CHAPTER 4
IN THE SPRING OF 2013, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran—the figure then and now outranking all Iranian government ministers, including Iran’s President and Foreign Minister—delivered a speech to an international conference of Muslim clerics, lauding the onset of a new global revolution. What elsewhere was called the “Arab Spring,” he declared, was in fact an “Islamic Awakening” of world-spanning consequence. The West erred in assessing that the crowds of demonstrators represented the triumph of liberal democracy, Khamenei explained. The demonstrators would reject the “bitter and horrifying experience of following the West in politics, behavior and lifestyle” because they embodied the “miraculous fulfillment of divine promises”:
Today what lies in front of our eyes and cannot be denied by any informed and intelligent individual is that the world of Islam has now emerged out of the sidelines of social and political equations of the world, that it has found a prominent and outstanding position at the center of decisive global events, and that it offers a fresh outlook on life, politics, government and social developments.
In Khamenei’s analysis, this reawakening of Islamic consciousness was opening the door to a global religious revolution that would finally vanquish the overbearing influence of the United States and its allies and bring an end to three centuries of Western primacy:
Islamic Awakening, which speakers in the arrogant and reactionary camp do not even dare to mention in words, is a truth whose signs can be witnessed in almost all parts of the world of Islam. The most obvious sign of it is the enthusiasm of public opinion, especially among young people, to revive the glory and greatness of Islam, to become aware of the nature of the international order of domination and to remove the mask from the shameless, oppressive and arrogant face of the governments and centers that have been pressuring the Islamic and non-Islamic East.
Following “the failure of communism and liberalism” and with the power and confidence of the West crumbling, the Islamic Awakening would reverberate across the world, Khamenei pledged, unifying the global Muslim ummah (the transnational community of believers) and restoring it to world centrality:
This final goal cannot be anything less than creating a brilliant Islamic civilization. All parts of the Islamic Ummah—in the form of different nations and countries—should achieve the civilizational position that has been specified in the Holy Quran … Through religious faith, knowledge, ethics and constant struggle, Islamic civilization can gift advanced thought and noble codes of behavior to the Islamic Ummah and to the entire humanity, and it can be the point of liberation from materialistic and oppressive outlooks and corrupt codes of behavior that form the pillars of current Western civilization.
Khamenei had expatiated upon this topic previously. As he remarked to an audience of Iranian paramilitary forces in 2011, popular protests in the West spoke to a global hunger for spirituality and legitimacy as exemplified by Iran’s theocracy. A world revolution awaited:
The developments in the U.S. and Europe suggest a massive change that the world will witness in the future … Today the slogans of Egyptians and the Tunisians are being repeated in New York and California … The Islamic Republic is currently the focal point of the awakening movement of nations and this reality is what has upset the enemies.
In any other region, such declarations would have been treated as a major revolutionary challenge: a theocratic figure wielding supreme spiritual and temporal power was, in a significant country, publicly embracing a project of constructing an alternative world order in opposition to the one being practiced by the world community. The Supreme Leader of contemporary Iran was declaring that universal religious principles, not national interests or liberal internationalism, would dominate the new world he prophesied. Had such sentiments been voiced by an Asian or a European leader, they would have been interpreted as a shocking global challenge. Yet thirty-five years of repetition had all but inured the world to the radicalism of these sentiments and the actions backing them. On its part, Iran combined its challenge to modernity with a millennial tradition of a statecraft of exceptional subtlety.
THE TRADITION OF IRANIAN STATECRAFT
The first implementation of radical Islamist principles as a doctrine of state power occurred in 1979, in a capital where it was least expected—in a country unlike the majority of Middle Eastern states, with a long and distinguished national history and a long-established reverence for its pre-Islamic past. So when Iran, an accepted state in the Westphalian system, turned itself into an advocate for radical Islam after the Ayatollah Khomeini revolution, the Middle East regional order was turned upside down.
