By Ray Takeyh
Monday, December 26, 2016
As the Obama presidency fades from the scene, its most
consequential and catastrophic legacy in foreign affairs is its Iran policy.
Iran’s clerical leaders today possess a nuclear infrastructure that is
gradually expanding and is blessed by the international community. For the
first time in its modern history, Tehran is in a commanding position from the
Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Iran’s leaders continue to castigate the
United States from their platforms while their Revolutionary Guards taunt the
American armada patrolling international waters. The incoming Trump
administration should not just tinker with this legacy but cast it aside
altogether.
President Barack Obama was the architect of his own Iran
strategy, and brought to it his own peculiar concerns. For Obama, the success
of the policy was measured not by the traditional benchmark of whether it
arrested Iran’s ambitions, but by the extent to which it propitiated a nation
he thought had been abused for too long by the United States. His historical
illiteracy was nowhere more on display than in Iran, as he reduced complex
events to bumper-sticker slogans: America had overthrown a legitimately elected
government of Iran in 1953 and then buttressed a cruel despot for nearly three
decades. The clerical leaders are not hardened anti-Western ideologues but mere
nationalists whose legitimate prerogatives have been trampled upon by arrogant
Americans. And the Islamic Republic’s imperial surge is a legitimate expression
of a regional stakeholder. If a little history is a dangerous thing, in the hands
of Obama it was absolutely toxic. The sum total of his achievements was the
worst nuclear agreement in the history of U.S. arms-control diplomacy and an
emboldened Iran rampaging across the Middle East.
The starting point of any sensible Iran policy will be to
revisit key aspects of the Iran deal, which is formally known as the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The agreement’s rapidly expiring sunset
clauses ensure that Iran will soon embark on developing advanced centrifuges
that operate efficiently at high velocity. Its research-and-development
concessions are already allowing Iran to modernize its nuclear infrastructure.
And its economic concessions have damaged the once-formidable sanctions
architecture that effectively hemmed in the mullahs’ ambitions. All these core
aspects of the accord must be reconsidered.
Although the proponents of the agreement insist that its
international support makes it inviolable, it is important to note that the
JCPOA was rejected by the House of Representatives and that 58 senators went on
the record opposing it. An agreement rejected by a majority of legislators has
no credibility. The sovereignty of the U.S. Congress outweighs any
international body’s embrace of an agreement damaging to American national interests.
Should the Trump team wish to revisit or even abrogate the JCPOA, they have
sufficient domestic political authority to justify their moves.
The question then becomes: To what type of civilian
nuclear program is Iran entitled? At the moment, Iran is on the path of not
just enriching uranium domestically but industrializing that capacity once the
JCPOA’s restrictions expire. The United States should set aside the agreement’s
sunset clauses and insist that Iran is entitled only to a modest and largely
symbolic program. Whatever uranium Iran enriches must be permanently shipped
abroad for processing into fuel rods that are difficult to convert for military
purposes. And Iran may never have advanced centrifuges but must limit itself to
small cascades of primitive machines. An oil-rich Iran does not require an
elaborate nuclear network operating thousands of advanced centrifuges while
accumulating tons of enriched uranium.
In attempting to persuade the Europeans to join the
United States in strengthening the JCPOA, the new administration has some
important cards to play. President Donald Trump will have a period of honeymoon
in the alliance: The European leaders will initially be eager to get along with
him. All these states have higher priorities than a flawed arms-control
agreement with an unsavory theocracy. If setting a new Iran policy is one of
the most important issues to the new president, they will be inclined to help.
Given Trump’s nascent relationship with Vladimir Putin, Russia might be more forthcoming
on this issue than it has been. And should the Russians and the Europeans prove
receptive, China will not wish to remain the sole and lonely obstacle to
sensible revisions. Still, the manner in which the case is presented will be
crucial.
