The American Conservative August 2 2013
When is pointing out an opponent’s motivation an effective tactic in foreign-policy debate? During the Cold War, I published my first large article documenting that E.P. Thompson (a leading proponent of the “nuclear freeze”) was not merely (as he was customarily presented) a pleasantly “utopian” socialist with a charming shock of white hair, but a figure with a somewhat hardline Marxist history and a long record as an opponent of NATO and advocate of accommodating the Soviet Union. Thirty years later I have white hair myself, E.P. Thompson has passed on, and all are grateful that the Cold War concluded without nuclear bombs going off. As to whether or not my type of argument—made in countless variations by hundreds of writers during the rhetorical Cold War—was effective, many thought it was. The piece was quoted, circulated, and advanced the professional aspirations of its author. And in fact it was an easier argument to make than to wade into the impossible-to-calculate unknowables about how a strategy of non-belligerence might save Europe from both the threat of war and Soviet dominance.
This issue of motivation arises because of the House’s vote on Wednesday to ramp up sanctions on Iran. The vote was rushed to floor before recess not so that sanctions can be escalated anytime soon (the Senate won’t take up the bill till the fall, if ever) but because AIPAC—representing in Washington the perspectives of Israel’s current government—wants to short circuit any chance of meaningful negotiation between the Obama administration and Iran’s newly elected president. One goal of the bill is to demonstrate to Iran’s leaders, through a landslide House vote, that America is deeply, almost inherently, hostile and to undercut whatever small gestures of peaceful diplomacy that Obama and the new Rouhani team have each been making since the latter’s election last June.