The Iran dilemma Washington refuses to resolve
Two goals have been in tension in U.S. policy for nearly half a century.
Why is the most powerful country on the planet unable to get its way with a much smaller, weaker country that has been ravaged by economic sanctions and military strikes? At one level, the simplest way to understand America’s problem in the Iran war is to use game theory. President Donald Trump decided to play a game of “chicken” with Iran — think of two drivers racing straight at each other. In these situations, if the stakes for one side are existential and for the other much lower, the side with the higher stakes usually prevails. For the Iranian regime, if it loses, there is a good chance it ends up toppled and slaughtered. For Trump, it would be a bad weekend at Mar-a-Lago. It’s easy to see why the Iranians would be more willing to lock their steering wheel in that game of chicken.
But there is a broader reason the United States has found it so difficult to handle Iran, one that is not just about Trump and this latest ill-conceived war. Ever since the Islamic regime took power in Iran, America has been of two minds about it. On the one hand, the U.S. has had certain issues it wanted resolved — from the return of the hostages to nuclear limits. On the other hand, it wants to topple the regime, not just negotiate with it. There is a tension in these two attitudes that has run though U.S. foreign policy for almost half a century. Does Washington want to change certain policies of Iran or does it want to change Iran?
If Washington negotiates with Tehran, inevitably there is a give-and-take, there are concessions on both sides, there is some relaxation of hostilities. Above all, in engaging with it, the U.S. government is conferring a certain degree of legitimacy on the Islamic Republic, treating it as a serious negotiating partner, accepting that it represents Iran on the world stage. But that acceptance sits uneasily with some American elites, who feel that the Islamic Republic is illegitimate, that it should not exist and that Washington’s only policy toward it should be to overthrow it. And yet, there are things Washington wants that only Iran can deliver. That is why even President Ronald Reagan found himself secretly negotiating with the Iranian mullahs while publicly denouncing them.
We can see the tension almost daily in Trump’s policy toward Iran. One social media post threatens to destroy Iranian civilization and bring an end to 47 years of evil. Another one that same day speaks of the progress being made in negotiations with Iran. Trump enters negotiations and seems optimistic about a deal with Iran and in between rounds starts a war with Tehran and urges Iranians to overthrow their government. Less than a week later, he’s back to promising that if they agree to his demands, Iran will have a bright future.
The U.S. had a similarly contradictory attitude toward the Soviet Union. After the Communists took control of Russia in 1917, Washington broke relations with it and even tried in some small ways to overthrow it. It took President Franklin D. Roosevelt, almost 16 years later, to recognize its existence and exchange ambassadors with Moscow. The tension reemerged after World War II. In the 1970s, Henry Kissinger’s policy of negotiation with the Soviet Union was pilloried on the right because it was seen as bolstering the standing of an evil empire. Kissinger’s response was always that America stood in ideological opposition to the Soviet Union but that it also had certain national interests — like the control of nuclear weapons — that could not be handled without agreements with Moscow.
Kissinger’s equivalent in the Iran debate was President Barack Obama. Obama’s was the one administration to make a choice. It determined that while the U.S. might prefer another regime in Iran, it had to deal with this one to tackle the greatest danger to America’s national interest — which as with the Soviet case involved nuclear weapons. The Iran nuclear deal was an effort to take the one most dangerous element of Iran’s foreign policy and neutralize it. And it succeeded at that. But for many on the right, the price was that it in some sense legitimized the regime. So Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal, which then led to the discrediting of President Hassan Rouhani and the return of the hard-liners in Tehran, who ramped up Iran’s enrichment program — which has brought Trump right back to the same dilemma. Does he make a deal or take a stand?
At this point, it is clear that Trump wants a deal. But in making it, he might end up giving the Islamic Republic what it has been seeking for 47 years: unqualified acceptance even from the most hard-line elements of the United States. For Tehran, that’s a prize worth many concessions.
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