Anyone who will say that religion is separate from politics is a fool; he does not know Islam or politics.
—KHOMEINI
IT WAS harder than it should have been to implement the Iran policy announced in President Trump’s October 2017 speech. Any policy shift is difficult across all departments and agencies of the U.S. government, especially when the change in direction is significant, as with Iran. And some of the friction in implementation was due to lingering sympathy for a conciliatory policy. I believed we had to force Iran to choose between either acting as a responsible nation and enjoying the corresponding benefits of such behavior or suffering sanctions and isolation as it continued to wage its destabilizing proxy wars. But some continued to prioritize avoiding confrontation with Iran over forcing that choice, clinging to the forlorn belief that one day Iranian leaders would, as President Obama had hoped, unclench their fists.1
During the summer and fall of 2019, about a year after the United States withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal, and as Iranian oil exports and the value of its currency hit historic lows, Iran attacked Saudi, Emirati, Japanese, and Norwegian oil tankers; conducted drone strikes on Saudi Arabian oil facilities; and shot down a U.S. drone.2 Those actions should have confirmed to the United States that until there is an evolution in the nature of the regime, Iranian leaders will not abandon their proxy wars. Iranian aggression might also have disabused U.S. allies still supporting the JCPOA of the premise that the West can, through engagement and economic enticements, convince the regime to forgo aggression. What became known as the Gulf Crisis of 2019 reinforced the notion that the ideology of the revolution drives Iran’s external actions. Iran’s revolutionaries do not want to be conciliated, and Iran believes it can continue to have it both ways: use extra-state violence to achieve its objectives and still be treated internationally like a responsible nation. It was probably encouraged in this by the international reaction to its hostile acts, which assigned blame more to the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran Nuclear Deal than to the decisions made by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, the Guardian Council, or IRGC commanders. “America made Iran do it” was the subtext behind too much news analysis.
But the regime’s “Great Satan,” “Death to Israel,” and “Death to America” language is not mere bluster. Hostility toward the United States, Israel, and the West is foundational to Iran’s revolutionary ideology, but has historical roots that well predate the revolution. Iran’s leaders deeply resent colonial and foreign powers who are seen as the cause of the Persian empire’s collapse and their country’s loss of sovereignty in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Due to its strategic geography and oil reserves, Iran was an arena of competition in the “Great Game” between Britain and Russia for power and influence across Central Asia. But Iran was also an active player in that game. In the 1930s, for example, authoritarian ruler Reza Shah sought to consolidate his power and cultivated relationships with fascists in Germany, Italy, and Turkey. Early Axis victories in World War II seemed to create an opportunity to expel the British he resented for profiting inequitably from Iran’s oil wealth, but he bet on the wrong side. After the Soviets invaded from the north and the British from the south, Reza Shah abdicated to his son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who would go on to rule Iran for thirty-seven years. Iran declared war on the Axis in 1943.3 The Cold War contest between the Soviet Union and the West introduced the new Shah to an updated version of the Great Game, with the United States replacing Britain as the primary external influence on Iran’s politics and economy. Resentment toward America and Britain for undermining sovereignty, especially during the overthrow of Mosaddeq in 1953, remains a principal emotional determinant of Iranian foreign and military policy nearly seventy years later.
