By Reuel Marc Gerecht & Ray Takeyh
Thursday, December 17, 2020
Among Donald Trump’s proudest achievements as president
was his withdrawal of the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA), his predecessor’s nuclear agreement with Iran. The boldest
action of his presidency was his decision to kill Qasem Soleimani, the commander
of the Quds Force — the expeditionary, special-operations, terrorist branch of
the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — at the Baghdad airport.
President Trump wanted to leave Iraq, and yet he assumed the risks of
retaliation and greater U.S. commitment to kill a general who had probably
orchestrated the deaths of more Americans than any man since Osama bin Laden.
Nonetheless, using Trump’s own standard for success, his
administration’s Iran policy — increase economic pressure until Tehran agrees
to a better deal — has failed. It was destined to: No “good” agreement is
possible with a revolutionary Islamic state. Any conceivable new accord — or
“follow-on” agreement — will be like the JCPOA. It will end with Tehran
extorting the United States out of billions of dollars of sanctions relief,
which will fortify the theocracy and its imperialism, while the regime’s
acquisition of atomic arms will be modestly delayed. There is a reason why the
Obama administration declined to include a ballistic-missile-control regime in
the nuclear accord: The Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and the IRGC
would never have agreed to it. Ditto any verification system wherein Western
inspectors could actually perform in-person visits, let alone spot inspections,
at IRGC bases where nuclear or ballistic-missile research is known or
suspected. The development of long-range, nuclear-capable ballistic missiles —
a priority for the IRGC for more than two decades — guarantees the means for
the Iranian nomenklatura to check, intimidate, and terrorize its opponents in
the region and beyond. It is simply not something Iran would have given up.
Trump’s Iran policy has been selective and uneven,
showing a preference for economic coercion over containment. Containment is a
patient regime-change strategy. Unwavering pressure and pushback would
intensify the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy crisis, which has often led to
massive protests, and make it more likely to break the system. Trump surely has
had no moral qualms about doing this; he was, however, unwilling to assume the
commitments that containment unavoidably entails (i.e., crafting an
international and domestic consensus behind displacing the regime). Instead, he
advanced an Arab Sunni alliance against Shia Iran — a strategy that collapsed
in September 2019, when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates failed to
respond to the clerical regime’s attacks against their own oil tankers and
processing plants despite having overwhelming air superiority. Trump didn’t
pull air and naval units from the Gulf, and he temporarily increased ground
forces in the region, leaving the mullahs capable of harassing Gulf Arabs but
not convulsing the oil-rich southern Middle East.
Tehran has now accumulated around 5,000 pounds of
low-enriched uranium, an amount way beyond the limitation of the JCPOA and
about one-fifth of what the state had before the nuclear agreement. The
clerical regime actually hasn’t been racing to build a big stockpile. (They
could have done so given the ease of reconnecting centrifuges.) Trump has
watched this growth with some anxiety. Reportedly, he recently considered
military strikes against nuclear sites but was dissuaded from ordering them by
his advisers. Odds are that Iran hasn’t vigorously enriched uranium since the
United States withdrew from the nuclear accord, in part because Tehran is
scared of Trump.
Despite uncontested Iranian expansion and increasing
uranium enrichment, the president’s achievements in Iran are real and likely to
last. His most consequential, likely irreversible, and certainly unintended
success was the enfeebling of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and his circle
of “pragmatic technocrats.” For years Rouhani, a founding father of the
theocratic police state, had advanced the proposition that the Islamic Republic
could use Western funds and commerce to propel the country past its own
problems. The cleric had wanted to import an Islamic variation of the Chinese
model — an economically more robust dictatorship based on state capitalism.
In 2013, Khamenei accepted Rouhani’s pitch. Iran could
have it all on Obama’s terms: a stronger economy (sanctions relief and
commercial relations that would make it effectively impossible for the United
States to punish Iran economically again), a more powerful military, an
unmolested sphere of influence, more domestic stability, and an improved
nuclear program with numerous, more-advanced centrifuges whose operation the
international community couldn’t obstruct — in exchange for a limited delay on
industrializing its nuclear infrastructure. In important ways, the nuclear deal
actually eased the clerical regime’s pathway to the bomb.
Rouhani is likely the last cleric who can save the
theocracy from itself and get the West to finance the effort. Joe Biden
probably will offer billions of dollars to the mullahs before Rouhani leaves
office this summer, in an effort to seduce Khamenei back into the nuclear
accord. Time is short, however, and the supreme leader knows clearly the
precariousness of any “deals” with Washington. The Islamic Republic doesn’t
have a deep bench of relatively sophisticated, cosmopolitan talent. It’s
possible that Ali Larijani, a former speaker of the parliament and former
secretary general of the Supreme National Security Council who is contemplating
a run for the presidency, can match Rouhani’s skill set at home and abroad. But
it’s a stretch. Larijani has seemed friendly to the autarkist views of the
supreme leader; he and his brothers, all ardent Islamists with limited
politesse, have a harder time making nice with Westerners. And Larijani
currently appears to have cooler relations with the supreme leader, who has approval
over who runs for, and who wins, the presidency. There was a moment for the
JCPOA after Rouhani was elected in 2013 — but Trump trashed the agreement,
leaving less clever and less worldly men to fulfill the regime’s ambitions.
These men will have to deal with another accomplishment
of Trump’s: He has helped to fray the bonds between the clerical regime and the
poor. What the eruption and brutal suppression of the pro-democracy Green
Movement did in 2009 to the college-educated Iranian middle class in Tehran,
the nationwide protests of 2017 and especially 2019 (the latter of which was
put down with unparalleled severity) have done more recently to the provincial
lower classes, once assumed to be the theocracy’s bedrock. American sanctions
have accentuated the long list of grievances the demonstrators have against the
regime. It remains striking how few have criticized Trump for his measures that
have undoubtedly aggravated their poverty. Pro-American sentiment among the
protesters was common.
The cash that Biden may soon throw at Tehran could
alleviate domestic pressures. But internal politics and regional developments
aren’t playing to Tehran’s advantage. Israel has pummeled the Revolutionary
Guards and their proxies in Syria; the mullahs have clearly shown they don’t
have the guts to escalate against the Jewish state. In Iraq, anti-Iranian
sentiment has been steadily building among the Shia; the death of Soleimani and
his Iraqi lieutenant Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis seriously weakened Tehran’s standing
in the country, leaving pro-Iranian forces and the clerical regime still
scrambling to find effective replacements. And Lebanon is such a mess, it’s not
clear that even Hezbollah, Iran’s favorite Arab offshoot, can exploit it.
Though Trump couldn’t abandon the idea of arms control as
a paramount concern, he certainly let go of the timidity and guilt that has
defined so much U.S. foreign policy toward Tehran since the Islamic Revolution.
And his actions may still save us from massive nuclear extortion at the hands
of men who grow happy as U.S. power retrenches. The “compensatory” financial
demands of Khamenei and the mullahs may even make Team Biden blanch. Tehran may
also be in no mood to further restrict its centrifuge progress, which per the
JCPOA is just years away from the open construction of advanced machines. If
Trump’s actions eventually do save us from throwing billions at the most
anti-American, terrorism-fond, aggressive, and sanguinary regime in the Middle
East, he will have shown himself to be the most consequential and effective
president in handling the Islamic Republic since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
downed Jimmy Carter.
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