President Bush recently authorized William Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, to attend a meeting in Geneva on Iran’s nuclear program. The meeting, which was held Saturday, produced no developments after Iran responded with a written document failing to address international demands.

In Geneva, officials from six negotiating partners — the U.S., France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China — pressed Iran to accept a “freeze-for-freeze” proposal, under which Iran would cease enriching uranium, and the U.S. and other powers would not demand additional international sanctions against Iran. After Iranian officials failed to address the nuclear concerns at the meeting, the six nations gave Iran two weeks to formally respond to the proposal before it would be withdrawn.

To discuss the Geneva meeting, foreign policies and the future of Iran, The Stanford Weekly spoke with Visiting Prof. of Political Science Abbas Milani, frequently referred to by The New York Times as an “Iran expert.” Professor Milani currently serves as director of Stanford’s Iranian Studies program and as a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.

The Stanford Weekly: In the past, Bush administration officials have said they will not negotiate with Iran until Iran suspends its uranium enrichment program. Why, then, was William Burns sent to Geneva?

Abbas Milani: Well, first of all, they tried to pretend like they haven’t changed their position by insisting that Burns was there not to negotiate, but to participate, and that he did not actually engage directly with the Iranians, but sat there silently, watching.

But I think it is a change, in fact, and the reality is that the demand was not that reasonable a demand to begin with. Suspension of the enrichment is what the fight is about, and you can’t demand the other side to give you what you want to negotiate about. It’s a very unusual demand to make, because the ultimate goal of the negotiations, by every account, would be suspension and something else, so to demand that Iran should do the only thing that it has up its sleeve as a precondition of negotiation doesn’t leave much for them to negotiate with.

SW: Would you say, as John Bolton told The New York Times on Tuesday, that the Bush administration is “desperate to sign deals” in its final year?

AM: Not at all. I think John Bolton is desperate to attack the Bush administration for any sign of reason that they show in their foreign policy. His diatribes against the Bush administration on both the North Korean and Iranian issues, I think, are more the result of his ideology than of any clear observance of reality as reality is. In his world of neoconservative ideology, he can do and he can surmise and he can order what he wants, but in the world of diplomacy, you have to work with reality, not with the mandates of ideology. Work with reality, and the world looks different.

SW: Iran presented a nonpaper in Geneva that ignored the uranium enrichment concerns of the six countries sitting at the other side of the table, and was subsequently given two weeks to accept the freeze-for-freeze proposal. To your knowledge and opinion, what is Iran’s play here? What do you see happening at the end of the two weeks?

AM: I think Iran’s strategy is two-fold. One is to look like they are conciliatory, to look like they are open to a diplomatic solution. This way, their allies — that is, China and Russia — can then argue for a continuation of the diplomatic path. China and Russia can continue to argue that harsher methods and harsher embargos — harsher punishments — are unnecessary, and that the current, promising diplomatic path is the one to continue. That’s one goal they have.

The other goal is to prolong the negotiations in order to create reality on the ground. The more they prolong the negotiations, the more centrifuges will be running, the more they will have learned about the process and the more difficult it will be to turn back the clock. Their strategy is very, I think, clear, and they have been doing this for a long, long time, and they have become very good at it — at pursuing this concurrent strategy and using creative ambiguity to delay and obfuscate and confuse and, ultimately, buy time.

SW: Two ideas were tossed about in the L.A. Times earlier this week. One says that Iran may now have a strong incentive to continue delaying negotiations due to an apparent pattern of recent U.S. concessions. The other says that Iran may bite at the freeze-for-freeze proposal because it believes it can squeeze more out of Bush in his final months than out of a new U.S. president. Is either of these valid?

AM: I don’t think so. In terms of the election, what I think did play a role might well have been Obama’s speech at AIPAC. It was clear, in my view, that they were hoping that maybe an Obama presidency would be more lenient toward them. That speech made it very clear that, on the nuclear issue, Obama is as tough as anybody else is going to be. In some ways, his talk at AIPAC was every bit as tough as anything Bush has ever said on Iran. So I think the idea of delaying this until the election and finding out who is in power so they might get a better deal is much less of a concern to them, because they now have realized that either Obama or McCain, both of them, will be rather tough on this.

The thing that one also has to realize is, for them, I think the most important recent turn of events has been the change in the tone of the British. The British have become much tougher, and the British have openly suggested that they will put oil and gas on the list of embargoed commodities. And the regime knows that if oil and gas are part of the embargo, then if they can’t sell oil and gas — if, there’s a big if — then they are in deep trouble. In Britain now, talks are as tough on these things as in the Bush administration.

SW: Why has Britain’s policy changed?

AM: I think it has to do with the fact that the British have realized the regime in Iran is going to be a threat for the region. This precedes this regime — if you go back to the ‘60s and ‘70s when Iran was run by the Shah, the British had a tendency to side with the Arab states of the Persian Gulf: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen. The British have a long history of close relations with these countries, and they have protected these countries essentially from Iran’s bullying in the past, and now they have realized that the Arabs in the Persian Gulf are very concerned about Iran’s rise as a predominant force in the region. And if that [rise] is accompanied by nuclear power, then the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, which are all Arab and predominantly Sunni, have serious concerns.

