The Foreign Service Journal, June 2007

treatment comparable to the way the American diplomats were then held, Tehran reversed course and quickly released the British sailors and marines substantially unharmed. The release was painted by the regime (and personally by Pres. Ahmadinejad) as a generous gesture, even though the British government did not fully respond to Tehran’s demand for a face-saving apology. What are we to make of this? A very likely explanation might be that Iranian activists who believe in demonstrat- ing that they are not afraid of U.S. and British power ini- tiated this incident. They were originally supported by higher Iranian authorities (as the November 1979 hostage-takers were by Ayatollah Khomeini), but were eventually overruled by calmer heads backed by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei (as Iranian hostage- takers who had previously invaded the American embassy back in February 1979 were overruled by an earlier, more moderate Iranian government). We can interpret this as something of a parallel to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s growing frustration in the early 1970s, when important gestures like throwing his Soviet military advisers out of Egypt failed to elicit a friendly response from the American government. He eventually resorted to a more dramatic gesture with the 1973 attack on Israeli-held territory that launched the Yom Kippur War. In short, this peculiar incident may sig- nal that the Iranian moderates want to talk before things deteriorate further. For all the reasons cited here, it makes sense for the U.S. government and its allies to deal with Tehran through a combination of pressure, engagement and containment, as they did over so many years with far more aggressive opponents during the Cold War. The current approach of treating Iran as an enemy, and threatening regime change, only encourages extreme behavior from a government that is already under domestic pressure to transform itself. U.S. threats are proving hollow, but if they are not bal- anced by a viable negotiating strategy, they could never- theless have highly negative consequences for all con- cerned. n F O C U S 46 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 7