There is no reason to believe that Iran’s development of a nuclear capability would mean the start of Armageddon. Nevertheless, it would be a problem for the United States and a threat to the Middle East. It would be a situation best avoided whether Tehran is content to stop with a breakout capacity or seeks a full-blown arsenal. For that reason, it’s important now to turn to the options left to the United States and our allies to try to prevent that unhappy situation and try to assess whether the costs of doing so outweigh the risks of not doing so.
Even at this late stage, it is worth considering policies that seem to hold some prospect of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. There are four worth exploring: a revised version of the current carrot-and-stick strategy (referred to by the Obama administration as its “Dual Track” policy); a plan for regime change to try to topple the current ruling leadership before it acquires a nuclear capability; an Israeli military strike on key Iranian nuclear facilities; or an American military operation to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
It is important to recognize that the first three proposed courses of actions are not “final” or “complete” options. Their ultimate success or failure lies outside American control. For these three policies, ultimate success would only be possible if the Iranian government (even a new Iranian government, in the case of the regime change scenario) agreed to end its pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability. In every case, the Iranians might simply soldier on toward a nuclear weapon or a narrow breakout window.
Only the fourth course, an American military campaign, constitutes a final option because even if the United States started with limited measures, it could escalate to a full-scale invasion and occupation of Iran. In that case, whatever else it might accomplish and might cost, Iran’s nuclear ambitions would end for the foreseeable future, just as our invasion of Iraq ended Saddam’s dream of a nuclear arsenal once and for all, even if at a much higher price than anyone signed up to pay. In that sense, only an American invasion of Iran constitutes a true alternative to containment. The other three are gambits that might succeed in accomplishing our goal, but also carry the risk of failure. And if they fail, they will still leave the United States with the choice between war and containment.
None of these four policy options are dumb ideas. None of them is craven. All have merits and advantages. All have been proposed and advanced by smart, experienced, patriotic, and insightful men and women. Ultimately, however, I fear that none of them will succeed at an acceptable cost. Two of them—a revised Dual Track approach and some aspects of regime change—have enough promise to try. They are both worth trying regardless of their likelihood. The other two possible options—an Israeli strike or an American military effort—I see as entailing more risks and costs than the likelihood of success merits. The rest of this part of the book will examine each of these four options, before turning to a fuller discussion of what the alternative to prevention, containment, would entail.
When it comes to choosing among our options toward Iran, one of the most important and least acknowledged factors to understand is that where you start shapes where you end up, and where you are willing to end up shapes both how far you are willing to go and, to a great extent, where you start. This is the case for two reasons. First, everyone must make certain assumptions to fill in the many gaps in our knowledge of Iran. These assumptions will determine whether you prefer the costs and risks of a war with Iran or the costs and risks of containing a nuclear Iran if all else fails. Second, what you are ultimately willing to accept, in terms of war or containment, also goes a long way to determining how far you are willing to go in exploring alternatives to war as a means of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability.
To understand these phenomena a bit better, it seems best to start with the second point, that when all else fails, whether you prefer containment or war shapes what you are willing to do and willing to try before the United States gets to that point.
Think of it this way. If you are ultimately willing to live with a nuclear Iran, believing it possible to do so and that the costs and risks of containment are “better” than the costs and risks of a war with Iran, why not make the effort to try to convince the Iranians to give up their nuclear program peacefully? The worst that could happen would be that Iran uses the negotiations as a ploy to buy time to complete their work on nuclear weapons. However, if you are willing to contain a nuclear Iran, that end-state is something that you are already willing to accept. It may not be an ideal outcome, but it is not unacceptable to those willing to opt for containment. On the other hand, if the carrot-and-stick approach works—if it convinces the Iranians to slow down their program, stick with a breakout capability, or accept more intrusive inspections (or a variety of other limits), any and all of this would create a situation better than the status quo. And since those willing to contain a nuclear Iran must also ultimately be ready to accept the status quo, any improvement is a victory. Moreover, if the carrot-and-stick approach could convince Iran to give up its nuclear program altogether, then that is the jackpot, and there is no reason not to give that option every chance to succeed since you are already willing to accept even the worst-case scenario if it fails.
