During Iraq's military offensive against Iran (1980-1988), then-Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani defended restoring relations with the United States. The peculiarity and significance of Rafsanjani's position is evident when one considers the Iranian political climate during that period. The leader of the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, took an uncompromising, antagonistic stance toward the US when he was still alive. Moreover, due to developments in the aftermath of the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979, including the Americans' support for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, hostilities between Iran and the US reached their apogee. It is no exaggeration to say that no one dared to talk about reconciliation with the US unless one was as close to Ayatollah Khomeini as Rafsanjani was. At the time, he was arguably the second most powerful man in Iran after Khomeini. In an interview in 2013, Rafsanjani said, “I wrote a letter to Imam [Khomeini] in the last years of his life [he died in 1989]. I even didn't type it. As I preferred that no one read my letter, I gave it to the Imam personally. I discussed some seven issues in the letter, and I told him it was better to resolve those issues while he was alive, otherwise they might become a barrier against the country's development in the future. [I said] that if you don't help us remove them, it would be difficult to remove them after you [die] ... One of those issues was relations with America. I wrote in the way we have adopted now: that not to talk or have any relations with America is not sustainable.” Shortly after the death of Iran's revolutionary leader in July 1989, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was elected as Iran's second supreme leader against even his own expectations. After the election, Khamenei said, “I did not expect, even for a second in my life, the outcome of the process that has ended in my election as the new leader and the responsibility that has been put on my shoulders as a humble servant of Allah ... I always considered my level [of qualifications] too low for this highly significant and crucial post and also even for much lower posts like the presidency and others which I have held since the revolution.” It is likely that this mentality resulted in his concluding that he was not in a position to risk his “highly crucial post” by abandoning his mentor's heritage of characterising the United States as the “Great Satan.” In other words, he perceived that the state of enmity with the US had to be woven into the fabric of the revolution, and that the nezam (political system in Iran) must stay revolutionary and thus that hostilities would have to be perpetuated. In August 1989, Rafsanjani was elected president of Iran. Although he played a decisive role in Khamenei's election as supreme leader, the two significantly diverged over Iran-US relations. Khamenei banned any talks with the US, given his belief that the Americans' ultimate goal was “regime change”. He also adopted the doctrine of the “West minus the United States”, which determined the Rafsanjani administration's foreign policy. Rafsanjani placed great importance on normalising relations with the West and even conducted indirect rapprochement efforts with the US. But one reality could not be ignored: to have friendly relations with the West as a political bloc, while having hostile relations with the leading state of that bloc, was a senseless policy. As a result, relations with Europe remained unstable. Finally, five years after the so-called Mykonos assassinations, when three Iranian-Kurdish opposition leaders and their translator were assassinated by gunmen who attacked a Greek restaurant in Berlin, a German court verdict in April 1997 identified the Iranian government as having “inspired, supported, and supervised” the terrorist act. Relations with Germany quickly spiralled downwards, and both countries recalled their ambassadors. Other EU member states recalled their ambassadors too and, in retaliatory moves, Iran withdrew its ambassadors from those countries. Two months later, the reformist Mohamed Khatami won the presidential elections in Iran on a platform of liberalisation and reform, thus raising serious considerations among European countries about restoring relations with Iran. The Iranians were informed about this decision through different channels. After six months of deliberations between the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the European countries concerned, their embassies opened again in Tehran. While the policy of the “West minus the United States” remained in effect, the reformists made overtures towards the US. Before and after the tragic events of 11 September 2001, they conducted direct talks with Washington. The talks centred on the situation in Afghanistan rather than bilateral relations. After September 11, the talks were directed towards unseating the common enemy in Afghanistan of the Taliban. Iran effectively cooperated with American-led forces in bringing down the Taliban and, afterwards, establishing Afghanistan's new government. But on 4 January 2002, Iran was suddenly accused by the Israelis of complicity in smuggling a huge consignment of weapons to the Palestinian Authority (PA). The news took the headlines by storm. Three weeks later, the then-US president, George W Bush, included Iran in his “axis of evil”. The US newspaper The Washington Post reported in early February, “the discovery of Iran's role in smuggling 50 tons of weapons to the Palestinians was a body blow to the State Department's initiative to engage Iran.” But, ironically, at that point Iran had very tense relations with Yasser Arafat, the then PA leader, making the claim implausible. Then the August 2002 revelations about the existence of Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities began one of the most complex international conflicts in the post-Cold War era. Talks were held between the Iranians and the European troika of Britain, France and Germany, but the major obstacle in reaching an agreement was US insistence on the notion of “zero uranium enrichment inside Iran”. The situation was well defined by the then-British foreign secretary, Jack Straw. Speaking on a BBC panel in July 2013, he remarked, “We were getting somewhere, with respect, and then it's a complicated story. The Americans actually pulled the rug out from under Khatami's feet and the Americans got what they didn't want.” John Sawers, then one of the British negotiators and current chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service MI6, told Hossein Mousavian, a member of the Iranian negotiating team, that Washington “would not tolerate” even one centrifuge spinning in Iran. The talks collapsed in 2005. Eventually, Tehran succeeded in overcoming the crisis when it revised its zero-talks policy towards the US and launched direct negotiations with Washington in 2013. Yet the current state of Iran-US relations, as a result of Iran's decision not to hold bilateral talks on improving relations with the US, is shaky and unsustainable. Under Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, the West minus the US doctrine is in motion again. Will it work this time round? The answer is that this is unlikely. The reality is that the likelihood of escalation of the conflict between the two countries is still high despite the nuclear deal. The major element that is constantly in play is hostile Iran-Israel relations, intertwined with ongoing allegations by both the US and Israel of Iran's support for terrorism, namely of the Lebanese Shia group Hizbullah. Other factors resulting in strained US-Iran relations are US allegations accusing Iran of regional destabilisation, human rights abuses and the expansion of its ballistic missile programme. The doctrine of the West minus the US is doomed to fail in the absence of direct talks aimed at reaching an enduring peace between the two states. Without these, one or a combination of the above factors could always spark new waves of tension between Iran and the US. As the pressure mounts, the Europeans will have to choose either Iran or the US. Faced with such a decision, the Europeans will most likely side with the US. As a result, efforts to improve Iran's relations with Europe will also fail, as has repeatedly happened in the past. The writer is a political analyst writing primarily about Iranian domestic and foreign affairs. He is the co-author of Iran and the United States: An Insider's View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace.
