Reading Schelling in Tehran*: 2

* Still technically in Doha

The second part of my reflections on teaching Thomas Schelling’s Arms and Influence here in Doha during the ongoing war.

The international relations scholar Robert Vitalis diagnosed the discipline of International Relations with what he termed the “norm against noticing”: a pattern to avoid discussing race and racialized subjects, to maintain a fictitious claim that race and international relations had nothing to do with each other—the sort of claim that evaporates upon first contact with the writings or speeches of, well, just about any pre-Second World War statesman or scholar from Europe or its settler offshoots.¹ That norm operated at least in part from the reading around of unsettling or bluntly racist passages in canonical works, a process by which young scholars were socialized into letting major authors’ observations pass without further comment—a strategy familiar to anyone with an uncle prone to making certain kinds of jokes or remarks at the Thanksgiving table.

Of late, that norm has crumbled a bit as the discipline has become more diverse in its intake, as the generation that wrote those canonical works has passed on from making career-shaping decisions, and as broader currents in American and global society have made it intolerable to not notice what is being said. And yet, it can still come as a shock to re-read canonical stories and suddenly notice what was there all along.

So it is with Schelling and his discussion of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the prime minister of Iran overthrown by a British-American operation in 1953.

Of that incident, Schelling writes (p. 38)

Recall the trouble we had persuading Mossadegh in the early 1950s that he might do his country irreparable damage if he did not become more reasonable with respect to his country and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Threats did not get through to him very well. He wore pajamas, and, according to reports, he wept. And when British or American diplomats tried to explain what would happen to his country if he continued to be obstinate, and why the West would not bail him out of his difficulties, it was apparently uncertain whether he even comprehended what was being said to him. It must have been a little like trying to persuade a new puppy that you will beat him to death if he wets on the floor. If he cannot hear you, or cannot understand you, or cannot control himself, the threat cannot work and you very likely will not even make it.

So, this passage hits different—as the kids no longer say—when one reads it as Iranian missiles are blasted apart overhead.

It should be noted that, as far as I know, this is a comically oversimplified portrait of interactions between Mossadegh and the West; portraying “the West” as seeking to “bail him out” seems particularly slanted. Nor does Mossadegh appear to have been so puppyish as this account holds. In short, this paragraph—which really does not need to be in the book! the puppy example by itself is crude but effective!—severely mars the chapter.

I’m annoyed and even embarrassed that I did not catch how sloppy it was the first time I read it, nearly twenty years ago. (I have the same copy I read in graduate school with me.) Should it have taken my relocation to the Middle East to perceive the slapdash nature of this argument? It bespeaks a casual denigration of the rest of the world. And it reads especially oddly in the present context because if you were going to describe a leader two weeks ago who was unable to understand the stakes of a confrontation—well, would it be the Iranian one?

Indeed, throughout Schelling, there’s a constant drumbeat of assertions that the United States is reliable, responsible, and unlikely to act rashly. For Schelling, this is a disadvantage. Much of Arms and Influence revolves around the idea that one must credibly signal an ability to lose control in order to make threats of nuclear use believable—a threat so self-defeating that no rational leader would make it, but so powerful that no rational leader could abjure it. To be fair-minded, evenhanded, and cool-headed may well be a disadvantage, Schelling argues: “We have not the character of fanatics and cannot scare countries the way Hitler could.”

Oh, to live in a world where the consensus knock against the United States was that it was not rash enough!

That world died in the Vietnam War within months of the book’s publication, along with the bipartisan confidence that the Cold War was worth waging at the levels that Schelling took for granted.

The cozy Cold War consensus was not the only victim. Within a generation, arguments and voices that had been marginalized would seize the commanding heights of intellectual production, seemingly making breezy claims like Schelling’s distasteful. That victory was never total—Samuel Huntington could assert in print that Mexican-Americans inclined toward secessionism, for instance—but a passage like Schelling’s discussion of Mossadegh would have at least required more syllables.

And yet a great deal of that attitude toward those who resisted the West remained. The analytical presumption of U.S. rationality and Others’ emotional nature is deeply embedded in how American scholars see the world — and beyond academia it is even more entrenched. How many people describe North Korea as “irrational,” for instance, as though a regime that has survived for seven decades through calculated brinksmanship simply cannot think straight?

To dismiss one’s adversaries as flighty or incomprehensible is not just uncharitable. It is a cardinal intellectual sin — the kind that wrecks analysis before it begins. Getting this right is not a matter of politeness or political correctness. It is a matter of flinty, steel-eyed realism: you will not bother to try to outthink an opponent you have decided is incapable of thought.

But first you have to notice that these prejudices exist. And then you have to stop reading around them.

1. Vitalis, Robert. “The graceful and generous liberal gesture: Making racism invisible in American international relations.” Millennium 29, no. 2 (2000): 331-356.