Toying with Foreign Policy: From Red Reset to Pink Drones

[Geee]

PjMedia:

You remember the U.S. sentinel drone that went down over Iran in December? President Obama asked Iran to send it back. According to the Russian RT news site, Iran — via the Swiss embassy, which represents U.S. interests in Tehran — is now sending President Obama a toy model of the American drone, colored bright pink.

Stories about this mocking gesture have been bubbling up for a while. In January the Christian Science Monitor reported that an Iranian toy-maker had begun turning out these model U.S. stealth drones in vivid hues. They come mounted on stands engraved with one of Ayatollah Khomeini’s slogans, still a pet sentiment of the Tehran regime: “We will trample America under our feet.”

Mockery is of course nothing new in these realms, and the Christian Science Monitor story included some details suggesting that this mockery of the U.S. could backfire on the Iranian regime itself. The toy models have been selling for the equivalent of about $4, which is no small sum for many Iranians, in a country where the oil-fed tyranny of the mullahs has warped and stunted the economy, and sanctions are now applying added pressure. The Monitor quoted one unnamed resident of Tehran complaining about the “toy shop tactics” of the Iranian government, saying they are “annoying” when “we have such serious issues to confront.”

 

What worries me, though, is less the effect of this mockery inside Iran itself, than the message it sends to Iran’s pals about the extent to which it is safe to defy and deride the U.S. The RT story — let’s reprise that link — “Iran sent pink drone to Obama,” ran on the English-language version of a Russian news site. Especially in any Russian context, toy tools of foreign policy evoke the embarrassing red “reset” button that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented in 2009 to the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov — complete with the mistranslation with which the State Department labeled the toy button with the Russian word for “overcharged,” rather then the intended “reset.” Photos of Clinton and Lavrov show them laughing together over the toy button. But the real laugh has been Russia’s, at U.S. expense, as the U.S. has ceded one important policy position after another, from dropping the promised missile defense for Eastern Europe, to bowing to Russia and China, over Syria, by taking the issue to the United Nations Security Council.