A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran
author: Trita Parsi
name: Paul
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at: 2012/06/04
date added: 2012/06/04
shelves: new-in-2012, non-fiction
review:
Whew. This was a tough one for me to get through. About a year ago when I started making a concerted effort to finish more books, I made a little deal with myself that if I ever had a bit of downtime and I found myself specifically not wanting to pick up the book I was reading, that meant I wasn’t into it and I needed to set it aside and read something else. It was an effort to prevent the logjam that sometimes happens when I’m reading a difficult or dry book that I want to finish (either because someone recommended it or because the subject, if not the presentation, is something I’m interested in) but struggle with. I came close to putting Trita Parsi‘s book about the Obama administration’s early efforts at diplomacy with Iran aside in this way because there were some times when I had a chance to read and found myself looking at the book thinking, “Meh.”
In the end I powered through because while I wasn’t thrilled about reading it all the time, I did continue to stick with it. I think, ultimately, the main complaint I have with A Single Roll Of The Dice is that it doesn’t feel to me like it needed to be a book. This is an exhaustive examination of a period of only about three years, and a lot of the detail here frankly feels like TMI. For example, Parsi goes into an insane level of detail on the backstory of Brazil’s diplomatic history and their desire to win a seat on the UN Security Council, which he presents to contextualize why Brazil partnered with Turkey in order to get Iran to agree to a diplomatic deal that had originally been floated by the US to ship low enriched uranium out of Iran in exchange for fuel rods (enriched elsewhere) to power a research reactor that would provide medical isotopes. In other words, the US wanted to stall Iran from enriching their uranium toward weapons grade but didn’t necessarily feel they shouldn’t be allowed to use non-arms applications of nuclear technology.
While it’s sort of interesting that Brazil wanted to get involved, the whole explanation of why Brazilian President Lula felt his country could assist here is tangental to the point that Turkey and Brazil had reasons for getting involved and ultimately got Iran to agree to the deal that US and European negotiators some months before had been unable to sell to Iranian officials. This is but one example of where Parsi over-explains, possibly just to show off how much he knows about all of the details of the complicated matter of diplomacy with Iran, but loses the forest for the trees.
I think in the end the core story here is fascinating but this should have been an in-depth article, something like 30-40 pages worth, condensed to its most pertinent essence, and not a 200+ page book of wearying tales of which ambassador was present in which meeting and what sources say was discussed and how they relayed the information to the press, ad nauseum. Most tellingly, the drama conveyed by the snappy title does not carry through to the sea of minutiae within.
I certainly didn’t hate this book, and the subject that compelled me to check it out from the library pulled me through to the end, as a pleasant side effect of the belabored point is a pretty decent education on the history and current state of international relations as pertains to Iran. There’s also a very good overview of the Iranian elections which caused so much news cycle coverage a few years ago, told from both the internal perspective of Iran as well as from the external point of view as seen by the rest of the world, and by those inside the Obama administration. For that reason alone I might be tempted to suggest that someone with some general questions about the state of affairs in Iran check out this book. But then again, it’s possible I’d recommend it only because, for now, it’s the most timely portrait of that and even then, it’s probably been supplanted by newer works covering the latter half of 2011 and the first part of 2012. And those would probably be shorter, more journalistic articles. By the end of this year, I suspect the reasons to read this book would have almost disappeared entirely unless someone really wanted to know exactly what US-Iran relations were like as of late 2011. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.