Of all the countries of the region, Iran has perhaps the most coherent sense of nationhood and the most elaborated tradition of national-interest-based statecraft. At the same time, Iran’s leaders have traditionally reached far beyond the modern borders of Iran and have rarely had occasion to adhere to Westphalian concepts of statehood and sovereign equality. Iran’s founding tradition was that of the Persian Empire, which, in a series of incarnations from the seventh century B.C. to the seventh century A.D., established its rule across much of the contemporary Middle East and portions of Central Asia, Southwest Asia, and North Africa. With resplendent art and culture, a sophisticated bureaucracy experienced in administering far-flung provinces, and a vast multiethnic military steeled by successful campaigns in every direction, Persia saw itself as far more than one society among many. The Persian ideal of monarchy elevated its sovereign to quasi-divine status as a magnanimous overlord of peoples—the “King of Kings” dispensing justice and decreeing tolerance in exchange for peaceful political submission.
The Persian imperial project, like classical China’s, represented a form of world ordering in which cultural and political achievements and psychological assurance played as great a role as traditional military conquests. The fifth-century B.C. Greek historian Herodotus described the self-confidence of a people that had absorbed the finest of all foreign customs—Median dress, Egyptian armor—and now regarded itself as the center of human achievement:
Most of all they hold in honor themselves, then those who dwell next to themselves, and then those next to them, and so on, so that there is a progression in honor in relation to the distance. They hold least in honor those whose habitation is furthest from their own. This is because they think themselves to be the best of mankind in everything and that others have a hold on virtue in proportion to their nearness; those that live furthest away are the most base.
Roughly twenty-five hundred years later this sense of serene self-confidence had endured, as manifested in the text of an 1850 trade agreement between the United States and the Safavid Dynasty—which governed a curtailed but still expansive version of the Persian Empire consisting of Iran and significant portions of present-day Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Turkmenistan. Even after the recent loss of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, and eastern Georgia in two wars with the expanding Russian Empire, the Shah projected the assurance of the heir of Xerxes and Cyrus:
The President of the United States of North America, and his Majesty as exalted as the Planet Saturn; the Sovereign to whom the Sun serves as a standard; whose splendor and magnificence are equal to that of the Skies; the Sublime Sovereign, the Monarch whose armies are as numerous as the Stars; whose greatness calls to mind that of Jeinshid; whose magnificence equals that of Darius; the Heir of the Crown and Throne of the Kayanians, the Sublime Emperor of all Persia, being both equally and sincerely desirous of establishing relations of Friendship between the two Governments, which they wish to strengthen by a Treaty of Friendship and Commerce, reciprocally advantageous and useful to the Citizens and subjects of the two High contracting parties, have for this purpose named for their Plenipotentiaries …
At the intersection of East and West and administering provinces and dependencies stretching at their widest extent from modern-day Libya to Kyrgyzstan and India, Persia was either the starting point or the eventual target of nearly every major conqueror on the Eurasian landmass from antiquity to the Cold War. Through all these upheavals, Persia—like China under roughly comparable circumstances—retained its distinct sense of identity. Expanding across vastly diverse cultures and regions, the Persian Empire adopted and synthesized their achievements into its own distinct concept of order. Submerged in waves of conquest by Alexander the Great, the early Islamic armies, and later the Mongols—shocks that all but erased the historical memory and political autonomy of other peoples—Persia retained its confidence in its cultural superiority. It bowed to its conquerors as a temporary concession but retained its independence through its worldview, charting “great interior spaces” in poetry and mysticism and revering its connection with the heroic ancient rulers recounted in its epic Book of Kings. Meanwhile, Persia distilled its experience managing all manner of territories and political challenges into a sophisticated canon of diplomacy placing a premium on endurance, shrewd analysis of geopolitical realities, and the psychological manipulation of adversaries.
