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Michael McFaul is getting a lot of criticism for this take, with people drawing on Saudi Arabia and other examples to claim that it doesn't matter what color the cat is as long as it meows the Star Spangled Banner. I think, however, the question goes much deeper. https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1337460347033141248
It's about the (non)existence of discourses. The discourse of hostility in US-Iran relations runs deep, so that disengaging from this discourse - in the US and Iran - has high political costs, unless the other side is seen as having unilaterally capitulated.
I was thinking about it earlier today when reading docs on Sino-Soviet relations in the mid-1960s. When Khrushchev was ousted, there was a hope of repairing the rift in relations with China. But this hope came to nothing, as Moscow proved unwilling to admit to past "mistakes."
This kind of capitulation was required to prove that Mao was correct all along, and this was a precondition for shifting the discourse from confrontation to reconciliation. But the Soviets could not capitulate for reasons of their own prestige; so the conflict continued.
So it is with Iran. The wounds of 1978-79 have not healed, which is why changing Iran becomes a precondition to changing the discourse. Leaving Iran as is while trying to change the discourse becomes a non-option *except* that it has been done - many times, in fact.
A good example is the Sino-Soviet rapprochement in the late 1980s, when Beijing and Moscow agreed to "close the past and open the future". Since then, China and Russia have not only repaired their rift but have come to fruitfully cooperate with one another.
Thirty years of cooperation - that's a long time in our volatile world. The credit goes to Gorbachev for breaking the logjam and disengaging from the discourse of hostility, which in his case meant seeing China for what it was, and addressing their security concerns.
The credit also goes to Deng Xiaoping for breaking away from the discourse of hostility, which he himself had been partly responsible for constructing. Amazingly, in a matter of a few years, the discourse of cooperation appeared from almost nowhere, becoming a viable option.
So I would both agree and disagree with McFaul. Under the current conditions, it's hard to foresee a change of discourse short of one or the other's side capitulation, and it has nothing to do with Saudi Arabia. But breaking the logjam is not impossible.
But it can only be done by a political heavyweight who would be willing to absorb the domestic political costs of challenging the predominant discourse. What's worse, it has to happen on both sides.
Changing the predominant discourse is like redirecting the course of a river. You have to know how to do it but you also have to want to do it - a pretty tall order. Easier to sit back and wait for the river to change its course naturally, which to be sure does happen sometimes.
