Selfless Selfishness: Strategic Empathy in the US Foreign Policy Talks toward Iran's Nuclear Program

If the rationalist argument that war is a failure of communication is true, the endless conflicts in the 21st century seem to suggest that we have not yet learned how to communicate successfully with each other. Against the backdrop of recent conflicts, policy experts and scholars have urged for applying "strategic empathy" to conflicts to better communicate and negotiate with different parties, hoping to increase the possibility of mitigating violence, suffering, and the cost of wars. Strategy empathy calls for an imperative of understanding others, especially those who have conflicting interests. This thesis incorporates an interdisciplinary perspective and defines "strategic empathy" as a capacity for and an attempt to understand others' thoughts and feelings to serve self-interest. By adopting mixed methodologies to code substantial presidential corpus, this thesis conceptualizes strategic empathy and manifests its expressions in the US foreign policy talks toward Iran's nuclear programs across the Clinton, George. W. Bush, and Obama administrations. My thesis found that the presence of strategic empathy is not rare in US foreign policy talks toward Iran. However, whether strategic empathy can signal good intentions and foster effective communication depends on its expressive styles. Although the outcome of applying strategic empathy might be agnostic, this thesis suggests that when the expression of strategic empathy maintains a temporal consistency and a structural balance with its negative counterparts, it is more likely to leverage its relational momentum and effectively signal and communicate between different parties, thus to create dynamic relationships between states.