This sense of distinctness and adroit maneuver endured in the Islamic era, when Persia adopted the religion of its Arab conquerors but, alone among the first wave of conquered peoples, insisted on retaining its language and infusing the new order with the cultural legacies of the empire that Islam had just overthrown. Eventually, Persia became the demographic and cultural center of Shiism—first as a dissenting tradition under Arab rule, later as the state religion starting in the sixteenth century (adopted partly as a way to distinguish itself from and defy the growing Ottoman Empire at its borders, which was Sunni). In contrast to the majority Sunni interpretation, this branch of Islam stressed the mystical and ineffable qualities of religious truth and authorized “prudential dissimulation” in the service of the interests of the faithful. In its culture, religion, and geopolitical outlook, Iran (as it called itself officially after 1935) had preserved the distinctiveness of its tradition and the special character of its regional role.
THE KHOMEINI REVOLUTION
The revolution against Iran’s twentieth-century Shah Reza Pahlavi had begun (or at least had been portrayed to the West) as an antimonarchical movement demanding democracy and economic redistribution. Many of its grievances were real, caused by the dislocations imposed by the Shah’s modernization programs and the heavy-handed and arbitrary tactics with which the government attempted to control dissent. But when, in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris and Iraq to claim the role of the revolution’s “Supreme Leader,” he did so not on behalf of social programs or of democratic governance but in the name of an assault against the entire regional order and indeed the institutional arrangements of modernity.
The doctrine that took root in Iran under Khomeini was unlike anything that had been practiced in the West since the religious wars of the pre-Westphalian era. It conceived of the state not as a legitimate entity in its own right but as a weapon of convenience in a broader religious struggle. The twentieth-century map of the Middle East, Khomeini announced, was a false and un-Islamic creation of “imperialists” and “tyrannical self-seeking rulers” who had “separated the various segments of the Islamic umma[community] from each other and artificially created separate nations.” All contemporary political institutions in the Middle East and beyond were “illegitimate” because they “do not base themselves on divine law.” Modern international relations based on procedural Westphalian principles rested on a false foundation because “the relations between nations should be based on spiritual grounds” and not on principles of national interest.
In Khomeini’s view—paralleling that of Qutb—an ideologically expansionist reading of the Quran pointed the way from these blasphemies and toward the creation of a genuinely legitimate world order. The first step would be the overthrow of all the governments in the Muslim world and their replacement by “an Islamic government.” Traditional national loyalties would be overridden because “it is the duty of all of us to overthrow the taghut; i.e., the illegitimate political powers that now rule the entire Islamic world.” The founding of a truly Islamic political system in Iran would mark, as Khomeini declared upon the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran on April 1, 1979, “the First Day of God’s Government.”
This entity would not be comparable to any other modern state. As Mehdi Bazargan, Khomeini’s first appointee for the post of Prime Minister, told the New York Times, “What was wanted … was a government of the type seen during the 10 years of the rule of the Prophet Mohammed and the five years under his son-in-law, Ali, the first Shiite Imam.” When government is conceived of as divine, dissent will be treated as blasphemy, not political opposition. Under Khomeini, the Islamic Republic carried out those principles, beginning with a wave of trials and executions and a systematic repression of minority faiths far exceeding what had occurred under the Shah’s authoritarian regime.
Amidst these upheavals a new paradox took shape, in the form of a dualistic challenge to international order. With Iran’s revolution, an Islamist movement dedicated to overthrowing the Westphalian system gained control over a modern state and asserted its “Westphalian” rights and privileges—taking up its seat at the United Nations, conducting its trade, and operating its diplomatic apparatus. Iran’s clerical regime thus placed itself at the intersection of two world orders, arrogating the formal protections of the Westphalian system even while repeatedly proclaiming that it did not believe in it, would not be bound by it, and intended ultimately to replace it.
This duality has been ingrained in Iran’s governing doctrine. Iran styles itself as “the Islamic Republic,” implying an entity whose authority transcends territorial demarcations, and the Ayatollah heading the Iranian power structure (first Khomeini, then his successor, Ali Khamenei) is conceived of not simply as an Iranian political figure but as a global authority—“the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution” and “the Leader of the Islamic Ummah and Oppressed People.”