The same logic largely holds for regime change. If you are willing to contain Iran, even a nuclear Iran, and prefer that course to a war with Iran, why not try regime change? The time it could take to work or prove that it has failed (one of the greatest problems with this option) is irrelevant. Since you were always willing to contain even a nuclear Iran, if Iran acquired a nuclear capability before regime change worked or demonstrated that it had failed, it doesn’t matter. Of course, there are still reasons why it would be best to topple the regime before it crossed the nuclear threshold, such as avoiding the messy question of what happens to any nuclear weapons in the midst of a revolution or palace coup and preventing the current regime from gaining any value from its nuclear arsenal before it is overthrown. However, a willingness to contain this regime with nuclear weapons presupposes a willingness to take the actions necessary to prevent it from taking advantage of them for as long as necessary. Similarly, the containment scenario assumes that there will be a political transition in Iran at some point (and probably a messy one), and therefore the problems of such a transition cannot be reasons to eschew regime change.
The exact opposite is the case if you are unwilling to contain a nuclear Iran and are willing to go to war to prevent it. If that is the case, you will want to ensure a successful military campaign to prevent Iran from acquiring either a nuclear arsenal or the ability to field one. Once Iran has a nuclear weapon, it is unimaginable that the United States, let alone Israel, would attack it, except in dire circumstances. Consequently, the United States could not afford to wait too long to attack, lest Iran exercise its breakout option.
Thus, if you prefer war to containment when all else fails, you can try both the carrot-and-stick and regime change policies for a little while, but not for very long. Not so long that Iran may have a narrow enough breakout window to field a weapon before the United States can do whatever is necessary to end the program. The amount of time the United States would need for a successful military campaign is variable, however, as it rests on whether we can achieve our objectives with only an air campaign or if it becomes necessary to follow up with a ground invasion.
Likewise, if war is the preferred ultima ratio, the United States will need a good casus belli to generate as much domestic political and international support for going to war with Iran as possible and avoid repeating our post-Iraq-invasion isolation. The most obvious way to do both would be to put a good deal on the table for Iran as an ultimatum: Either Tehran accepts the offer or—instead of imposing still more sanctions—the United States will attack.1 And the ultimatum would need a time limit to prevent Iran from dithering, giving half answers, accepting then rejecting the deal, accepting parts of it, or anything else short of a full “yes.” The worst thing for someone who prefers war to containment is for Iran to be able to drag out negotiations, all the while making progress toward a nuclear bomb. So this too means that those who prefer war can only give a revamped carrot-and-stick a short time to succeed before they have to shift to the military option. Since no one really knows how close Iran is to a breakout capability, for those willing to go to war, how much time they can afford for diplomacy is also unknown.
If you are willing to accept all the costs and risks of a war with Iran, for the same reason, you cannot accept anything except a very good deal with Iran. For those willing to accept war as the last resort, the worst nightmare is a weak or partial agreement that allows the Iranians either to keep a narrow breakout window or to cheat and so narrow the window (or even develop a weapon itself) in secret. If that happens, Iran could surprise the world with a nuclear weapon before the United States could go to war to prevent it. In other words, a bad deal with Iran could leave the United States and its allies with no choice but to contain Iran. If you are willing to accept containment, that’s fine; if you prefer war to containment, it’s a disaster.
GOOD DEALS AND BAD DEALS. The objective of all the alternative policies to force or containment is to convince Iran to agree to a negotiated settlement of the nuclear impasse. As always, no one, probably including most of the Iranian leadership, knows just what the Iranians would be willing to accept in a nuclear deal. However, if we compare Iran’s rhetorical declarations and the West’s demands, it is possible to imagine a deal between the two sides in which Iran gets the multilateral sanctions lifted and what would amount to a rudimentary breakout capability—limited enrichment and possession of LEU that would theoretically enable Tehran to assemble a nuclear weapon in six to twelve months—in return for Iran agreeing to forgo the possibility of achieving a rapid breakout capability and accepting intrusive UN inspections to assure the international community that it is not cheating on the agreement. Such a deal seems to fall into the narrow area of overlap between the two sides’ declared positions.