In the years leading up to 1979, opponents of the Shah, such as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, gained popularity for expressing anti-American sentiment. After being exiled from Iran in 1964 and expelled from Iraq in 1978, Khomeini moved to France, where he took full advantage of freedoms he would later suppress in Iran to spew anti-American and anti-Western propaganda. In his cottage in the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Château, surrounded by telephones and cassette tape recorders, he conducted more than 450 interviews, portraying the Shah as a puppet of the United States. When the Ayatollah returned to Iran on February 1, 1979, the crowds that greeted him chanted anti-Western and anti-Israel slogans. The 444-day-long hostage crisis also gave Khomeini and his fellow revolutionaries the opportunity to use anti-Americanism to consolidate their grip on power. It is a technique the regime uses to this day.4 In November 2019, when protests erupted around Iran in response to a government announcement rationing petrol and raising gas prices by up to 300 percent,5 the IRGC called a rally to direct popular discontent away from the regime and toward the United States. The commander of the IRGC, speaking in front of a crowd, blamed the United States for the recent protests, stating, “We are in a great world war and at this moment you are defeating the arrogant powers. The war that was started recently in our streets was an international plot.”6
While understanding what drives and constrains Iranian leaders is critical to U.S. policy, so is an appreciation for the broad range of beliefs and perspectives held by the Iranian people themselves. In 1998, when proposing a “dialogue between civilizations,” Iranian president Mohammad Khatami observed that one should “know the civilization with which you want to maintain a dialogue.”7 He was making a case for strategic empathy. The Iranian people’s attitudes toward the United States and the West are neither uniform nor immutable, which is why a long period of friendship between the American and the Iranian people preceded the revolution. Across public and private sectors, discussions with Iranian counterparts can foster understanding of the positive as well as the negative aspects of Iran’s and America’s intertwined history. One might share the story of Howard Baskerville, a young American who taught English, history, and geometry in Tabriz and went on to become a martyr of the 1905–1911 Persian Constitutional Revolution. Quoted as stating that “the only difference between me and these people is my place of birth, and this is not a big difference,” Baskerville died in command of 150 young constitutionalists while trying to break a siege of tsarist forces and bring food to the people of Tabriz.8 We should recognize the Iranian people’s diversity of viewpoints and take advantage of communities that possess an affinity for American and Western literature, film, music, and the performing arts. Many of Iran’s communities possess cultural and religious identities incompatible with the Marxist and Islamist fundamentalist ideology of the regime.9
While the Iranian regime cannot be changed from the outside, engagement with the Iranian people can help constrain the regime’s use of demagoguery to justify external aggression and internal repression. Penetrating or circumventing the regime’s restrictions to build relationships with Iranians can help counter the regime’s narrative. Although many foreign citizens of Iranian descent have been unlawfully imprisoned in Iran, communication and visits between the Iranian diaspora in the West and their friends and family is an effective catalyst for countering regime disinformation.10 Soon, technological means of bypassing Iran’s censors will be available. Satellite-based internet and other empowering technologies will make it harder for the Iranian regime to block communications and access to information.
Dialogue might also increase social pressure on the regime by reducing Iranian leaders’ ability to blame “the Great Satan” (the United States), “the Little Satan” (Israel), and others for the tragedy of the modern Islamic Republic. The United States and other nations should not take credit for the failing Iranian economy. Credit should go to those Iranian leaders whose corruption and militarism are preventing normal economic engagement and Iranian prosperity. Iran is a tragedy not only because of the devastation and suffering it has caused, but also because of its leaders’ failure to take advantage of the tremendous potential of its people and natural resources. During Ahmadinejad’s presidency, the kleptocratic regime wasted an estimated $800 billion in oil wealth.11 Historically, during periods of instability, the nation’s corrupt leaders hoarded even more wealth to bolster their positions of privilege.
The United States and other nations can also do more to expose the hypocrisy in the regime’s flawed ideology and claims to virtue. Parallels are easy to draw between the corrupt mullahs of Iran and the tyrannical Communist totalitarian regimes of the Cold War era. The statement that the Iranian revolutionaries issued to explain mass executions in the early days of the 1979 civil war echoed the language of the Bolsheviks who rationalized the Red Terror in 1918: “To destroy and kill evil is part of the truth and that the purging of society of those persons means paving the way for a unified society in which classes will not exist.”12 The Supreme Leader’s theocratic authority through the concept of velayat e faqih, or “rule of the jurist,” is not universally accepted in Shiism. Many see the corrupt authoritarian system cloaked in religion as heretical. Investigative journalists and analysts should expose the money wasted on Iran’s proxy wars, and the vast wealth of government officials and clerics associated with the bonyads, to show the Iranian people how their wealth is squandered. In public statements, foreign leaders should be careful to distinguish the Iranian regime from the Iranian people. Failure to do so only allows the regime to continue to deflect criticism away from its own failures to take advantage of the country’s tremendous gifts, including its educated population, geostrategic location, and natural resources.
DESPITE THEIR failing economy, Iranian leaders feel emboldened because they perceive the United States and Europe as divided and weak in resolve. The IRGC’s successes are due not only to its unscrupulousness and talent for deception, but also to the lack of a sustained response. Khamenei saw the divisiveness and contention in the United States after the 2016 presidential election as a sign of political and moral decline, stating that the United States “is becoming hollow from the inside like what termites do.” Like the Chinese Communist Party leadership, he had regarded the 2008 financial crisis as an indication of weakness, stating that the U.S. economy “had declined astonishingly in recent decades” and “American power has declined in the area of politics as well.”13 The lack of a U.S. military response to Iranian attacks in 2019 fit what Iranian leaders view as a pattern of weak reactions to Iranian provocations. The European Union clung to a conciliatory policy even as Iran conducted escalatory attacks, working to circumvent reimposed sanctions after the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA.14 It is entirely possible that Iranian leaders concluded that neither the United States nor European nations possess the will to see through a military confrontation with Iran. In November 2019, IRGC commander Salami boasted to the United States that “you have experienced our power in the battlefield and received a powerful slap across your face and could not respond . . . If you cross our redlines, we will annihilate you.”15
The U.S. strike that killed Qasem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in Baghdad on January 3, 2020, must have come as a surprise. Just prior to the strike, the Supreme Leader, referring to the prospect of U.S. retaliation for Iranian proxy attacks on U.S. bases and the U.S. embassy in Iraq, had taunted President Trump, saying, “You can’t do anything.”16 The regime had clearly been conditioned to believe so.