In challenging some of the most problematic aspects of
the agreement, the U.S. will merely be asking its partners in the so-called 5+1
(the U.S. plus Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China) to return to the
principles that they accepted up to 2013. It was the official 5+1 position
until then that Iran would be entitled only to a small cascade of primitive
centrifuge machines and that it could expand its program only after it
satisfied the international community that the program was strictly for
peaceful purposes. The reelected Obama administration, eager for an agreement
and a legacy, cajoled other members of the coalition to abandon these positions
for the sake of a deal; the new Trump administration would be asking the
alliance to return to positions that it very recently considered prudent.
***
But revising the JCPOA should not be the sole objective
of a revamped Iran policy. During both the Obama and George W. Bush
administrations, the United States did not have an actual Iran policy, but
rather only a series of arms-control formulations. The most sensible
contribution the Trump administration can make to regional stability is to
conceive a strategy that stands up to Iran in the region and puts its domestic
regime under stress. The “supreme leader,” Ali Khamenei, is presiding over a
state with immense vulnerabilities, and the task of U.S. policy is to exploit
all of them.
As it begins its transition to power, the Trump team
should be wary of the accumulated wisdom it is bound to receive from the
diplomatic corps and the intelligence community. In their briefings, the
professional bureaucracy will insist that the mullahs are firmly in control of
their state and that the regime’s hold on power is absolute and immutable. The
professionals will likely warn that any attempts to forcefully confront Iran
will only empower the so-called hard-liners. Such anachronistic postulations
must be set aside if America is to have a successful Iran policy.
In the summer of 2009, the presidential election that
returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power by rigging the vote presented the
theocratic state with the most consequential crisis of its lifetime. The Green
Movement that exploded on the scene was a coalition of disenchanted clerics,
restive youth, disenfranchised women, and impoverished elements of the middle
class. The regime managed to regain control of the streets through brute
violence against its own citizens, show trials in which regime loyalists
confessed to fantastic crimes, and continued repression. However, the essential
link between the state and society was severed during that summer’s riots. The
Islamic Republic was never a typical totalitarian state, as its electoral
procedures and elected institutions provided the public with at least
impressions of democratic representation. That republican element of the regime
provided it with a veneer of legitimacy — and in 2009, that legitimacy
vanished. The clerical regime lingers on, but a state that relies on a terror
apparatus cannot forever stifle the forces of change.
Trump’s task is similar to the one Ronald Reagan faced
with the Soviet Union: not just renegotiating a better arms-control agreement
but devising a comprehensive policy that undermines the already wobbly
foundation of the regime. In this regard, there is nothing as powerful as the
presidential bully pulpit. Reagan’s denunciations of Communist rule did much to
galvanize the opposition and undermine the Soviet empire. Dissidents in jail
and others laboring under the Soviet system took heart from an American
president who championed their cause. Trump should study Reagan’s old speeches
and emulate his powerful rhetoric.
As it did with Solidarity in Poland, the United States
should find a way of establishing ties with forces of opposition within Iran.
Given the Islamic Republic’s cruelty and corruption, the opposition spans the
entire social spectrum. The Iranians have given up not just on the Islamic
Republic, but even on religious observance, as mosques go empty during most
Shiite commemorations. Three decades of theocratic rule has transformed Iran into
one of the most secular nations in the world. The middle class and the working
poor are equally hard pressed by the regime’s incompetence and corruption. Even
the senior ayatollahs are beginning to realize the toll that has been taken on
Shia Islam by its entanglement with politics. America has ready allies in Iran
and must make an effort to empower those who share its values.
Economic sanctions are a critical aspect of any policy of
pressuring the Islamic Republic. The experience of the past few years has shown
that the United States has a real capacity to shrink Iran’s economy and bring
it to the brink of collapse. It was this leverage that the Obama administration
forfeited for the sake of a deficient arms-control accord. And it is this
leverage that must be reestablished and redeployed. Instead of imploring
Europeans to invest in Iran, as John Kerry is doing, we must return to the days
of warning off commerce and segregating Iran from global financial
institutions. Designating the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization
and reimposing financial sanctions could go a long way toward crippling Iran’s
economy. Once deprived of money, the mullahs will find it difficult to fund the
patronage networks that are essential to their rule and their imperial
ventures. One of the best ways of threatening the theocracy is through the
power of the purse.
