Clinton's Intrinsic Realism

Posted: September 29th, 2016

By Suzanne Maloney

Suzanne Maloney is deputy director of the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow in the Brookings Center for Middle East Policy and Energy Security and Climate Initiative, where her research focuses on Iran and Persian Gulf energy. She is the editor of Markaz, a blog on politics in and policy toward the Middle East published by the Brookings Institution. Maloney previously served as an external advisor to senior State Department officials on long-term issues related to Iran. Before joining Brookings, she served on the secretary of state's policy planning staff, as Middle East advisor for ExxonMobil Corporation, and director of the 2004 Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on U.S. policy toward Iran, chaired by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. She holds a doctorate from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

No country is watching the theatrics of the American presidential campaign more closely than the Islamic Republic of Iran. As the object of U.S. President Barack Obama’s most significant foreign policy initiative, Iran has a bigger stake in the outcome of the race than at any time since the end of the hostage crisis, which was timed deliberately by Tehran to coincide with the January 1981 inauguration of President Ronald Reagan.

Now, as then, Washington and Tehran find themselves navigating the murky territory of a negotiated truce that has deescalated the most dangerous aspect of their bilateral conflict without ameliorating, at least in the short-term, the underlying drivers of their mutual animosity. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) represents a diplomatic feat, one that wrangled six sovereign nations, two multilateral bureaucracies, and a near infinite array of technical and financial minutia into a complex arrangement for deferring Iranian nuclear ambitions.

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