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Cruz and many Republicans look at the news of the past week and see an enfeebled United States fecklessly pursuing rapprochement with an appeased and emboldened enemy. They see the Iranian military releasing humiliating photos and video of U.S. sailors apologizing for straying into Iranian waters and being apprehended at gunpoint while on their knees, only for the U.S. government to thank the Iranians for letting the sailors go, cheer the episode as the fruits of diplomatic outreach to Tehran, and then shower Iran with billions of dollars in sanctions relief.

Obama, in contrast, dwells in his public statements less on what happened in recent days than on what could have happened and what could yet happen. The start of nuclear talks with Iran in 2013 precipitated the highest-level dialogue between the Iranian and U.S. governments since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Obama claims this dialogue with America’s longtime enemy is yielding near-term benefits and long-term opportunities that decades of isolating Iran never did.

“Whereas Iran was steadily expanding its nuclear program, we have now cut off every single path that Iran could have used to build a bomb … without resorting to another war in the Middle East,” Obama asserted on Sunday. The detention of the sailors “could have sparked a major international incident.” Instead, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry quickly called up Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif; some 15 hours later, after a series of phone calls between the two men, the sailors were released unharmed, with all their gear and weaponry. Relative to stony silence, dialogue could also bring better relations with young Iranians, who constitute the Islamic Republic’s largest population bloc and whose restlessness and political activism arguably pose the greatest threat to the ruling theocracy. “Following the nuclear deal, you—especially young Iranians—have the opportunity to begin building new ties with the world,” Obama told the Iranian people, essentially placing a bet on the country’s future. After all, the nuclear deal with Iran is designed to last at least 15 years—a stretch of time that could change everything, or nothing at all.

In the long term, Obama may be hoping that engagement transforms Iran from an enemy to a friend, though he’s not sure it will. But in the near term, he evidently hopes that engagement, deployed judiciously and in balance with isolation and coercion, will reduce the risks of serious showdowns with a very real foe. In his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Obama elaborated on his thinking, which he has applied not just to Iran, but also to countries like Cuba:

I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach—condemnation without discussion—can carry forward only a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door.



In light of the Cultural Revolution’s horrors, Nixon’s meeting with Mao appeared inexcusable—and yet it surely helped set China on a path where millions of its citizens have been lifted from poverty and connected to open societies. … Ronald Reagan’s efforts on arms control and embrace of perestroika not only improved relations with the Soviet Union, but empowered dissidents throughout Eastern Europe.

The allusion to Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to Mao Zedong’s China, which came after more than two decades of icy relations, is instructive in understanding Obama’s philosophy. In an Oval Office meeting shortly before the trip, Nixon, a staunch anti-communist, explained his rationale for reaching out to Beijing to administration officials and the Dutch prime minister, employing logic that in many ways prefigures Obama’s. Nixon wanted to get to know the Chinese not despite the “enormous differences” in ideology and interests between the capitalist and communist giants, but precisely because of them. The stakes were too damn high to choose righteous blindness over some degree of visibility into a key Cold War player:

What may come out of it will be … some method of communication in the future, some contact in the future, and perhaps reducing the chance in the immediate future of a confrontation between the United States and the [People’s Republic of China] in Asia, such as we had in Korea, and such as we had indirectly in Vietnam. And looking further in the future, when they become a superpower, a nuclear superpower, to be in a position that at that time, we will have such relations with them that we can discuss differences, and not inevitably have a clash. Now, also, no one can look at Asia, and take 750 million Chinese out of it and say you can have any policy in the Pacific that will succeed in preventing war without having the Chinese a part of it. It’s just as coldblooded as that.

Several months earlier, Nixon had justified his overtures to Mao more succinctly: He would pursue “a more normal relationship” with China “[b]ecause our interests require it. Not because we love them, but because they’re there.”