***
Pushing back on Iran in the Middle East is the order of
the day in Washington, and shrinking the Islamic Republic’s imperial frontiers
should be an important priority of the incoming Trump administration. An
essential insight of any such policy is to dispense with the false notion that
Iran and America have a common enemy in the Islamic State. Such pretenses
ignore the fact that Sunni radicalism is the necessary by-product of Iran’s
Shiite chauvinism. Destroying the Islamic State requires diminishing the tides
of Sunni militancy, which in turn necessitates tempering Iran’s regional
ambitions.
The best arena in which to achieve this objective is
Iran’s periphery in the Persian Gulf region. The Gulf sheikdoms, led by Saudi
Arabia, are already locked into a region-wide rivalry with Iran. The Sunni
states have taken it upon themselves to contest Iran’s gains in the Gulf and
the Levant. Washington should not only buttress these efforts but press all
Arab states to embark on a serious attempt to lessen their commercial and
diplomatic ties to Tehran. The price of American guardianship is for Sunni Arab
states to do their part in resisting the rising Shiite power of Iran.
Even in a disorderly Middle East, there are opportunities
to forge new constructive alliances. The enmity that Saudi Arabia and Israel
share toward Iran should be the basis for bringing these two countries closer
together. Instead of lecturing the Saudis to share the Middle East with Iran
and hectoring Israelis about settlements, as the Obama White House has done,
the Trump administration should focus on imaginative ways of institutionalizing
the nascent cooperation that is already taking place between Riyadh and
Jerusalem. The U.S. should press both countries to move beyond intelligence
sharing and perhaps forge complementary trade ties, with Saudi oil being
exchanged for Israel’s technological products. History rarely offers
opportunities to realign the politics of the Middle East; a truculent Iran has
presented this chance.
Although today Iraq may seem like a protectorate of Iran,
this is a predicament that most Iraqi leaders want to escape. Iraq was once the
seat of Arab civilization and the center of the region’s politics. The Shiite
leaders in Iraq take Iranian advice and money for the simple reason that they
are locked out of Sunni Arab councils and abandoned by the American superpower.
Iraqis understand that Iran has exercised a pernicious influence in their
country, further accentuating its sectarian divides as a means of ensuring
Iranian influence. Iraq cannot be whole and free so long as Iran interferes in
its affairs. A commitment by the United States to once more rehabilitate the
Iraqi army and bureaucracy can go a long way toward diminishing their ties to
Tehran. No Iraqi Arab wants to be subordinate to imperious Shiite Persians.
Once Iraq frees itself of Iranian dominance, it may yet find a path back to the
Arab world and once more serve as a barrier to Iranian power.
The tragedy of Syria is that, as the Obama administration
stood aloof and preoccupied itself with useless international summits, Iran and
Russia possibly succeeded in saving the Assad dynasty. The Syrian army,
buttressed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah terrorists, and Russian
airpower, is poised to control most of the population centers. This hardly ends
the civil war, but the attempt to unseat Iran’s client in Damascus will take
considerable effort and commitment by the United States and its Sunni allies.
For both humanitarian and strategic reasons, the Trump administration should
embrace this task. Pushing back on Iran means harassing its Syrian proxy. At
the very least, as the opposition strengthens, Iran will have to face the
dilemma of sinking more resources and men into a quagmire or cutting its
losses, as the Soviet Union was forced to do in Afghanistan.
Since the inception of the Islamic Republic, Westerners
enchanted by the clerics and their mysterious ways have insisted that their
regime is essentially a pragmatic one. If only America set aside its animosity,
it could forge a new relationship with the much misunderstood theocracy. But in
reality it is a revolutionary regime that sees a resumed relationship with
America as an existential threat. The clerical oligarchs need an American enemy
to justify their repression and their costly and corrupt rule. They know that
between our two nations there can never be permanent peace. And this is the
most important lesson for the incoming president to learn.
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