An Unedifying 'Face-Off' on Iran

There is some value in engaging people that hold different policy views, but this was a perfect example of why some interlocutors are not worth talking to.

The German Marshall Fund hosted a 30-minute “face-off” debate recently between Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and Richard Nephew, formerly an official in the Obama administration and author of The Art of Sanctions. I have provided the link and you can watch it for yourself if you feel like you have thirty minutes to burn, but you won’t come away from the debate understanding anything about the policy better than you did going in. The framing of the debate wrongly leads the audience to think that the only real objection to “maximum pressure” comes from an even more hard-line position, as if the choice is between grueling economic warfare and an even more aggressive policy that attacks Iran in other ways as well. The real debate that would be worth hearing is between a principled defense of constructive engagement with Iran and the policy of isolation and collective punishment that the U.S. government is currently pursuing. That reflects the real disagreement over what Iran policy should be, and it wouldn’t require pointless parlor games.

The gimmick of this debate was to have the two men to make an argument opposite of the one they usually make about the “maximum pressure” campaign. Dubowitz and his organization are essentially the authors of Trump administration policy, so it seemed bizarre to enlist him to argue the negative view. The problem with the format is that it allowed Dubowitz to game the format by arguing for a more hard-line position. The question was “Is the Trump administration’s ‘maximum pressure’ campaign working?’, and Dubowitz was permitted to argue that it wasn’t working because it had not been as draconian as it should have been. The problem, he said, was that the U.S. was not using all of its intruments of power. In short, he attacked “maximum pressure” for not going far enough, and Nephew was left holding the bag arguing in favor of the Trump administration’s policy.

I genuinely fail to see how this was edifying or illuminating for anyone, and it seems at best like a huge waste of everyone’s time. Nephew went into the debate in good faith in an attempt to talk to the other side, but his goodwill was abused and the exericse proved to be a futile one. Lots of people knew that Dubowitz and FDD were bad faith actors before this debate, and this display has reconfirmed that view, but it raises the question of why important foreign policy institutions give them the opportunity to promote their propaganda in the guise of serious argument. There is some value in engaging people that hold different policy views, but this was a perfect example of why some interlocutors are not worth talking to.