Whether you are willing to accept war or containment will determine whether you see such a deal as miraculous or disastrous. If you are willing to contain Iran, this deal looks great because almost any agreement that imposes real constraints on the Iranian nuclear program is worthwhile. Right now, Iran is moving smartly down the path toward a nuclear arsenal. It already has acquired the theoretical capacity to develop nuclear weapons, although it would probably require at least a year before it could field one from a decision to do so. With each passing day, the amount of time that Iran would require to build a nuclear weapon diminishes, and at some point in the next few years, Tehran will probably be at a point where it could build a bomb in just a few months from a decision to do so. That is the baseline, the starting point for containment. Consequently, any time that the United States can buy, any limits on the Iranian program, any additional monitoring and inspections, any additional pressure on Iran—any improvement over the status quo—is worth it because it leaves the situation with Iran better off than it otherwise might be. Therefore, any halfway-decent deal produced by the carrot-and-stick approach is going to make containment easier, stronger, and less risky than it would be without such a deal.
From the opposite perspective, if you prefer to go to war, you will likely see this deal as enabling Iran to retain an unacceptable, even if longer-term, breakout capability. The mere fact that a deal had been struck—a deal potentially easy for Iran to honor—would also be dissuasive because it would make it far more difficult to build either domestic or international support for war, since the Iranians will be seen as behaving reasonably, honoring international agreements, and demonstrating the “peaceful” intent of their nuclear ambitions. Such a deal would make it even harder to build support for military action than was the case before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when Saddam’s allies claimed that he was “mostly” complying with the UN resolutions and therefore military action was premature. Moreover, many who favor war with Iran over containment tend to believe that Iran will find ways to cheat on any agreement. For that reason, too, they tend to be willing to accept only deals with Iran that altogether eliminate Iran’s breakout window by prohibiting all enrichment activities. That it seems even less likely that Iran could be convinced to agree to such terms is not meaningful for this group, since they are willing to go to war, and may be looking for the justification to do so.
When it comes to Iran, the discomfiting truth is that we just don’t have the kind of information that we would like to figure out how best to handle the Islamic Republic and its nuclear program. We don’t know what Tehran’s aim is for its nuclear program: whether it is meant to build nuclear weapons, achieve a breakout capability, or even remain peaceful—implausible though that may be. Nor can we be certain how the Iranian regime will behave after they acquire whatever status they seek. Perhaps Professor Waltz was right, and Iran will become more restrained. Perhaps the Iran experts are wrong and the Iranians will prove to be insane millenarians who will launch nuclear weapons at Israel and Saudi Arabia the moment they have them. If either of these extreme visions were accurate, it would argue for extreme approaches to Iran—doing nothing in the case of the former and doing anything to prevent the latter. Moreover, there are vast uncertainties about how others will behave. Will the Saudis, Turks, and Egyptians seek to acquire nuclear arsenals of their own, or can they be dissuaded from doing so? How will Hizballah, Hamas, and other radical, Iranian-backed groups react? What will the Israelis do? And will the interaction of their various actions bolster the security of the region or suck it into even more violent disorder?2
Since we cannot know the answers to any of these huge questions, the best that we can do is make informed guesses about them. However, we need to recognize that the assumptions we make will inevitably dictate the policy (or policies) we prefer, because different policies only make sense based on specific assumptions. This is why the debate over Iran policy is often so vitriolic and unproductive: the various sides see the fundamental issues so differently that it is hard for them to find any common ground. It is challenging to discuss how best to make a policy work when people hold fundamentally opposite views about the basic assumptions underpinning the policy. At best, the debate becomes about the assumptions themselves—which is useful and honest, but ultimately inconclusive since none of us can actually prove which assumptions are correct.
