Adam Wren, a contributing editor at Indianapolis Monthly, writes about Indiana politics.

“Your nation is grateful,” National Security Advisor Susan Rice tweeted this week as Secretary of State John Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz announced the most historic international agreement of the Obama presidency, the Iran nuclear deal.

Huh? Grateful? Us?


On Tuesday night, long after the ink had dried on the 159-page document outlining the pact, it took me three hours and nearly 10 conversations with shoppers, diners, and passersby at a Midwestern megamall, inside a nearby Applebee’s Bar and Grill, and on an Uber ride to find an average, everyday American—the most bandied about voter group so far during the 2016 cycle—who cared, or even knew, about the Iran nuclear deal.

Things are actually far worse than that. As it turns out, 75 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 can’t locate Iran on a map, according to a National Geographic-Roper Public Affairs Geographic Literacy Study in 2006, let alone be grateful for a complicated diplomatic deal crafted half a world away.

***

The Bondo-colored Castleton Square Mall, situated just off I-465 and Interstate 69 on the north side of Indianapolis, is the state’s largest mall. It lies 6,561 miles west of Tehran, but only a stone’s throw from familiar American chains such as Costco and Applebee’s. With its JCPenney and Sears and Chick fil A, Castleton earned a local reputation as the mall for 99 percenters, in stark contrast to its more posh neighbor down the street, The Fashion Mall at Keystone, where so-called 1 percenters can browse Apple or Saks Fifth Avenue or Tesla Motors retail stores.

On July 14, the day now known by Beltway pundits, diplomats and foreign policy wonks as the nuclear agreement “Finalization Day,” Ben Wallace, 35, sat outside of a Macy’s, enjoying a day he knew by a more pedestrian term: Tuesday. When asked if he had heard about the historic deal reached earlier that morning, Wallace, a barber on the city’s eastside who identifies as a Republican, squinted his eyes. He hadn’t heard anything about the events unfolding in Tehran or Washington, D.C., he said.

Was such an accord even necessary? Wallace wasn’t entirely certain. “They don’t like us, right?” he said of Iran, as he lingered over a box of sausage pizza from the food court. “Isn’t it oil-related or Saddam Hussein-related?”

Asked whether he could identify Iran on an unlabeled map of the Middle East, Wallace used the process of elimination to narrow his choice between Saudi Arabia and Iran. When I pointed out Iraq—the country the U.S. invaded in 2003—to give him a reference point, Wallace was shocked to find that it seemed comparatively small.

“The smaller one? Damn.”

Nearby, Megan Lynch, 37, sat in a chair, resting after a busy evening of shopping. Lynch—an 11th grade English teacher at North Central High School in Indianapolis, a prestigious public school that’s produced notable alumni ranging from former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels to former Ebola czar and Vice President Biden’s former chief of staff Ron Klain—had also not heard news of the recently sealed pact that was hammered out over the course of some two years.

“I have been so very busy this summer,” Lynch said. “I usually keep up.”

She had at least heard of Iran. Asked about her opinions on Iran and foreign policy in general, Lynch shifted to biblical prophecy. “My political views are shaped by a very different focus,” she said, adding that under the relevant section of her Facebook page, she had typed three words instead of the more customary one. Not Republican. Not Democrat. Not Independent. But: “Follower of Christ.”

“I’m pretty much led by the Word of God,” Lynch said. “I know that things happen the way that they’re supposed to happen, but I also believe that we have so many issues over here. I always think that [it’s important to] clean up your own backyard before you try and cut someone else’s grass. I’m a firm believer in a lot of prayer, and I don’t really get too caught up in a lot of the politics of everything. I know that things are going to happen in the way that God has ordained them to happen.”

Could she identify Iran on a map? Of course. But then, as she studied the same map Wallace had peered at minutes earlier, she seemed flummoxed. Roughly 10 seconds later, she surrendered. “Sadly, I must say no,” Lynch said.

Closer to the food court, Steve Winter, a 57-year-old auditor for an insurance company, hovered over a steaming Styrofoam clamshell container of rice and teriyaki chicken splayed on his table. Like Wallace and Lynch, he had yet to hear about the nuclear deal. He described himself as a Republican voter, though not a straight-ticket one.

“There’s so many other things we’re concerned about,” Winter said. “It’s hard to be concerned about everything on the world stage.”

Later, outside the mall’s entrance, Chris Stark, 32, stepped out of a McAlister’s Deli with leftovers in his hand. He hadn’t heard of the president’s p5+1 victory, and like Wallace and Lynch and Winter, he couldn’t locate the country on the map. Did Stark think events in Iran mattered to his own life here in Indiana?

He shrugged.