SW: A third idea from the L.A. Times says that Iran is simply looking for a promise that the U.S. will not topple Iran’s government.

AM: This talk has been around for a long time — this idea that the U.S. has to somehow say it is not going to engage in a regime change, and the regime, in turn, will budge. First of all, I think that game was at one time the regime’s game, but I think they now think they are in a better position.

That’s no longer just what they want. They think the U.S. is in deep trouble in Iraq and Afghanistan. They think the U.S. doesn’t have the military capacity to take on another war. They think the U.S. economy is in trouble. They think they are in a much better position than they were four years ago, when that offer would have been a very appealing offer to them. Now I think they want more. Whether they will budge is an open question. If I were to guess today, I would say they are not going to budge. Recent news coming out of Iran is not very promising.

SW: Two weeks ago, Iran test-fired a missile with the range to strike Israel. Condoleezza Rice immediately said the U.S. is committed to Israel’s defense. What do the missile tests mean for Israel, America and the Middle East?

AM: One approach that is supported by Ahmadinejad and a considerable portion of the Revolutionary Guard commanders is that the only way to get anything from the West is if you go tit for tat, if you don’t back down. They have a very sort of street-fighter mentality. If you throw a punch, they throw a bigger punch. If you give an inch, they will want three inches.

When the Israeli Air Force had an exercise over the seas near Greece — a distance almost exactly equal to the distance from Israel to Iran — the Israeli papers made it very clear that this was a test-run for a possible attack on Iran. Iran wanted to throw back a punch. And there are elements, [for whom] Ahmadinejad is sort of a spokesperson, who want to be provocative. They want to be provocative partly for the reason I just said — they think that’s the way you get the West to back down. You don’t conciliate, you confront.

But there’s also another reason why the Ahmadinejads in Iran propose a confrontational attitude, and that is, for them, the confrontational attitude is a win-win situation. If the West backs down, they have won. If the West doesn’t back down and the negative confrontation does happen, they still have won, because this faction in Iran does not mind a military attack on Iran. They know that if such an attack comes, they will be in constant power and have a consolidated hold on power.

SW: So am I correct to say that you believe Iran’s nuclear program is not for civilian electricity needs — as Iranian officials claim — but for building weapons?

AM: I think, for sure, that they want to be a kind of de-facto nuclear power, like Japan, where they have the capacity, and the world knows they have the capacity, but they don’t take the next step and develop the bomb. That’s the minimum. They might take the next step and develop the bomb itself.

If they get attacked, I can guarantee you that they will openly declare that they will pursue the bomb. If they don’t, then they might, within a couple of years, be there, where they have the capacity to enrich uranium in a form sufficient for weapons. You know, the idea that they are pursuing this just for the notion that this is modern science, that they should be allowed to pursue modern science, is just too, I think, absurd.

SW: The Bush administration is reportedly considering an American diplomatic presence in Iran, in the form of so-called “interests sections” where American diplomats could issue visas to Iranians wishing to travel to the States. Of course, the U.S. has not had any diplomatic presence in the country since the Revolution in ‘79. What impact would a renewed presence have on U.S.-Iran relations?

AM: I, with Mike McFaul and Larry Diamond, suggested something along these lines four years ago. We wrote at the time that there should be such a diplomatic presence, and we also wrote what we thought would be the consequence.

One consequence would be that there would be enormous convergence on the embassy for visas. That would be a very potent metaphor and symbol of the people’s disgruntlement with the regime. There would be lines along the block, because right now people travel to Dubai, to Turkey, to Pakistan, to Europe, to get these visas.

The other consequence is that, if the U.S. has diplomats on the ground there, the U.S. government can have a better sense of what’s happening in the country. Right now they’re shooting in the dark. Right now they’re at the mercy of some expatriates who have a political axe to grind, or they’re at the mercy of journalists who often have very little experience with Iran, or at the mercy of, what had been until a few years ago, a dwindling number of programs for the study of Iran. Stanford has changed that with its Iranian Studies program, and a couple of other universities have done the same, but if you look at academic institutions a year before September 11, the incredible thing is that there are a smaller number of centers teaching Persian or Iranian studies.

SW: What caused this pre-9/11 shortage of centers teaching Iranian studies?

AM: The shortage was, I think, partly the result of the [1979-1981] hostage crisis. People were just fed up with the Iranians. But for a country like the U.S., with as much political, economic and global interest, you can’t get peeved at a country and stop studying it because you’re mad at it. And right now, that country is Iran — a central player in the Persian Gulf and a central player in the Muslim world. You can’t just, because you’re mad at it, stop studying it. The reverse should have happened. There should have been double the number of centers teaching Iranian studies as there were before September 11.

September 11 finally convinced the powers-that-be here that you need to study Islam, you need to study Iran, you need to study the Persian language, the culture, if you are to understand who these people are and what makes them tick.