Absent demonstrated American resolve to impose physical and financial costs on Iran, Iran’s proxy wars will intensify. The ability of the Islamic Republic to modernize its military and wage its proxy wars is partially dependent on the success of the overall Iranian economy. From 2008 to 2018, Iran spent nearly $140 billion on its military and combat operations abroad. Between 2017 and 2019, the United States sanctioned approximately one thousand Iranian individuals and organizations. In 2018, the rial declined fourfold against major currencies, and oil exports, which generate most of the regime’s income, dropped to 1 million barrels a day from a high of 2.5 million. Sanctions, a decrease in GDP, and high inflation resulted in a 10 percent reduction in military spending. In spite of these economic constraints, Iran continued to draw on foreign currency reserves to fund its proxy wars.17
Until the regime ends its hostility to the United States, Israel, the West, and the Arab world, the United States and its partners should improve defenses against Iranian capabilities. Iran’s proxy wars have grown more dangerous because they have expanded both geographically and in the number of participants. Other nations have joined in the conflicts to protect their interests in Syria, Yemen, and in the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Bab-el-Mandeb strait. From 2012 to 2020, Iran’s use of the Levantine air and land bridge to increase the threat to Israel prompted the Israel Defense Forces to intervene in Syria.18 In 2019, Israel increased strikes in Lebanon and Gaza to disrupt Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas capabilities and leadership while Iran continued to support those organizations with weapons and cash. Between 2015 and 2020, Iranian proxies in Yemen launched more than 250 missiles into Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and attempted dozens of attacks on ships in the Bab-el-Mandeb.19 As a result, Saudi Arabia threatened to retaliate directly against Iran. In a November 2017 interview, Prince Mohammad bin Salman called Supreme Leader Khamenei “the new Hitler of the Middle East” after stating in May that the kingdom would make sure any future struggle between the two countries “is waged in Iran.”20
The proxy wars are also more dangerous because of the destructive weaponry Iran provides its militias. Hezbollah and Houthi rebels have both demonstrated an ability to hit ships with guided missiles. Iran’s use of cyber and drone attacks, as well as ballistic missiles, serves as a warning to nations in the region and beyond. Increased U.S. and European defense cooperation with Gulf states in areas such as missile defense, air defense, and long-range fires might convince Iran’s leaders that they cannot accomplish objectives through the use of force. As Iran’s efforts spread geographically, its span of control and logistics became stretched. A multilateral effort should exploit existing weaknesses in the IRGC and proxy network, including its broad geographic scope and overstretched logistic capabilities.
Meanwhile, defensive measures in Arab nations must extend beyond military means. Political and governance reforms to address grievances and meet the needs of non-Sunni citizens will reduce Iranian influence and the numbers willing to aid and abet Iranian subversion, especially in countries with Shia majorities, such as Iraq and Bahrain, and in those with significant Shia minorities, such as Kuwait, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia.
In particular, strengthening governance in Lebanon and weakening Lebanese Hezbollah should be a top priority. Lebanon was the site of Iran’s first proxy war. The Revolutionary Guard took advantage of a brutal multi-sectarian civil war that began in 1975 by portraying themselves as patrons of the poor Shia community. They began forming and training Shia militias that coalesced into Hezbollah after Israel invaded in 1982. Members of Hezbollah and other Iranian-controlled militias went on to launch a series of devastating terrorist attacks, including the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. In the 1970s, anti-Shah Iranians who would later become leaders in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard received training and support at Lebanese Palestine Liberation Organization camps. After the revolution, the newly formed IRGC maintained its militant relationships.