Near a courtyard-like entrance to the mall, a 50-year-old woman who worked in marketing and identified herself only as Connie, walked with her college-aged daughter, Jess. Like Wallace and Lynch and Winter and Stark, she and her daughter couldn’t identify Iran on a map, and I had to break the news to them about the deal.

My quest continued. Outside the mall’s 14-screen AMC Theater, Vickie Mills, 48, and her daughter Jesse Mills, 23, were leaving an advance screening of “Trainwreck,” the new Amy Schumer movie. They hadn’t heard the news, either, and didn’t care to venture a guess about Iran’s location.

At 9 p.m., the mall closed, and I trundled to a nearby Applebee’s, where I sat at the bar next to Ryan Burns, a 37-year-old mid-level manager in the telecomm industry who never went to college. As he nibbled on boneless Buffalo wings and nursed a Bud Light, he confessed that foreign policy wasn’t of much interest to him. Then, he revealed something he said few people knew about him. He had never voted in a local, state or federal election over the course of his life.

“My life has always been work,” he said, as his eyes toggled between his smartphone and the Major League Baseball’s All-Star game.

Like Wallace and Lynch and Winter and Stark and Connie and Mills, he couldn’t place Iran on the map. And he cared little about the landmark accord. “It doesn’t change my daily life,” Burns said. “I still got to go to work today.”

***

In his seminal book on American foreign policy Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, Walter Russell Mead writes about how early Americans were innately interested in foreign policy. American farmers, for example, “never forgot their dependence on foreign customers and on the means of transporting their produce to market,” writes Mead, the former Henry A. Kissinger Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“It was no accident that so many American political leaders devoted so much attention to foreign policy in the so called isolationist period,” Mead writes. “The prosperity and happiness of the average American family were visible tied to international affairs, and the connection was lost neither on the voters nor on those who hoped to win their support for office.”

Still, Americans back then probably couldn’t have found Iran on a map either, Mead told me. Today, many Americans see Iran as “bad place, building bombs—‘Iran, Iraq, Qatar, what the heck, who knows which is which?’”

Turns out it takes a really big event, much bigger than the Iran deal, to get Americans truly interested in foreign affairs. Like Pearl Harbor. That got Americans interested.

Back at the mall, the Millses, mother and daughter, were less concerned whether Iran could continue to enrich uranium, and more interested in whether a premiere of Amy Schumer's movie lived up to billing (it did, they said). Steve Winter, the insurance auditor, was less concerned about whether the Obama administration had allowed Iran to cross so-called red lines, and more concerned with whether the teriyaki chicken tasted as good as he hoped (it did not, he admitted; he would order something different next time).

If 2016 is shaping up to be a foreign policy election, no one has told these people yet. Average Americans here in the heartland have sausage pizzas to eat, shopping to do, movies to see, work to accomplish, and All-Star games to watch. They’re sort of glad we have diplomats to take care of other stuff. Though they’re not entirely sure what it is diplomats do.

***

After talking with Ryan Burns at Applebee’s, I finally gave up and ordered an Uber. Ford Hebner, a gray-haired Hoosier who lives in the suburbs, arrived minutes later in a GMC Yukon. Hebner asked me if I had been working late. I explained to him my dilemma: In the course of three hours, I couldn’t find an average American who harbored a passionate opinion—let alone knowledge of—the new Iranian nuclear deal.

And then Hebner made my night: He had been following the negotiations with Iran leading up to Tuesday’s announcement. After taking a buyout from UPS in the 1990s, Hebner said he had started several Inc. 500 companies that he sold off before the Dot-com bust, and then began dabbling in local and state Republican politics. He had taken up driving for Uber on the bet of a friend, and so a few of his new companies wouldn’t need to pay him a salary to survive.

“Like any deal, time will tell if it’s a good or a bad deal,” Hebner said. “It all boils down to: Is a deal better than no deal? I give it a 40 percent chance that it’s successful. I hope it’s successful. The biggest problem was that the proliferation treaty signed years ago said any sovereign territory has the right to develop nuclear power and generation capability. Iran’s playing it. They’ve violated half of the past agreements. I don’t give them a whole lot of trust that they won’t violate this one, too. We’ll see.”

Hebner dropped me off at my destination, and handed me his business card. Once home, I realized I had forgot to ask him a key question. I dialed his cell as listed on the card he handed me.

Could he place Iran on a map? Because everyone else I talked to that night could not.

“It surprises me,” Hebner says. “It has an effect on us. We’re doing business with countries all over the world. You know [Thomas] Friedman’s The World is Flat? It really is. Maybe I expect too much out of folks.”

And could he place Iran on a map?

“Yes,” Hebner said. “Iran’s surrounded by Iraq and Pakistan on the other side, and Turkey is to the North. Right?”

There is hope for America.