensus at the UN to ratchet up the pressure. On the other hand, O is working (in concert with other nations) to bring in Iran and discuss their legitimate right to a nuclear energy program with the assurances of the IAEA getting transparent access to their facilities. Soooo….where’s the hypocrisy? (I know, I know…I should’ve spoken up in class to bring up this point. I didn’t. So now the inter-webs have to suffer because of it.) The purpose of sanctions is to “carefully ratchet up pressure or change the calculus of different governments”[2] in order to get them to fall in line with some international consensus (yeah, I just cited myself…who cares?). If we just impose sanctions without having a viable second track of engagement available then that pretty much defeats the purpose of the whole exercise. That means that all the hard work going on at the USUN is for nothing because the sanctions are simply there to punish a State. That’s not the case and so the Obama administration keeps up the two-track messaging and the two-track tactic. No hypocrisy evident…
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