THE LEARNING CURVE.

• Author: Riczo, Daniel
• Position: WORLDVIEW - Cold War

Are the lessons of the Cold War past lost on contemporary America?

AFTER WORLD WAR II, the U.S. and USSR emerged as the world's sole superpowers. America's subsequent foreign policy history can be viewed as a product of the Cold War that followed. Yet, more than a quarter-century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, nuclear containment and protracted conflicts remain central to the U.S.'s foreign policy, which includes dealing with Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

In 1953, the U.S. overthrew a democratically elected leadership in Iran, installing a monarchy in its place. That monarchy initiated uranium enrichment. In 1979, Islamists overthrew the monarchy, resulting in the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, who called America the "Great Satan." That year, student supporters of the revolution captured the American Embassy, taking 52 hostages.

Obviously, the 1953 intervention neither justifies terrorism nor nuclear weapons. However, along with U.S. interventions in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, it does help explain a possible Iranian perception that the U.S. is a looming threat that it would like to deter with powerful weapons.

Paul Bracken, professor of management and political science at Yale University, contends that "the U.S. is supporting Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen as part of a larger strategy to humiliate Iran." This approach will not produce the stability that diminishes the motivation to develop nuclear weapons--nor does it respect Yemeni lives.

Cold War history suggests that of an adversarial working relationship with Iran. For instance, a misperception of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is that it was a 13-day standoff in which Pres. John F. Kennedy triumphed by taking a rigid position. Philip Brenner, professor of international relations and affiliate professor of history at American University, contends instead that Kennedy was a flexible negotiator who was able to listen to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's perspective that the missiles were a defensive measure in reaction to the U.S. invasion of Cuba 13 months earlier. "[We] only learned 25 years later that what Kennedy had done was to agree to Soviet demands that we withdraw our missiles from Turkey."

Pres. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of CCCP's Communist Party, were cooperating to reduce nuclear stockpiles 20 years later. Analogously, the point is not that Iran deserves trust, nor that it is easy to build trust with Iran, but that the U.S. should acknowledge the past and build an adversarial...