Thus, the more you believe that Iran is likely to use its nuclear weapons unprovoked or to give them to terrorists, the more inclined you should be to use force against Iran. That should be obvious. If you believe that Iran is going to start nuking people, then going to war to prevent Tehran from getting the weapons in the first place is not just the best relative course of action, it is an absolute necessity to save the world from the horrors of nuclear conflict. On the other hand, if you agree with Waltz that a nuclear Iran will probably behave in a more restrained and prudent manner, then you probably see no need to try a revamped carrot-and-stick approach, let alone explore the possibility of accelerating regime change to try to keep the Islamic Republic from acquiring a nuclear capability. In fact, if you think that a nuclear Iran will be more restrained than it currently is, why do anything at all? Pursuing any of the policy options to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability will be costly in myriad ways. If you think it unnecessary because you believe that Iran will be pacified by its acquisition of a nuclear arsenal, why pay the price—any price?
A similarly important and ambiguous set of assumptions concerns how any of these policies would work. The more you believe that inspections in Iran would follow the North Korea model—in which the inspectors were constrained, they saw little, and there was even less desire on the part of the great powers to punish Pyongyang for its transgressions—the less faith you are likely to have in any agreement with Iran. The extent to which you believe that a new inspections regime in Iran could more closely resemble the Iraqi model of intrusive, effective inspections coupled with a willingness on the part of the international community to act against misbehavior, the more likely that you will feel comfortable reaching the kind of deal with the Iranians that they just might be willing to accept.
The best that any of us can do is to simply be explicit about our assumptions and the evidence and methodologies we have used to arrive at them. I have given you my own answers to these questions in the preceding chapters, along with the evidence I have used to reach these conclusions. However, as you read the chapters that follow, you ought to be asking yourself how much you agree with me—and if you don’t, in what ways your own views differ. The more that you disagree with my assumptions, the more you will likely disagree with my policy preferences because, in the case of Iran, it is your assumptions that determine your preferences.
There is one last issue that needs to be addressed before plunging into a discussion of each of the four proposed strategies for preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. That is why there is not a fifth option: pure engagement.3 In Ray Takeyh’s words, a policy of pure engagement rests on the assumption that “Iran’s nuclear ambition stems from a desire to craft a viable deterrence capability against a range of evolving threats, particularly from the United States. Instead of relying on threats of sanctions, a more effective way to convince Iran to suspend the critical components of its nuclear infrastructure is to find ways to diminish its strategic anxieties. Should Washington dispense with its hostilities, assure Iran that its interests will be taken into account as it plots the future of the Persian Gulf, and relax its economic prohibitions, then the case of nuclear proponents within the clerical state would be significantly weakened.”4
Between 2002 and 2009, a number of people, particularly on the left, advocated a policy of pure engagement with Iran—that is, the carrot without any threat of the stick. This group included many of the most accomplished and empathetic scholars of Iran.5 Their arguments were cogent, based on a reasonable interpretation of the evidence and, at that time, mostly untested. If I were writing this book prior to June 2009, I would have included pure engagement as a fifth option. But since then, too much has happened for engagement alone to remain a plausible approach.
The historical record always suggested that a policy of pure engagement was unlikely to succeed. In their compelling synthesis of the theoretical and historical records of engagement as a strategy, Richard Haass and Meghan O’Sullivan concluded that “[e]ngagement works best in pursuit of modest goals and often falters in pursuit of ambitious ones.”6 Changing Tehran’s behavior on an issue of such importance as its nuclear program falls far into the ambitious category, suggesting that engagement alone was not practical. Similarly, Haass and O’Sullivan found that historically, “to be most effective, incentives offered in engagement strategies almost always need to be accompanied by credible penalties.”7 In their words, the “honey” of engagement had to be combined with the “vinegar” of penalties such as sanctions to have a realistic chance of success.8 Indeed, the German scholar Johannes Reissner concluded that Europe’s effort to pursue what in effect amounted to an engagement-only approach to Iran in the 1990s, called the “critical dialogue,” failed because it included no threat of retribution, no stick to accompany the carrot. As he wrote, the case of Europe’s engagement with Iran in the 1990s “argues that sanctions should not be excluded from any engagement strategy, and, if endorsed, their role should be explicitly stated in policy pronouncements.”9
Indeed, these theoretical and historical objections to an engagement-only approach to Iran point to other problems. The fundamental assumption of this approach is that Iran’s objectionable behavior is predicated on its perception of threat from the United States and that if the United States were to take actions that reduced Tehran’s perception of threat, the Iranian leadership would diminish or cease that objectionable behavior. The first part of that sentence—that Iran’s behavior is a defensive reaction to an American threat—is unknowable, and may vary from Iranian to Iranian. Some Iranian leaders, perhaps all, may be motivated by what they see as a defensive stance toward what they see as a pervasive American threat. We don’t know, either for any given individual or for the leadership as a collective.
