A Positive Engagement
Tehran’s triumphal stewardship of the Non-Aligned Movement summit is a testament to Iran’s emergence as a dominant regional power. It is also a reflection of the important role that non-Western states can play in mitigating conflict in the Middle East region. As the Supreme Leader has said, a new world order is imminent and significant shifts in the power constellation are on the horizon. The fault lines of power are shifting and the political praxis is taking on a different expression – much to the chagrin of the hegemonic and ethnocentric West. The dominant North Atlantic and Western European powers can no longer resort to coercion, force and subterfuge to affect change in the political area – change that invariably reflects their interests. NAM has made it patently clear that that the modern world order is unsustainable and that there is a need for a positive logic of engagement vis a vis Iran.
Noam Chomsky put it bluntly: ‘Iran has to be punished because it broke free from of US control in 1979.’[1] Iran has been antagonised for not capitulating to western interests. As such the logic of engagement in relation to Iran has been a negative one: crippling sanctions, threats of military intervention, cyber-warfare, regime change efforts, and covert actions to destabilise the government under the guise of democracy. In order to justify the egocentric stance toward Iran, the West has reduced the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an era of revolutionary revivalism with apocalyptic scenarios. The fact is that the West’s behaviour was no different during reformist Mohammad Khatami’s presidency – it was under his leadership that Iran was brandished as a member in the ‘axis of evil’.
The hyperbolic talk over Iran’s nuclear programme is a perilous campaign is actually provoking an arms race by prompting regional states to develop strategic deterrence capabilities. The Arab states of in the Persian Gulf are buying billions of dollars in new American weapons because of the fear of a so called ‘nuclear-armed’ Iran. What is needed is a positive logic that allows us to venture beyond the kind of egocentrism that breeds the hostile world in which Samuel Huntington grounded his vision of a looming ‘clash of civilisations’.
Iran’s NAM confab is a triumph in demonstrating that we are living in a global village with greater interconnectedness – a global village in which there is more diversity and less uniformity. As such the West needs to tame its impulse to homogenise, dominate and assimilate the ‘other’. Iran’s NAM confab is also a triumph in demonstrating that the era of a fixed, Eurocentric world order is on the verge of reaching its end. This global village behoves that West to reformulate its unipolar political logic. A new pluralistic and multilateral logic of engagement is required so that we can avert the looming humanitarian disaster in the Middle East.
Iran’s 3-year NAM presidency augurs a new era and a new opportunity for the west to engage Iran – positively this time.