Over the years, Iran strengthened the bond between Hezbollah and its Shia base through the provision of social services and the political power Hezbollah exercises in the Lebanese government.21 Hezbollah was first legitimized as a defender of Lebanese Shia by its ongoing resistance to the Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory and later by initiating war with Israeli forces during Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon. Sunni jihadist sectarian violence has allowed Hezbollah to continue to portray itself as a protector of Shia Muslims and their sacred sites, such as by fighting ISIS in Syria since 2013. Indeed, Hezbollah has a reach far beyond Lebanon, with strategic goals in Syria and Israel, and a demonstrated ability to conduct terrorist attacks in Europe, South America, and the greater Middle East. Iran uses Hezbollah to provide an “Arab face” to its subversive efforts across the region.22
The U.S. government must do far more to target Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies, using its full range of financial, military, and law enforcement authorities. We should monitor and sanction Hezbollah-linked companies and bonyads, support countervailing forces in Lebanon, and cooperate with the European Union and regional partners.23 Exposing Hezbollah’s corruption and use as a tool of the Iranian regime can help galvanize the Lebanese people against the organization. It is important to understand the depth of the challenge, as Hezbollah is militarily strong, and Lebanon is politically fragile. Weakening Hezbollah requires a powerful appeal to the Lebanese people. The suffering that Hezbollah inflicted on the Syrian population and the costs the Lebanese people bore on behalf of the Iranian regime might boost anti-Hezbollah sentiment. More than 7,000 Hezbollah fighters were injured and 1,139 killed in Syria between 2011 and 2019, including more than 600 from heavily Shia southern Lebanon.24
In October 2019, the Lebanese people’s frustrations with their dysfunctional government overflowed. Much of their ire was directed at Hezbollah for defending the government and the corrupt status quo, tarnishing the image of the party as above the fray. By November, hundreds of antigovernment protestors were chanting “Hezbollah are terrorists!” and “Here is Lebanon, not Iran!” in a significant break from the past.25 In early 2020, the Lebanese financial system was in free fall and its government had collapsed. As Haider al-Abadi once told me, sectarianism and corruption go together.
Lebanon remains Iran’s primary front in its proxy war against Israel. Even as its economy falters, Iran will continue to prioritize its aggression toward the “little Satan.” It is possible that, despite efforts to deter another war, Iran will use Hezbollah to precipitate a crisis with Israel as it did in 2006. That war proved inconclusive, but Hezbollah claimed “divine victory” over the Israel Defense Forces. Despite the casualties suffered, the group promoted a resilient survival narrative in which its leaders boasted of their courage and appealed to anti-Israel sympathies. Hezbollah remains committed to Israel’s “total annihilation,” as do Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, two other organizations Iran sponsors. Since 2017, Iran has funded both groups, amounting to a combined $100 million annually. Just as Iran increased Hamas’s rocket supply during the 2008 Gaza War, Khamenei offered Hamas weapons and increased funding in response to Israeli airstrikes in July 2019. There is no reason to doubt Iran when it simultaneously emboldens these forces and makes threats, such as when the deputy commander of the IRGC warned Israel in 2018, “Listen! Any war that occurs will result in your annihilation.”26
UNLIKE IN China, where the ideology of “communism light” and the narrative of national rejuvenation are meant to preserve the party, the Iranian state exists to spread its ideology. The leaders of the Quds Force, the element of the IRGC that directs unconventional warfare and intelligence activities, believe they are protecting the “purity of the revolution.” After suffering more than a million casualties and losing nearly $645 billion during the Iran-Iraq War, those leaders committed to extraterritorial operations under the theory that the best defense was a good offense.27 The IRGC oriented its “forward defense” strategy on two principal enemies: Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Israel has responded much more forcefully to Iran’s threats than have Western nations. In 2019, as Iran attempted to complete its Levantine land bridge across Iraq and Syria and place a proxy army on the border of Israel, IDF strikes targeted nodes in the Iranian network in Syria, Lebanon, and reportedly even Iraq. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted that this offense is only the beginning, stating that “Iran has no immunity, anywhere.”28
Obstacles may remain insurmountable, but mediation between Israel and the Palestinians as well as between Israel and its neighbors would diminish Iran’s ability to portray itself as a patron of the Palestinians as it pursues its objective of destroying Israel. Many factors concerning the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians depend on the Palestinian people, such as whether an alternative to Hamas will develop in the Gaza Strip or if the Palestinian Authority will evolve in a way that produces not only a renewed desire to negotiate final status, but also the ability to enforce an agreement. Other factors depend on the Israeli people, including whether the highly personalized Israeli political landscape allows the sincere pursuit and eventual approval of an agreement. Progress also depends on the United States’ ability to pressure Israel and the Palestinian Authority or mediate between the two, an ability dependent on whether both sides view the United States as an honest broker.
