The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (18 page)

Nuclear capability is a convenient shortcut—the poor man’s path to strategic parity. Iran has learned the lesson of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had many more tanks and soldiers on its side of Europe, but that mattered little. America’s nuclear arsenal created a balance of power that kept the Red Army out of Western Europe.

The nuclear program is also at the heart of the Iranian regime’s survival strategy. The atom seems as if it can make any dictatorship untouchable (though it did not save the Soviet Union), and that notion has clearly been swirling around in the minds of Iran’s rulers as they have pressed ahead with the nuclear program despite international objections over the past decade.
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It was common wisdom in Iran in 2003 that the big difference between North Korea and Iraq was that Kim Jong-il had nuclear arms and Saddam did not. And let us not forget that it was after the failed Bay of Pigs attempt at regime change that Fidel Castro invited the Soviet Union to station nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. Nor was American handling of India and Pakistan when those two countries went nuclear much of a discouragement. After decades of objecting to Indian nuclear weapons, the Bush administration reversed course and signed a civilian nuclear deal with India, proving that with time all will be forgotten and that once-illicit nuclear programs could become accepted and legitimate. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons have given the West an enormous stake in that troubled country’s stability. Western governments may lament Pakistan’s bad behavior, but they keep pouring billions into the bottomless pit of its economy as insurance against a collapse into mayhem and extremism. Iran draws from these cases the lesson that “forgiveness is much easier to obtain than permission.” Make nuclear Persia a fait accompli, and the world will accommodate the new reality.

Iranians have always been ambiguous about precisely what “going nuclear” will mean. The official line is that Iran wants only the nuclear know-how needed to satisfy domestic energy needs—a curious claim from a country sitting atop such a large chunk of the world’s oil and natural gas reserves. Many among the country’s leaders, however, want the Japan option—which was also what the Shah was after. This means developing the knowledge and infrastructure needed to make nuclear weapons, but stopping “one turn of the screw short.” A smaller but growing segment of the ruling elite wants an actual nuclear arsenal. The harsher Western sanctions become, the more compelling becomes this last group’s argument. The seventy-three-year-old Khamenei, however, has not been willing to go along with it. In 2012, as domestic pressure to build the bomb continued to intensify, he repeated his 1995 fatwa declaring nuclear weapons a “great sin.”
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Efforts to put a stop to Iran’s nuclear program began shortly after it first caught the attention of the West in 2003 with the discovery of a uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz in central Iran. The United States, France, Germany, and Britain joined forces to demand that Iran abandon enrichment altogether and sign the Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which gives the nuclear watchdog agency, the IAEA, considerably greater ability to monitor a nuclear program.

The hardest and most exacting part of a nuclear program to master is uranium enrichment. Low enrichment levels will suffice to fuel nuclear power plants, but a bomb needs highly enriched uranium. Very little time and knowledge separate mastering enrichment from building a bomb. Iran claimed that its right to enrichment is protected under the NPT, and that it was merely trying to produce fuel for medical centers and experimental reactors. Those outdated reactors need 20 percent enriched fuel (more modern reactors can make do with lower enrichment levels), and once you get to the 20 percent threshold (the real hurdle in mastering enrichment) it’s a breezy dash to 90 percent or more (bomb-grade enrichment). One idea was that the United States should sell Iran newer research reactors that would take away Iran’s argument
for 20 percent enrichment.
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Before that could be agreed, however, Iran decided it wanted to produce fuel for nuclear power plants too. The United States and its European allies bristled at the idea, and tensions grew as Iran expanded its enrichment capacity.

From the outset, Washington declared a nuclear Iran to be unacceptable. Iran would use its nuclear capability to annihilate Israel, and short of that could provide a nuclear shield from behind which Hezbollah and Hamas could escalate their attacks on Israel. Similarly, a nuclear Iran would pose a newly alarming threat to its Arab neighbors, bullying them on regional issues or oil prices. Iran’s nuclear capability could also breathe new life into Islamic fundamentalism, energizing an ideology that Washington hopes will end up in the trash bin of history. Finally, Iran’s nuclear arsenal could spark proliferation throughout one of the world’s most volatile regions—not a comforting prospect for the West or Israel, which would surely find itself the target at which many of the weapons would be pointed.

The immediate strategic threat to Israel would be less Iranian nuclear missiles than the boost that Hezbollah, Hamas, and other “asymmetric” foes of Israel would gain from being able to hide behind Iran’s nuclear skirts. The record of Hezbollah’s actions in Lebanon or Hamas’s in Israel (not to mention Iraqi Shia so-called special groups responsible for violence in Iraq and radical Shia outfits in Pakistan or the Persian Gulf) makes this a serious threat. Some have even argued that instead of threatening war with Iran, America should have focused on knocking out the Assad regime in Syria. Without its Syrian outpost, Iran’s asymmetric capabilities would collapse (because Iran would not be able to support Hezbollah as effectively without using Syrian territory) and leave any possible Persian nukes with nothing to shield.
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With so many arguments arrayed against Iran going nuclear, Washington made preventing Iran from doing so a top foreign policy objective. And to underscore its determination, it threatened Iran with military action. “All options are on the table” became the phrase meant to signal that America was ready to use air strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites.
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But first America looked to the Europeans to negotiate an end to Iran’s nuclear program. And to make Iran go along, economic sanctions would be key. This policy of imposing sanctions while keeping open the
prospect of talks (dubbed the “dual-track” policy) was the brainchild of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Undersecretary Nicholas Burns. It had its origins in Washington’s desire to patch things up with European governments still stewing over the Iraq war. Washington knew that the Europeans would ignore or even oppose its efforts on Iran unless they were kept on board and, indeed, in the forefront.

