Joe Biden’s 2002 Speech to AIC a Focus of Recent Politico Analysis
/The one that gets away: Joe Biden’s jaded romance with Iran
Nearly two decades ago, as Americans stunned by the 9/11 attacks were still sifting through rubble on the East Coast and in Afghanistan, then-Sen. Joe Biden seized the moment to call for a revival of U.S. ties with Iran.
In a speech in Washington to the American Iranian Council, Biden laid out some modest steps the U.S. should take to court its longtime enemy, including allowing more people-to-people interactions. Biden didn’t shirk from addressing issues of concern to Washington, like Tehran’s nuclear program, and he acknowledged that anti-U.S. hardliners hold the key levers of power in Iran. But he also spoke of how ordinary Iranians had held candlelight vigils for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, and how the countries had cooperated to some degree in Afghanistan. Biden even invited Iranian lawmakers to meet with him, wherever and whenever they would like.
“I believe that an improved relationship with Iran is in the naked self-interest of the United States and, I would presume to suggest, Iran’s interest as well,” the Delaware Democrat, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, said in the March 2002 speech.
Despite reverberating in Iran, a negative reaction from that country’s supreme leader killed hopes that Biden’s remarks would yield a diplomatic breakthrough. Still, the speech, and the mere fact that Biden gave it, was emblematic of his approach to the Islamic Republic throughout his decades in public life.
In fact, years before Barack Obama ran for president on a platform that included reaching out to adversaries like Iran, Biden was calling for engagement with the Middle Eastern nation, meeting with its top diplomats and even flirting with a visit. At one point, a critic derided him as “Tehran’s favorite senator.”
A POLITICO review of available records, speeches, and congressional statements found that when it came to Iran, Biden has long tried to walk a careful path, one that is wary, yet hopeful; politically aware, yet politically risky; and often focused on incremental gains in the hopes of seeding long-term results.
Today, as president, Biden is in an increasingly tense faceoff with Tehran over how, or whether, to salvage an internationally negotiated 2015 deal that limits Iran’s nuclear capabilities. The stakes are high: If the deal collapses, it raises the odds of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and pushes Iran toward a more open conflict with Israel and some Arab states.
The politics, meanwhile, are toxic: pitting the U.S. against close friend Israel, straining America’s ties with its European allies, and giving Republicans a cudgel with which to pummel Biden. Yet, Biden appears willing to give nuclear diplomacy with Iran a shot, at least for now.
Biden has “always taken a far-sighted view” on Iran, said former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a Republican who helped arrange a 2003 meeting between Biden and Javad Zarif, now Iran’s foreign minister. “You just can’t accept that Iran’s going to be an enemy forever and ever and ever — something’s going to happen. If nothing else, you’ll have generational change.”
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