Is Ahmadinejad like Khrushchev?

In the New York Times, an op-ed by Nathan Thrall and Jesse J. Wilkins draws lessons from a particularly odd historical analogy. The authors describe the unsuccessful meeting between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. They see in the episode a cautionary tale, warning Barack Obama to re-think his pledge to negotiate with Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were the former to be elected president.

In fairness, this is a historical analogy Obama made himself when he boomed, “If George Bush and John McCain have a problem with direct diplomacy led by the president of the United States, then they can explain why they have a problem with John F. Kennedy, because that’s what he did with Khrushchev.” Such capacious rhetoric invited Thrall's and Wilkins' rigorous dissection of the Vienna encounter and its debilitating consequences for US foreign policy.

But Thrall and Wilkins - and Karl Rove in today's Wall Street Journal - miss the point if they think that the examples of the Cold War's bipolar politics should frame 21st century thinking. Iran is not the 1950s USSR. It is not in military or technological terms any were near matching the might of some US allies in the region - like India - let alone the US itself. Nor is Iran 1970s China. It is at best a middling regional power, situated within various layers of strategic ties, many of them to friends of Washington. Much of Tehran's policy establishment craves warmer relations with Europe and the US. Refusing Iran diplomacy only drives these moderates and their ambitions further against the wall.

This is an increasingly multipolar globe - or so the cliché goes - in which traditional strategies of isolation will struggle to achieve desired results. Obama's pledge to negotiate - whether or not he follows through - is a recognition of reality, of the tightening limits on American action in a world of numerous actors and more complicated relations. To wallow in the Beltway and hurl accusations of "naivety" at Obama is not only cheap, it is willfully self-deluding.