The second half of that sentence—that the United States can take actions that would reduce Iran’s sense of that threat and that this diplomacy could in turn produce “better” Iranian behavior—is demonstrably false. Since the 1979 revolution, there have been a number of occasions when the United States and its allies either reached out to Iran to improve relations or made little or no effort to harm/threaten Iran, and Iran did not diminish its threatening behavior. In several of those cases, the Iranians acted in a more threatening and aggressive fashion toward the United States and its allies. A quick summary of these instances include:
• 1979: The Carter administration, having reconciled itself to the Iranian Revolution, attempted to develop a nonconfrontational relationship with the new regime. It had not imposed any sanctions on Iran and had given up its flirtation with the idea of supporting a counterrevolution by the Iranian military (which the Iranians did not know about at the time). In response, Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy and Khomeini endorsed this diplomatic outrage, launching the “hostage crisis.”10
• 1982–89: Israel was trying hard to rebuild the close, if clandestine, relationship it had had with Iran under the Shah. It was covertly selling arms to Iran, which Iran desperately needed to fight Iraq at a time when no one else would sell it weapons. Nevertheless, when Israel invaded Lebanon—a move that did not threaten Iran in any way—Tehran responded by dispatching roughly one thousand Revolutionary Guards to the Bekaa Valley to arm, train, advise, and otherwise aid Lebanese forces fighting Israel. Iran would later go further to help organize and mount suicide bomber attacks against Israeli (and later American and French) diplomats and military forces in Lebanon.11 Again, none of these personnel, even the soldiers, posed any kind of threat to Iran itself.
• 2001–2012. From 2001 to 2005, the George W. Bush administration (Bush 43) largely tried to ignore Iran. Although his administration indulged in some unhelpful hostile rhetoric on a few occasions, it had also engaged in tacit cooperation with Iran over Afghanistan. Of greatest importance, the United States had made it clear to Iran that its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were not intended to threaten Iran, and the United States took no actions in either Iraq or Afghanistan that were harmful to Iran. Our toppling of the Taliban and Saddam, and our efforts to build democracies in both nations (which would ensure Shi’a predominance in Iraq), benefited Iran. Iran explicitly assisted U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and implicitly assisted them early on in Iraq. However, in both places Iran later began to support attacks on U.S. troops unprovoked. Especially in Iraq, Iran mounted a vast program of providing weapons, money, training, advice, and even operational planning to help indigenous groups kill American soldiers to try to drive the U.S. military out. This campaign preceded the new U.S. and UN sanctions on Iran related to its nuclear program, which did not begin until 2006. Nor did this campaign abate during the Obama administration’s yearlong effort to engage Iran in 2009, during which time no new sanctions were imposed on Iran.
Clearly it is not American behavior that generates Iran’s objectionable actions. It is either the Iranian leadership’s pathological perceptions of the United States or its own aggressive ambitions, neither of which appears to be affected by less threatening American behavior. There is no reason to believe that unilaterally moderating American actions toward Iran will produce a similar change from Tehran.
Contrary to the central logic of the engagement-only approach, the only times that Iran has signaled a willingness to repair relations with the United States have come when it felt most threatened by American actions.