ALTHOUGH SOME analysts have described the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran as a cold war, it is actually more dangerous and destructive than a cold war because the escalating political and religious struggle drives the cycle of sectarian violence across the region. In 1987, the threat of the Iranian Revolution and its ideology to the Saudi royal family struck home during the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are expected to make at least once during their lifetime. Iranian Shiite pilgrims gathered for a political demonstration, chanting “Death to America! Death to the Soviet Union! Death to Israel!” Subsequent clashes with Saudi riot police left four hundred dead.29 In response, Khomeini asserted that “these vile and ungodly Wahhabis, are like daggers which have always pierced the heart of the Muslims from the back.” In 1991, the two countries reinstated diplomatic relations, but efforts to improve the relationship failed. Tensions grew as Saudi Arabia became concerned over Iranian influence in Iraq and Yemen, and relations were again suspended in 2016, when Iranians stormed the Saudi embassy in Tehran following the execution of Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr in Riyadh on terrorism charges.30 Efforts to mediate between Saudi Arabia and Iran started again in early 2020. Although prospects are dim, the alternative is the grim continuation of sectarian violence.31
There are continuities across the four-decade-long conflict, but new technologies are generating new dangers. For example, the 2019 attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure was reminiscent of the 1987 failed commando attack on Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti oil fields using a flotilla of fast boats, an attack interdicted by American helicopters. The 2019 attack was successful as it employed armed drones in an unprecedented swarm attack. Another successful attack, in 2012, was carried out through cyberspace as Iranian hackers shut down thirty thousand computers and ten thousand servers belonging to Saudi Aramco, causing system damage that took five months to repair.32 Iranian development of ballistic missiles, a nuclear program, and chemical weapons would be unacceptable to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and other nations. Thus, a preventive war to deny Iran these destructive capabilities is a growing possibility, and given its potential to escalate into a devastating conflict, reducing Saudi Arabian and Iranian tensions is vital.
The United States and others should not take sides in the Shia-Sunni competition but can encourage authorities within those sects to isolate extremists who advocate for violence and fuel sectarian civil war. Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar must stop private and government support for jihadists, as those organizations allow Iran to claim that its support for the Houthis in Yemen, various militias in Iraq, and the proxy army fighting in Syria is a legitimate counterterrorism effort rather than an attempt to extend Iranian influence across the region. Enduring political accommodations among Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish populations in Syria and Iraq and between the Zaidi Shiites and Sunnis in Yemen are important steps toward curbing Iranian designs on the region.
Exposing Iran’s support for jihadist terrorist organizations hostile to both Shiism and its own people might place pressure on the Supreme Leader to end his cynical efforts to keep the Arab world perpetually weak. Iran, for example, has harbored Al-Qaeda leaders and eased the movement of Sunni jihadist terrorists. In a letter found in Osama bin Laden’s compound, a senior Al-Qaeda official reported in 2007 that Iran had “offered to some of Saudi brothers . . . to support them with money and arms and everything they need, and offered them training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in return for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.” Later that year, bin Laden chastised Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, for threatening Iran: “For as you are aware, Iran is our main artery for funds, personnel, and communication, as well as the matter of hostages.”33 All should condemn jihadist terrorist attacks against Iran such as the 2010 suicide attack on the Chabahar mosque that killed thirty-nine Iranians, the 2017 killings of twelve at the Iranian Consultative Assembly (parliament) and Khomeini’s tomb, and the 2018 murder of twenty-five Iranians at a military parade in Ahvaz. But it is also important to point out that, like Pakistan, Iran is vulnerable to those attacks because the regime’s reliance on religious oppression drives sectarian violence within the country.
Pakistan provides a stark warning. Iran could become, like Pakistan today, a nuclear armed state in which terrorists already enjoy a support base. The greatest threat to humanity in the coming decades may lie at the nexus between terrorists and the most destructive weapons on earth.
