{"id":1252,"date":"2009-09-23T04:58:04","date_gmt":"2009-09-23T08:58:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/mesh\/?p=1252"},"modified":"2009-10-10T03:31:07","modified_gmt":"2009-10-10T07:31:07","slug":"russia-america-and-iran-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/2009\/09\/russia-america-and-iran-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia, America, and Iran\u2014Again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>From <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/mesh\/members\/mark_n_katz\/\">Mark N. Katz<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"margin: 5px 10px;float: right\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2258\/2159839117_6a361ea687_m.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"160\" \/>Iranian President Ahmadinejad&#8217;s most recent statement that the Holocaust is a myth and denouncing Israel is an indication that he does not see U.S. President Obama&#8217;s call for dialogue and improved relations with Iran as desirable from his perspective.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->While Moscow has applauded the Obama administration&#8217;s decision not to execute the Bush administration&#8217;s plan to deploy a ballistic missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic aimed at Iran, Tehran is undoubtedly focusing on the Obama administration&#8217;s plan to instead deploy sea-based ballistic missile defenses closer to Iran. Ahmadinejad is highly likely to see this not only as more threatening to Iran than the Poland\/Czech Republic option, but also to see the Obama administration&#8217;s foregoing the latter as an attempt to curry favor with Moscow in the hope of enlisting its cooperation against Tehran.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, with Ahmadinejad seeing the United States as somehow orchestrating the continued Iranian democratic opposition protests against his claimed re-election victory, it all must seem to him that the Obama administration is even more of a threat to him than the Bush administration ever was. Issuing strident statements about Israel, then, is a desperate attempt by Ahmadinejad to rally support both at home and in the Muslim world.<\/p>\n<p>Moscow, though, is making it clear that the Obama administration&#8217;s abandoning the Poland\/Czech Republic BMD deployment plan will not result in a quid pro quo from Russia vis-\u00e0-vis Tehran. While there really are forces that threaten Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Republic, Moscow is making clear that Russia is not one of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Mark N. Katz Iranian President Ahmadinejad&#8217;s most recent statement that the Holocaust is a myth and denouncing Israel is an indication that he does not see U.S. President Obama&#8217;s call for dialogue and improved relations with Iran as desirable from his perspective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1620,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[622,2991,1813,2579],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iran","category-mark-n-katz","category-military","category-russia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1620"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1252"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1356,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions\/1356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}