Doves keep talking about the Iranian nuclear problem like it is a unilateralist Ungame, the game where you win by not seeking to win. It is better thought of as multilateralist chess.

Doves have argued that the primary obstacle to reaching a grand bargain with Iran has been the unwillingness of the United States to make a sufficiently generous offer. Doves believed that President Bush willfully ignored hopeful signs out of Iran and poisoned the well of negotiations by setting “unreasonable” conditions, for instance requiring that Iran pause its enrichment program while negotiating over the issue. Doves were encouraged by Obama’s campaign critique of Bush on Iran and especially by his promise to sit down face-to-face with Iranian leaders to hammer out a deal. Doves take a unilateralist approach to the international coalition, focusing almost exclusively on U.S. concessions as the engine of their strategy. The dove position is remarkably immune to bad news out of Tehran. Whenever the Iranian regime spurns a U.S. offer, the problem can be pinpointed in the alleged unfairness of the offer — unfair to Iran, that is. Be more generous, and the Iranians might play along. Whenever the Iranians are caught in a deceit, the doves propose a bold gambit of making further concessions to Iran as a way to capitalize on the momentum. Pushed to its logical conclusion, the dove position is an irrefutable tautology: If we are willing to live with an Iranian nuclear weapon, and we should be, then we can have a grand bargain with Iran and we can put this matter behind us. Like the Ungame, we only need to focus on moving our pieces and listening to others. Provided we don’t really care about “winning,” then the game is really quite simple.

If you do care about winning, where winning is defined as “Iran abandons its nuclear weapons program,” then the game is better viewed as multilateral chess — strategic interaction along several vectors with multiple players holding conflicting interests.

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