THAT IS why blocking Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon should remain a top priority. Aside from the potential transfer of such weapons to terrorists, it is also likely that Saudi Arabia and other nations will conclude that they, too, need nuclear weapons to deter Iran. The breakdown of nonproliferation in the Middle East would increase the potential for apocalyptic war in a region already enmeshed in persistent political and religious conflict. Iran’s leaders’ messianic ideology and their cult of martyrdom raise doubts about the ability to effectively deter a nuclear-armed Iran, as they may be willing to risk massive casualties among their own people. The billboards that Iranian teenagers walked by as they went to their deaths during the Iran-Iraq War stated tellingly, “The sword does not bring victory; it is the blood that brings it.”34
The JCPOA could not address the underlying problem: the Iranian regime’s hostility to the United States, Israel, the Arab monarchies, and the West. The agreement actually allowed Iran to have it both ways. The regime benefited economically and used those resources to intensify its proxy war. It is past time to force Iran’s leaders to choose between economic ruin and isolation or an agreement that combines a peace treaty to end its proxy wars and strong verification of promises not to pursue nuclear weapons, missiles, or other weapons of mass destruction.35
Combined with the effect of sanctions, it was the credible threat of a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program that moved Iran to enter multiple rounds of nuclear negotiations between 2006 and 2015.36 But after the U.S. departure from the JCPOA, an Iranian government dominated by the revolutionaries is unlikely to enter another agreement in the near future. As the United States and others attempt to influence a shift in the nature of the Iranian regime, it would be prudent to implement all available measures to delay and disrupt its program. Integrated intelligence, law enforcement, and cyber efforts should have support across the political spectrum as they did after President George W. Bush briefed President-elect Barack Obama about the range of U.S. efforts against Iran’s nuclear program, telling him, “We want you to succeed.”37
As pressure on Iran mounts, the United States and other nations must be prepared for escalation. Past patterns of escalation are instructive. In June 2010, a number of computer viruses, including a particularly elegant cyber malware called Stuxnet wrecked approximately one third of the centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility. Cybersecurity experts judge the virus to have been the creation of Israeli and U.S. scientists.38 Then, in November 2011, a large explosion occurred during an Iranian missile test, killing seventeen members of the Revolutionary Guard, including Maj. Gen. Hassan Moghaddam, director of Iran’s missile program. As Israel prepared for military strikes against Iranian nuclear and missile facilities, Israeli leaders appear to have expanded their efforts through clandestine attacks. Between 2010 and 2012, five Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated. Motorcyclists pulled up next to their cars and attached “sticky bombs” to their car doors before speeding away.39 Iran then sought retribution with multiple assassination attempts, including the brazen 2011 plot against the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, at Washington’s Café Milano. Contingency plans should identify the range of potential Iranian escalations and identify the actions that could be taken now to prevent them or mitigate their effects.
IN THE fall of 2017, I asked our NSC staff to coordinate across the government to develop such contingency plans. As in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the future course of events in Iran’s proxy wars depends on continuous interaction with a determined adversary. U.S. strategy toward Iran should be flexible and attempt to anticipate Iranian reactions and initiatives. Some potential Iranian actions are not difficult to predict, as we have seen most of it before across the four-decade-long proxy war: mining of the Persian Gulf and the Bab-el-Mandeb; shore-to-ship missiles fired at U.S. or other nations’ naval or commercial vessels; rockets fired into Arab partner nations from Yemen or into Israel from southern Lebanon or Gaza; assassinations, kidnappings, and hostage taking; attacks on U.S. forces in the region; bombings of U.S. military facilities; attacks on Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure. Even the relatively new options available to Iran, such as drone strikes and cyber attacks, are somewhat predictable. It would have been negligent not to prepare for these potential actions. With time to think, it is possible to understand better and mitigate risk as well as identify and take advantage of opportunities. Importantly, it is also possible to work with partners to craft multinational responses to Iranian aggression.
In 2020 it was clear that Supreme Leader Khamenei, after realizing that the regime could no longer enjoy the benefits of foreign investment and international trade while continuing wars of terror and subversion, chose to intensify Iran’s proxy wars and violate portions of the JCPOA in an effort to extort concessions. Given the regime’s behavior over the last forty years, the choice should not have been surprising. The revolutionaries’ pride and resentment, sustained by their ideological cocktail of Marxism and Shia millenarianism, made concessions impossible. Due to the combination of sanctions, falling oil exports and prices, and the regime’s corrupt practices, the economic pressure was too severe to wait out Donald Trump.
Although the Supreme Leader’s and the IRGC’s escalating attacks at the end of 2019 were predictable, the U.S. killing of Soleimani and Muhandis must have surprised Iranian leaders. As the regime encouraged large-scale protests in Iraq and Iran and whipped up anti-U.S. sentiment, it was also predictable that Iran would have to respond. Khamenei vowed to exact “severe revenge.” On January 7, the IRGC fired sixteen ballistic missiles at two Iraqi bases hosting U.S. forces.40 There were no fatalities, although soldiers suffered brain injuries in the attack.