The Islamic Republic announced itself on the world stage with a massive violation of a core principle of the Westphalian international system—diplomatic immunity—by storming the American Embassy in Tehran and holding its staff hostage for 444 days (an act affirmed by the current Iranian government, which in 2014 appointed the hostage takers’ translator to serve as its ambassador at the United Nations). In a similar spirit, in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini claimed global juridical authority in issuing a fatwa (religious proscription) pronouncing a death sentence on Salman Rushdie, a British citizen of Indian Muslim descent, for his publication of a book in Britain and the United States deemed offensive to Muslims.
Even while simultaneously conducting normal diplomatic relations with the countries whose territory these groups have in part arrogated, Iran in its Islamist aspect has supported organizations such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Mahdi Army in Iraq—non-state militias challenging established authorities and employing terror attacks as part of their strategy. Tehran’s imperative of Islamic revolution has been interpreted to permit cooperation across the Sunni-Shia divide to advance broader anti-Western interests, including Iran’s arming of the Sunni jihadist group Hamas against Israel and, according to some reports, the Taliban in Afghanistan; the report of the 9/11 Commission and investigations of a 2013 terrorist plot in Canada suggested that al-Qaeda operatives had found scope to operate from Iran as well.
On the subject of the need to overthrow the existing world order, Islamists on both sides—Sunni and Shia—have been in general agreement. However intense the Sunni-Shia doctrinal divide erupting across the Middle East in the early twenty-first century, Sayyid Qutb’s views were essentially identical to those put forward by Iran’s political ayatollahs. Qutb’s premise that Islam would reorder and eventually dominate the world struck a chord with the men who recast Iran into the fount of religious revolution. Qutb’s works circulate widely in Iran, some personally translated by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As Khamenei wrote in his 1967 introduction to Qutb’s work, The Future of This Religion:
This lofty and great author has tried in the course of the chapters of this book … to first introduce the essence of the faith as it is and then, after showing that it is a program of living … [to confirm] with his eloquent words and his particular world outlook that ultimately world government shall be in the hands of our school and “the future belongs to Islam.”
For Iran, representing the minority Shia branch of this endeavor, victory could be envisioned through the sublimation of doctrinal differences for shared aims. Toward this end, the Iranian constitution proclaims the goal of the unification of all Muslims as a national obligation:
In accordance with the sacred verse of the Qur’an (“This your community is a single community, and I am your Lord, so worship Me” [21:92]), all Muslims form a single nation, and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has the duty of formulating its general policies with a view to cultivating the friendship and unity of all Muslim peoples, and it must constantly strive to bring about the political, economic, and cultural unity of the Islamic world.
The emphasis would be not on theological disputes but on ideological conquest. As Khomeini elaborated, “We must strive to export our Revolution throughout the world, and must abandon all idea of not doing so, for not only does Islam refuse to recognize any difference between Muslim countries, it is the champion of all oppressed people.” This would require an epic struggle against “America, the global plunderer,” and the Communist materialist societies of Russia and Asia, as well as “Zionism, and Israel.”
Khomeini and his fellow Shia revolutionaries have differed from Sunni Islamists, however—and this is the essence of their fratricidal rivalry—in proclaiming that global upheaval would be capped with the coming of the Mahdi, who would return from “occultation” (being present though not visible) to assume the sovereign powers that the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic temporarily exercises in the Mahdi’s place. Iranian then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad considered this principle sufficiently settled to put it before the United Nations in an address on September 27, 2007:
Without any doubt, the Promised One who is the ultimate Savior, will come. In the company of all believers, justice-seekers and benefactors, he will establish a bright future and fill the world with justice and beauty. This is the promise of God; therefore it will be fulfilled.