• In 1995, when the United States was imposing, for the first time, comprehensive economic sanctions on Iran—and would go on to impose the first secondary sanctions on foreign firms doing significant business with the Iranian oil industry—President Rafsanjani signed a deal with the U.S. firm Conoco to develop a pair of Iranian offshore oilfields.12 This bid was important for Rafsanjani (albeit, not necessarily for the rest of the Iranian regime) to improve relations. It came at a moment when the United States was ratcheting up pressure on Iran.13
• In 1997–2000, Iran’s reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, made a sustained effort to begin a real rapprochement with the United States. Ultimately, Khatami failed because Iran’s conservative establishment (led by Ayatollah Khamene’i himself) opposed him. Although Khatami’s election reflected popular Iranian unhappiness with many aspects of the clerical regime’s rule, one aspect of that unhappiness was displeasure with the deepening antagonism between Iran and the United States, which had resulted in comprehensive economic sanctions on Iran by the Clinton administration in 1995–97. This economic displeasure was one reason that Khatami made such a determined effort to repair relations with the United States.14
• Briefly in 2003, the Iranians made a conciliatory gesture to the United States. In May a message was delivered via the Swiss Embassy purporting to be a “road map” of how Iran and the United States might reconcile. Although the provenance and importance of this gesture remain contested, it appears to have been—at the very least—an Iranian gambit to convince the United States not to invade Iran after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. There is no question that the Iranian leadership feared that the United States would attack Iran next, and this anxiety prompted Tehran to agree to the most far-reaching concessions on its nuclear program that it ever made: suspending enrichment and signing the Additional Protocol of the NPT.15 The May 2003 message to the United States was part of that effort, but it may also have been a bid by more moderate elements of the Iranian regime to try to start a wider rapprochement between the two countries (although this is far from proven).16 In the words of the principal Iranian author of this missive, Ambassador to France Sadegh Kharrazi, “In 2003 there was a wall of mistrust between Iran and the U.S. and they could attack us at any moment. Therefore, the government accepted my suggestion and sent a conciliatory letter to the U.S. administration.”17 Likewise, Hamid Reza Taraghi, another important Iranian hardliner, has explained that “[a]fter 9/11 and its consequences, we were very worried and a group of the [Iranian Parliamentary] Deputies met with the Supreme leader and explained the root of their fear. We reached the conclusion that Iran was facing a real threat and we could be occupied as it happened in 1941. . . . We asked the Leader to be more moderate toward the U.S. He accepted our view and through the government and other officials, wisely and successfully managed that dangerous time.”18
In 1995 and again in 1997–2000, the personality and policies of the Iranian presidents also played an important role in their efforts to reach out to the United States. Still, it seems more than coincidental that they made such far-reaching bids at a time when Iran had suddenly come under much greater American pressure. It is not necessarily that threatening American behavior is more likely to produce Iranian concessions, although this claim is consistent with the evidence. It is simply that, as a matter of evidence, Iran did not make its greatest concessions at times when the United States was trying to diminish its pressure and threats on Iran. Quite the contrary.
There are at least four other good reasons to set aside any consideration of pure engagement of Iran without sanctions. First, there is evidence that the sanctions have sparked a debate among the Iranian leadership, with more pragmatic figures arguing for making some concessions in return for a lifting of the sanctions. This debate is what the sanctions were intended to produce, and constitutes some evidence that they are having the desired effect. Second, whether they convince the Iranians to negotiate or not, the sanctions are critical to making clear to Iranians and other would-be proliferators that defying the international community comes at a price. Third, even if the sanctions do not cause Tehran to change its behavior, they are critical as a foundation to contain a nuclear Iran in the future.
The last reason that, wrong or right, it is not worthwhile to consider this option is that the sanctions on Iran are a reality. They are not going to be repealed short of a deal with Iran on its nuclear program. The U.S. Congress, the U.S. president, the European Union, and the UN Security Council will not do so. Period. Even if there were still reason to believe that engagement without sanctions, or penalties of any kind, might work better, it is not realistic to posit that as an option. We might as well argue that the best way to handle Iran’s nuclear program would be to have never assisted in Mosaddeq’s overthrow, but that too is a reality that cannot be undone merely by wishing it were so.