After the peace deal with Iran was reached in Vienna, Barack Obama quoted a line by John F. Kennedy that could define his own two-term presidency. “Let us never negotiate out of fear,” he said, “but let us never fear to negotiate.” He said patient diplomacy had finally achieved what pressure couldn’t. Echoing him, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also said that two years of diplomacy achieved what 10 years of American pressure couldn’t.
We had noted in National Interest (“Obama at Rajpath: Not Just Another Selfie Moment”, INDIA TODAY, November 27, 2014) in the run-up to the Obama visit on our Republic Day that he was currently besieged but history was likely to judge him much more fairly, and appreciatively, than journalism. He has now made even that distant. His persistence and courage have led to a settlement praised around the world, except by Benjamin Netanyahu. Obama’s conviction showed in his assertive new tone as he unambiguously threatened to veto any stalling of the deal in the US Congress.
This week’s argument, however, isn’t really about the Iran-US nuclear deal and the lifting of sanctions, which should soon follow, or the implications for India, which will certainly be positive, easing energy economics, bringing Iran more directly in the neighbourhood to help calm both Afghan and Pakistani societies, and ultimately deliver gas pipelines. It is, instead, on a larger, more complex issue: how a leader chooses the big objectives of his time, how he deals with the real-time distractions on his way to them, and how he employs his political capital to achieve them.
Political capital to a public figure is what finance is to a businessman. No matter how wealthy you may be, employable capital at your command is always finite, and good businessmen invest it wisely. Exactly the same applies to political leaders as well. Looking back at the more recent Indian experience, UPA 1 used it reasonably judiciously, staying clear of reformist demands like privatisation so as not to risk upsetting its Left supporters while saving it up for the big battle of the India-US nuclear deal where it won a famous victory. The moment took it to a second term in 2009.
See what Obama has done. He chose his big objectives early enough: settling the nuclear disputes with Iran, normalising relations with Cuba and, on the domestic front, Obamacare. Once this course was set, he started pulling out of existing distractions, Iraq and Afghanistan included, stayed generally out of Ukraine, whatever the provocation, and left the North Koreans in their not-so-splendid, self-imposed isolation.
Also read: Elements inside Pakistan military had links to al-Qaeda — Obama on raid that killed Osama
This deserves deeper analysis. Ukraine is linked to the fundamental old issues and fears which NATO was set up to deal with. But a tired, declining America does not have the decisive leverage needed to get Vladimir Putin to moderate his ambitions, so for now, the issue was dealt with from distance, or left to European neighbours. Even more importantly, he held his nerve over ISIS depredations even after the extreme provocation of the televised beheadings of Americans. Ordinary leaders respond to provocations, noise and popular demands of the day: UPA 2 reversed the then recently resumed normalisation with Pakistan to calm public opinion after the beheading of an Indian soldier in 2013. American society is no less polarised than ours, its Right hawkish in the extreme and Fox News is as noisy as anything we can invent. But Obama did no more than send some more bombing missions, leaving all fighting to incompetent Iraqis, isolated Syrians and desperate Kurds.
His target was Iran, and nobody understood it faster than Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who made it a mission to block a deal by playing US domestic politics. He even got himself invited to address the US Congress without Obama’s concurrence and pretty much launched his election campaign by rubbing his finger in the American president’s eye. India does not quite have an ally like Israel is for America, but imagine something similar being done to an Indian prime minister and the kind of personal as well as national affront it would be seen as. But Obama didn’t want to spray his political capital around responding to these.
He seems to have made two big decisions. One, that normalising relationships with neighbour Cuba was more possible and gainful than wasting effort on North Korea. And two, that the key to achieving a fundamental, positive shift in the increasingly chaotic Middle East was bringing its biggest and the most stable power, Iran, inside the tent. Intellectually, the point that most of the policy madness and dictatorial impulse in the Middle East was fuelled by oil price surge was accepted early enough. Obama therefore risked annoying his liberal constituency by pushing ahead with fracking for shale gas. It will not be an overstatement to say that he decided to look for the key to softening Iran in South Dakota’s shale gas underbelly.
As oil prices fell, Iran’s ability to survive sanctions diminished. It is a dictatorship of the clergy still, but unlike any other large nation in that region, its people have a strong argumentative impulse and there is an elected government, even though with limited powers. It is no Saudi Arabia, Iraq or Syria. Iran is also in the best position to help push back the Sunni ISIS expansion. There is a particularly revealing line in the interview Obama gave to Tom Friedman in the The New York Times this week after the Iran deal was clinched: “Even with your enemies, even with your adversaries, I do think that you have to have the capacity to put yourself occasionally in their shoes.”
Also read: Obama’s Bold Indo-Us Equation
Two more international developments over the past week deserve note in this context. Europe held together and Greece’s leftists accepted a tough bailout that will keep them in the European Union in spite of a resounding domestic referendum demanding the opposite. The leader to save up political authority and capital here was Germany’s Angela Merkel, and she emerged winner, and even more the leader of Europe. But Greece’s Alexis Tsipras, despite riding to power on a politics as populist as Arvind Kejriwal’s here, finally saw the big picture to his country’s benefit. The referendum was used by him to build negotiating heft. The second was our own Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif in Ufa.
Many, particularly Modi’s more loyal and vocal supporters, were left surprised and searching for answers as they had expected him to persist with his “tough” posture on Pakistan rather than return to what is seen as Congress-style talk-talk, fight-fight (apologies to Chairman Mao). That’s why many in his establishment erred in plugging it as a Pakistani capitulation of sorts by saying things like Kashmir wasn’t mentioned. The response came from Sartaj Aziz almost immediately, and the picture looks different now. It is encouraging that government spokespersons have refuted this by spinning the line that what matters is the written word of the joint statement, and not what is spoken.
But a key question begs answer. As we noted in detail in the case of Obama on Iran and Cuba and to a lesser extent Merkel on Greece, it is for the big leader to name the big objective, define what they see as a victory. In the India-Pakistan context, will it be ten heads for a head, as Sushma Swaraj said once, or kill five for one, as Rajnath Singh says to his BSF troops now? Or will it be to bring Pakistan to the negotiating table? That’s a call Narendra Modi has to make. And if his call is the latter, he has to press on, ignoring tactical distractions and keeping his political capital for the big decision. His mandate and ideology combine to give him the ability no Indian leader has ever had, of settling India’s most debilitating foreign policy challenges and rise as a peacemaker of the right like Ronald Reagan and Menachem Begin, or even take a leaf from the book of his friend Barack.
Also read: Obama at Rajpath: Not just another selfie moment