The peace envisaged by such a concept has as its prerequisite, as President Ahmadinejad wrote to President George W. Bush in 2006, a global submission to correct religious doctrine. Ahmadinejad’s letter (widely interpreted in the West as an overture to negotiations) concluded with “Vasalam Ala Man Ataba’al hoda,” a phrase left untranslated in the version released to the public: “Peace only unto those who follow the true path.” This was the identical admonition sent in the seventh century by the Prophet Muhammad to the emperors of Byzantium and Persia, soon to be attacked by the Islamic holy war.
For decades Western observers have sought to pinpoint the “root causes” of such sentiments, convincing themselves that the more extreme statements are partly metaphorical and that a renunciation of policy or of past Western conduct—such as American and British interference in Iranian domestic politics in the 1950s—might open the door to reconciliation. Yet revolutionary Islamism has not, up to now, manifested itself as a quest for international cooperation as the West understands the term; nor is the Iranian clerical regime best interpreted as an aggrieved postcolonial independence movement waiting hopefully for demonstrations of American goodwill. Under the ayatollahs’ concept of policy, the dispute with the West is not a matter of specific technical concessions or negotiating formulas but a contest over the nature of world order.
Even at a moment hailed in the West as auguring a new spirit of conciliation—after the completion of an interim agreement on Iran’s nuclear program with the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany—the Iranian Supreme Leader, Khamenei, declared in January 2014:
By dressing up America’s face, some individuals are trying to remove the ugliness, the violence and terror from this face and introduce America’s government to the Iranian people as being affectionate and humanitarian … How can you change such an ugly and criminal face in front of the Iranian people with makeup? … Iran will not violate what it agreed to. But the Americans are enemies of the Islamic Revolution, they are enemies of the Islamic Republic, they are enemies of this flag that you have raised.
Or, as Khamenei put it somewhat more delicately in a speech to Iran’s Guardian Council in September 2013, “When a wrestler is wrestling with an opponent and in places shows flexibility for technical reasons, let him not forget who his opponent is.”
THIS STATE OF AFFAIRS is not inevitably permanent. Among the states in the Middle East, Iran has perhaps the most coherent experience of national greatness and the longest and subtlest strategic tradition. It has preserved its essential culture for three thousand years, sometimes as an expanding empire, for many centuries by the skilled manipulation of surrounding elements. Before the ayatollahs’ revolution, the West’s interaction with Iran had been cordial and cooperative on both sides, based on a perceived parallelism of national interests. (Ironically, the ayatollahs’ ascent to power was aided in its last stages by America’s dissociation from the existing regime, on the mistaken belief that the looming change would accelerate the advent of democracy and strengthen U.S.-Iranian ties.)
The United States and the Western democracies should be open to fostering cooperative relations with Iran. What they must not do is base such a policy on projecting their own domestic experience as inevitably or automatically relevant to other societies’, especially Iran’s. They must allow for the possibility that the unchanged rhetoric of a generation is based on conviction rather than posturing and will have had an impact on a significant number of the Iranian people. A change of tone is not necessarily a return to normalcy, especially where definitions of normalcy differ so fundamentally. It includes as well—and more likely—the possibility of a change in tactics to reach essentially unchanged goals. The United States should be open to a genuine reconciliation and make substantial efforts to facilitate it. Yet for such an effort to succeed, a clear sense of direction is essential, especially on the key issue of Iran’s nuclear program.
NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION AND IRAN
The future of Iranian-American relations will—at least in the short run—depend on the resolution of an ostensibly technical military issue. As these pages are being written, a potentially epochal shift in the region’s military balance and its psychological equilibrium may be taking place. It has been ushered in by Iran’s rapid progress toward the status of a nuclear weapons state amidst a negotiation between it and the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (the P5+1). Though couched in terms of technical and scientific capabilities, the issue is at heart about international order—about the ability of the international community to enforce its demands against sophisticated forms of rejection, the permeability of the global nonproliferation regime, and the prospects for a nuclear arms race in the world’s most volatile region.