The reaction among U.S. allies on the death of Soleimani and Muhandis was mixed. Some called the strike an escalation, but those comments did not account for the forty-year-long proxy war that Iran had waged against the United States or give due consideration to Iran’s escalation of that war on its own terms without fear of significant retribution. Soleimani was not only a purveyor of death and suffering outside Iran’s borders, but also a scourge on the Iranian people. Under his leadership, the Quds Force squandered Iran’s wealth while earning the country’s status as a pariah terrorist sponsor that deserves isolation and sanction. Less than two months before Soleimani’s death, the deadliest protests since the 1979 revolution spread to twenty-nine of the thirty-one Iranian provinces. Protesters shouted, “Death to Khamenei” and “Death to the dictator” as they ransacked state-run banks owned by corrupt leaders. The regime unleashed the state security forces on its own citizens. It is estimated that more than three hundred people were killed, two thousand wounded, and seven thousand arrested.41 It is likely that Khamenei hoped that Soleimani’s killing might divert the people’s anger away from him and the corrupt order. It was not to be.
Public anger toward the regime erupted again just eight days after Soleimani’s death, over the Iranian military’s shooting down of a commercial airliner with 176 people on board. “They tell us the lie that it is America, but our enemy is right here,” a crowd shouted as protesters referred to the IRGC as akin to ISIS.42 It is possible financial ruin and calls for an end to the regime could chasten Iranian leaders and make them reluctant to intensify proxy attacks or resume their nuclear weapons programs. It is more likely that they will order a continuation of their proxy wars. Iran’s leaders will almost certainly continue to use external conflict as a way to divert the public’s anger away from them . . . and toward “Great Satan” and the “Little Satan.”
AN INCREASINGLY desperate regime could use combinations of old tactics and new capabilities to escalate conflict. The regime could decide to inflict mass casualties with chemical agents or a dirty bomb, which combines explosives with radiological materials. The IRGC would no doubt attempt to conduct those attacks through proxies, but everyone would know the return address. What seems even more likely, however, is that Iran would find ways to attack U.S. and European interests beyond the Middle East, including cyber attacks against critical infrastructure.
And those cyber attacks could be larger in scope and more effective than in the past. In 2012, the same year malware attacks hit Saudi Aramco, Iranian hackers targeted U.S. financial institutions with 176 days of distributed denial-of-service attacks similar to those that Russia used to attack Estonia’s system in 2007. Targeted banks were temporarily paralyzed. In 2013, in what was likely a rehearsal for cyber attacks on U.S. infrastructure, Iranian hackers broke into the control system of the Bowman Avenue Dam, in Rye Brook, New York.43 Cyber attacks will become more likely if Iran’s revolutionaries conclude that they have little to lose.
A conflict initiated by an Iranian cyber attack would likely continue after U.S., Saudi Arabian, Israeli, or multinational retaliation. Iran could escalate further with rockets and missiles from proxy forces or from its own territory. Iran is increasing its ability to strike targets in Israel, the Gulf states, and the waterways of the Persian Gulf and Bab-el-Mandeb with precision rockets and missiles. Therefore, the deployment of additional integrated missile defenses, air defense, surveillance, and strike-and-counter drone capabilities to prevent, defend against, or respond to an Iranian attack is prudent. As would be the removal of U.S. forces in the region that are vulnerable to attack and are not contributing materially to important missions. The 1983 bombings of French paratroopers and U.S. Marines in Lebanon and the 1996 bombing of mainly U.S. Airmen in Saudi Arabia should serve as warnings.
Still, despite the best efforts to anticipate Iranian actions and reactions, a conflict could easily produce unintended consequences on both sides. Consider how Iranian riots in Mecca during the 1987 Hajj led to military clashes that involved Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United States, resulting in the deaths of innocent civilians as well as combatants. Mohsen Rezaei, the head of the Revolutionary Guard, responded to the riots and the Saudi response by ordering a commando attack on Saudi Arabian oil fields. Since the Kuwaiti royal family had asked the United States to protect Gulf shipping from Iranian interdiction as the Iran-Iraq War raged on Kuwait’s doorstep, American helicopters were in place patrolling the Gulf. Those helicopters destroyed IRGC Navy boats, forcing the rest of the attackers to withdraw. Chastened by the failure, the Revolutionary Guard next struck two oil tankers near a dock outside Kuwait City with Chinese-made Silkworm missiles. One was a reflagged U.S. vessel; seventeen crewmen and the American captain were injured. The U.S. Navy responded by shelling two Revolutionary Guard bases located on oil platforms that had been used to stage attacks on shipping. In a reprisal attack four months later, the IRGC Navy laid mines, and the frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts struck one; it blew a hole in its hull, injuring ten sailors. The U.S. responded with attacks on two Iranian frigates and Revolutionary Guard bases. Iranian attacks on neutral ships dropped, but tensions remained high. On July 3, 1988, USS Vincennes, while engaged with Iranian boats, mistook Iran Air Flight 655 for an Iranian F-14 and shot it down over the Strait of Hormuz, killing the 290 innocent passengers and crew on board, including 66 children. The United States did not admit fault, and President Reagan’s lamentable decision to award the captain of the Vincennes with a medal deepened the legacy of mutual distrust and enmity between the United States and the Iranian regime.44 The series of events demonstrated how interaction between Iran and the objects of its proxy wars can lead to escalation and unintended, tragic consequences.
