Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and served in the Reagan, George W. Bush and first Trump administrations.
Donald Trump once sought to liberate the Iranians. In the war’s early hours, the president told this paper, “All I want is freedom for the people.” A month earlier, he instructed the country’s “patriots” to “keep protesting” and to “take over your institutions” because “help is on its way.” Fast-forward five months, though, and the United States has abandoned all such support. Worse, the administration has done so by accepting what was surely the regime’s rhetoric.
The memorandum of understanding that the Trump administration signed last week affirms that Washington and Tehran will “refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.” If the U.S. negotiators didn’t know the long and sordid history of that phrase, their Iranian counterparts almost certainly did. It is a classic case of “semantic infiltration,” or what Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan described as “the process whereby we come to adopt the language of our adversaries in describing political reality.”
The notion of noninterference first appeared in 1981, when the U.S. was trying to rescue the 52 Americans that Iranian revolutionaries held hostage for 444 days. The Algiers Accords, which the Carter administration agreed to, stipulated it would be U.S. policy not to “intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.”
Where did that language come from? The Islamic republic’s diplomats borrowed it from the Soviets. Throughout the Cold War, the U.S.S.R.’s response to any human rights criticism was that such comments were illegitimate. This was the Soviet line throughout the 1970s, when dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Anatoly Shcharansky, Andrei Amalrik and Yuri Orlov became famous in the West; when the “refuseniks” of the Soviet Jewry movement attracted worldwide attention; and when the Kremlin responded by putting such men in prison or mental hospitals.
Western condemnation, from ordinary citizens or heads of state, was met with the same line. In a November 1977 telegram to President Jimmy Carter, for example, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev wrote: “I must emphasize that if we want our relations to develop normally there must be no attempts to interfere in each other’s internal affairs.”
The Iranian regime knew exactly what it was doing when it demanded that the phrase be included four decades ago. Its meaning is, in essence, “no more criticism of our human rights abuses or support for dissidents.” The revolutionaries came to power in February 1979, and by the time the document was signed on Jan. 19, 1981, the regime had already committed widespread abuses. In 1979, more than 600 people were executed by firing squad; by 1982, nearly 6,000 had been killed.
President Ronald Reagan’s administration didn’t accept that it had to be silent on Iran or any other country. As early as April 1981, after only three months in office, the president wrote to Brezhnev about Poland. “I must reject charges that the United States is intervening in that country’s affairs,” he stated. “As we have repeatedly made clear, our concern is that the Polish Government and people be allowed to resolve their problems peacefully and free from any outside interference.”
Reagan made the point many times, including during his June 1988 visit to Moscow for a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev. “Things of this kind we don’t think are really interfering with someone else’s business,” he said about raising dissident cases with Soviet leadership. The general secretary reportedly said he “did not have a lot of admiration for that part of the trip.” Reagan insisted on it anyway.
Did it matter? Hoover Institution scholar Bertrand M. Patenaude noted in a 2012 paper that “Soviet dissidents exerted a moral and even political influence that vastly offset their modest numbers.” Such figures “served as the ‘conscience’ of Soviet society,” and “their ideas, moreover, gained increasing sympathy inside the Soviet establishment during the final decade of the USSR.”
If the West cares about freedom in Iran, support for dissidents is crucial — for opposition leaders in the country and those in exile, for the millions of Iranians who loathe the regime and for the hundreds of thousands who rise up against it even in the face of murderous suppression. They need and want the moral and political support of democratic societies. Lifting sanctions and unfreezing the mullahs’ assets only make their struggle more difficult.
As the recent conflict has demonstrated, neither war nor negotiations appear to solve the problem of the Islamic republic. The solution is the fall of the regime — or, to put it differently, for Iranians to regain the right to interfere in their own internal affairs by governing themselves democratically. Meanwhile, the Trump administration should keep such noxious language out of any final deal. If it’s there to stay, the president should do what Reagan did: flatly reject the idea that supporting freedom-loving Iranians is any kind of illegitimate interference.
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