The traditional balance of power emphasized military and industrial capacity. A change in it could be achieved only gradually or by conquest. The modern balance of power reflects the level of a society’s scientific development and can be threatened dramatically by developments entirely within the territory of a state. No conquest could have increased Soviet military capacity as much as the breaking of the American nuclear monopoly in 1949. Similarly, the spread of deliverable nuclear weapons is bound to affect regional balances—and the international order—dramatically and to evoke a series of escalating counteractions.
All Cold War American administrations were obliged to design their international strategies in the context of the awe-inspiring calculus of deterrence: the knowledge that nuclear war would involve casualties of a scale capable of threatening civilized life. They were haunted as well by the awareness that a demonstrated willingness to run the risk—at least up to a point—was essential if the world was not to be turned over to ruthless totalitarians. Deterrence held in the face of these parallel nightmares because only two nuclear superpowers existed. Each made comparable assessments of the perils to it from the use of nuclear weapons. But as nuclear weapons spread into more and more hands, the calculus of deterrence grows increasingly ephemeral and deterrence less and less reliable. In a widely proliferated world, it becomes ever more difficult to decide who is deterring whom and by what calculations.
Even if it is assumed that proliferating nuclear countries make the same calculus of survival as the established ones with respect to initiating hostilities against each other—an extremely dubious judgment—new nuclear weapons states may undermine international order in several ways. The complexity of protecting nuclear arsenals and installations (and building the sophisticated warning systems possessed by the advanced nuclear states) may increase the risk of preemption by tilting incentives toward a surprise attack. They can also be used as a shield to deter retaliation against the militant actions of non-state groups. Nor could nuclear powers ignore nuclear war on their doorsteps. Finally, the experience with the “private” proliferation network of technically friendly Pakistan with North Korea, Libya, and Iran demonstrates the vast consequences to international order of the spread of nuclear weapons, even when the proliferating country does not meet the formal criteria of a rogue state.
Three hurdles have to be overcome in acquiring a deployable nuclear weapons capability: the acquisition of delivery systems, the production of fissile material, and the building of warheads. For delivery systems, there exists a substantially open market in France, Russia, and to some extent China; it requires primarily financial resources. Iran has already acquired the nucleus of a delivery system and can add to it at its discretion. The knowledge of how to build warheads is not esoteric or difficult to discover, and their construction is relatively easy to hide. The best—perhaps the only—way to prevent the emergence of a nuclear weapons capability is to inhibit the development of a uranium-enrichment process. The indispensable component for this process is the device of centrifuges—the machines that produce enriched uranium. (Plutonium enrichment must also be prevented and is part of the same negotiation.)
The United States and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council have been negotiating for over ten years through two administrations of both parties to prevent the emergence of such a capability in Iran. Six UN Security Council resolutions since 2006 have insisted that Iran suspend its nuclear-enrichment program. Three American presidents of both parties, every permanent member of the UN Security Council (including China and Russia) plus Germany, and multiple International Atomic Energy Agency reports and resolutions have all declared an Iranian nuclear weapon unacceptable and demanded an unconditional halt to Iranian nuclear enrichment. No option was to be “off the table”—in the words of at least two American presidents—in pursuit of that goal.
The record shows steadily advancing Iranian nuclear capabilities taking place while the Western position has been progressively softened. As Iran has ignored UN resolutions and built centrifuges, the West has put forward a series of proposals of increasing permissiveness—from insisting that Iran terminate its uranium enrichment permanently (2004); to allowing that Iran might continue some enrichment at low-enriched uranium (LEU) levels, less than 20 percent (2005); to proposing that Iran ship the majority of its LEU out of the country so that France and Russia could turn it into fuel rods with 20 percent enriched uranium (2009); to a proposal allowing Iran to keep enough of its own 20 percent enriched uranium to run a research reactor while suspending operations at its Fordow facility of centrifuges capable of making more (2013). Fordow itself was once a secret site; when discovered, it became the subject of Western demands that it close entirely. Now Western proposals suggest that activity at it be suspended, with safeguards making it difficult to restart. When the P5+1 first formed in 2006 to coordinate the positions of the international community, its negotiators insisted that Iran halt fuel-cycle activities before negotiations could proceed; in 2009, this condition was dropped. Faced with this record, Iran has had little incentive to treat any proposal as final. With subtlety and no little daring, it has at each stage cast itself as less interested in a solution than the world’s combined major powers and invited them to make new concessions.