THE IRGC and mullahs in Tehran are in a weakened position. The country’s infrastructure is deteriorating. The corruption of the bonyads and the IRGC-controlled companies are a further drain on the economy. Iranians with the means and opportunity are leaving; the country is experiencing a massive brain drain. Approximately 150,000 educated Iranians emigrate every year, costing the country up to $150 billion annually. Pressure on the regime to focus on nation building at home instead of destruction abroad may mount, as it did during the widespread demonstrations of 2018, 2019, and early 2020. It was not an unprecedented reaction to the diversion of resources to the military. During the oil boom of 1973–74, vast expenditures on military hardware instead of investments in industry, agriculture, and education led to resentment of the Shah’s military establishment.45
Revolution in Iran can be sudden and violent. The Iranian regime today has created conditions that are analogous to 1979. The Shah fell, in part, because the economy was collapsing, corruption was rife, military spending was excessive, and efforts to develop political alternatives to his rule were stifled. The Shah thought he had escaped historical dangers of porous borders, hostile neighbors, and internal divisions. He had not. There are earlier historical precedents for the regime’s problems. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the rulers of the declining Safavid dynasty governed their empire through a system that balanced theirs and their military’s power against that of the clergy. The clergy sometimes shifted its allegiance between the regime and the merchant class. Today, the Supreme Leader finds himself in a position redolent of that of his monarchical predecessors. As the economy worsens, clerics and Iranian citizens increase their criticisms; Khamenei has responded by tightening his grip on Shiism’s holy city of Qom, which, in turn, strengthens the clerics of its Iraqi competitor Najaf, who adhere to the quietist tradition and oppose the rule of the jurisprudent, which underpins Khamenei’s power. Khamenei has to prevent internal opposition, defend against those he has provoked, and continue the pursuit of his messianic vision to export the revolution. Paradoxically, he and his fellow revolutionaries may have created political, economic, social, and military conditions similar to those that led to the demise of both the government they overthrew and the empire they want desperately to restore.
The tension between religious tradition and secular modernity is also not new. The Shah’s suppression of the Shia ulema (scholars of Islamic sacred law and theology) contributed to his fall. The revolutionaries’ brutal repression of republicans who prefer secular representative government to theocratic authoritarianism may also generate growing internal opposition. The Guardian Council’s denial of approximately seven thousand candidates for parliamentary elections in 2020 made clear that the revolutionaries remained unwilling to grant political space to the reformers. The Shah was unable to reconcile tensions between the traditional and the modern, the religious and the secular, the rural and the urban. The Supreme Leader faces the same dilemma.
The Iranian people may tire of and reject the rule of jurisprudence. The concept is not inherent to Iranian culture. There are signs that Shia clerics of the quietist tradition in the Iraqi city of Najaf and the Iranian city of Qom are increasingly critical of clerical rule, and those criticisms are inspiring others. As Shiism’s preeminent Marja’, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, entered his ninth decade and Ayatollah Khamenei was well into his eighth, it was not clear how their successors might influence clerical rule in Iran.
It is possible that the Iranian regime can evolve such that it ceases its permanent hostility to the United States, Israel, its Arab neighbors, and the West. Although, since 1979, the Iranian regime has proven consistently hostile and the revolutionaries are ascendant, the Iranian regime is not a monolith. Also, the IRGC and the Iranian regime are particularly vulnerable to a concerted multinational effort to force them to choose between continuing their murderous proxy wars or behaving like a responsible nation. The United States and other nations can encourage them to choose the latter if we implement a long-term strategy to defend against the Iranian regime’s aggression, and force Iranian leaders to make a choice.