Yet Washington remained wary of talks and worried that without some form of pressure on Tehran they would go nowhere. In practice, Washington embraced European-led talks, but it remained focused on coercion, lobbying to include Russia and China, whose support at the UN would be critical if serious sanctions were ever to become a reality.

The dual-track approach gave Bush a punitive course of action short of war that could also placate other stakeholders in the dispute, such as Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Israel. They all wanted reassurance that the United States would not accept Iran going nuclear and would take tough action to stop that outcome. Sanctions were also conveniently both low-risk and low-cost. They could bite hard without sparking a shooting war. And Iran would bear all the pain, with America not needing to spend money or risk a single soldier’s life.

The problem with sanctions is that they are just too convenient. They are what you do when you cannot or will not do anything else. They offer a good feeling that a crisis is being handled, but in reality they are blunt instruments with a questionable track record.
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When they work, they hurt the economy and state institutions of the country they target—along with its civilian populace—but do they reshape the bad policy behaviors that cause them to be applied in the first place? Sanctions impoverished Iraq and cost the lives of vulnerable Iraqis (including tens of thousands of children), but Saddam Hussein stayed in power and remained a hazard. Indeed, it could be argued that sanctions boomeranged on the United States because the Iraq that U.S. forces conquered and were then responsible for putting back on its feet had been left such a basket case.

Sanctions are not likely to work in the case of Iran either. The reasons Iran craves nuclear status run too deep for it to be swayed by economic pressure. And indeed, there is reason to worry that U.S. pressure is only convincing Iran it needs nuclear deterrence in order to protect itself from that very pressure. When Bush was president, Iran’s rulers
were certain that regime change was the U.S. goal and reasoned that an Islamic Republic shorn of its nuclear program would be that much more vulnerable.

Iranians are not easy to negotiate with. This is a nation whose complex psyche is reflected in its art. Think of the dazzlingly detailed miniature paintings or the spectacularly ornate Persian carpets they have produced for centuries, and you can grasp that Iranians are patient and fantastically complicated. The Western expectation of quick, straightforward deal making has met with frustration when it comes to Iran. I remember a conversation in 2006 with Jack Straw, who was then Britain’s foreign secretary, about his time talking to Iran. He said,

Diplomacy with Iran was always going to be long and hard. Iranians are hard bargainers, tenacious and unlikely to budge unless they are under pressure. Diplomacy with Iran will be like doing business with the North Vietnamese at the end of the Vietnam War—they too were dogged, difficult, and appeared likely to bend only under pressure. And yet in the end there was a road to a deal with the North Vietnamese—it just needed American persistence and a clearheaded strategy for managing the process.

The problem with the dual-track policy with Iran was that in practice it relied on a single track: economic pressure.
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It failed because it deviated from the goal of using coercion to bring Iran to the negotiating table. The United States started to look to pressure to do the job on its own.
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The Bush administration was never interested in diplomacy. It
left it to Germany, France, and Britain to sit down with Iran for talks—but Washington would hold a veto over the outcome. Nor was Washington interested in resolving all outstanding issues, improving relations, and resolving the nuclear problem in that context. The Bush administration wanted Iran to surrender. The United States said that it would talk to Iran only if Iran first gave up its nuclear program—we would accept Iran running a civilian nuclear program provided all enrichment activities took place outside Iran. In other words, diplomacy will follow only after its intended result has already been achieved.

Initially there was hope that Europe could persuade Iran to change course. A visit to Tehran by three European foreign ministers in 2004 led to a two-month suspension of nuclear enrichment, which President Chirac thought was “exemplary of how problems can be resolved by European diplomacy.”
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But those early positive steps led nowhere.
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Washington stuck to its position that Iran would have to abandon its nuclear program in its entirety—no enrichment activity whatsoever—before any further discussions could happen.

Inside Iran, hard-liners argued that the temporary suspension had been misconstrued as weakness and had only emboldened the United States to pressure Iran into total surrender. This view fit a prevalent narrative in Tehran that the West views any Iranian concession as weakness and therefore grows more aggressive.
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Iran’s rulers thought sanctions were intended to weaken Iran militarily and change the regime. The best response was to get tough and even belligerent—which escalated violence in Iraq. As Khamenei told his advisers, “The West is like a dog, if you back away it will lunge at you, but if you charge, then it will back away.”
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Little wonder, then, that more sanctions only made Iran more recalcitrant.

Iran’s rulers thought that hard-charging Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would make the West back off when he took over the presidency from the more pliable reformist Mohammad Khatami in 2005. But Ahmadinejad’s menacing rhetoric and shows of defiance only hardened U.S. attitudes in turn. What Khamenei did not know was that American policy makers also thought they would get a reaction from Tehran only if they were menacing to the point of threatening Khamenei’s grip on
power. “He moves only if you hold a gun to his head,” a senior administration official told me.

Washington responded to Ahmadinejad’s defiance by tightening the economic noose. Iran and the United States found themselves in an uneasy standoff, with American pressure only inviting greater Iranian obduracy.

Ironically, no Iranian leader more badly wanted a deal with the United States than did Ahmadinejad, and yet none failed more miserably in wooing America to the table. Ahmadinejad was following his own dual-track policy. He hoped his vitriol, denying the Holocaust, taunting Israel, and rallying resistance to America would make him too important to ignore—the adversary that America had to talk to. But his plan backfired. He made himself a pariah, the leader whom everyone was
determined
to ignore. Ahmadinejad broke the taboo against communicating directly with an American president, writing first to Bush, then to Obama to congratulate him on winning the 2008 election. Neither one responded. Above all, Ahmadinejad supported deal making over the nuclear issue, first in Geneva with the United States and its European allies in 2009, and then with Brazil and Turkey in 2010. Those deals failed to take hold and he got no credit for trying to get them through.