When the negotiations started in 2003, Iran had 130 centrifuges. At this writing, it has deployed approximately 19,000 (though only half are in use). At the beginning of the negotiations, Iran was not able to produce any fissile material; in the November 2013 interim agreement, Iran acknowledged that it possessed seven tons of low-grade enriched uranium that, with the numbers of centrifuges Iran possesses, can be transformed into weapons-grade material in a number of months (enough for seven to ten Hiroshima-type bombs). In the interim agreement, Iran promised to give up about half of its 20 percent enriched uranium but through a circuitous route; it pledged to convert it into a form from which it can easily be reconverted to its original status, and it has retained the means to do so. In any event, with the number of centrifuges now in Iran’s possession, the 20 percent stage is less significant because uranium enriched to 5 percent (the threshold claimed to be a negotiations achievement) can be enriched to weapons grade in a matter of months.
The attitude of the negotiators of the two sides reflected different perceptions of world order. The Iranian negotiators conveyed to their opposite numbers that they would not be deterred from pursuing their course even at the risk of an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The Western negotiators were convinced (and, underscoring their commitment to peace and diplomacy, periodically referred to this conviction) that the consequences of a military attack on Iran dwarfed the risks of a growth in the Iranian nuclear capability. They were reinforced in their calculations by the mantra of professionals: that every deadlock needs to be broken by a new proposal, the responsibility for which they assumed. For the West, the central question was whether a diplomatic solution could be found or whether military measures would be necessary. In Iran, the nuclear issue was treated as one aspect of a general struggle over regional order and ideological supremacy, fought in a range of arenas and territories with methods spanning the spectrum of war and peace—military and paramilitary operations, diplomacy, formal negotiation, propaganda, political subversion—in fluid and mutually reinforcing combination. In this context, the quest for an agreement must contend with the prospect that Tehran will be at least exploring a strategy of relaxing tensions just enough to break the sanctions regime but retaining a substantial nuclear infrastructure and a maximum freedom of action to turn it into a weapons program later.
The process resulted in the November 2013 interim agreement, in which Iran agreed to a qualified, temporary suspension of enrichment in return for a lifting of some of the international sanctions imposed on it for its defiance of UN Security Council demands. But because Iranian enrichment was permitted to continue for the six months of the interim agreement, its continuation as well as the implementation of more comprehensive restrictions will merge with the deadline to complete the overall agreement. The practical consequence has been the de facto acceptance of an Iranian enrichment program, leaving unresolved (but only on the Western side) its scale.
Negotiations for a permanent agreement are in process at this writing. While the terms—or whether any are achievable—are not yet known, it is clear that they will be, like so many issues in the Middle East, about “red lines.” Will the Western negotiators (operating via the P5+1) insist that the red line be at the enrichment capability, as the UN resolutions have insisted? This would be a formidable task. Iran would need to reduce its centrifuges to a level consistent with the plausible requirements of a civilian nuclear program, as well as destroy or mothball the remainder. Such an outcome, whose practical effect is the abandonment of a military nuclear program by Iran, would open the prospect of a fundamental change in the West’s relationship with Iran, particularly if it was linked to a consensus that the two sides would work to curtail both the Sunni and Shia waves of militant extremism now threatening the region.
In view of the Iranian Supreme Leader’s repeated declarations that Iran would give up no capability it already possesses—statements reiterated by a panoply of senior Iranian officials—the Iranian emphasis seems to have shifted to moving the red line to the production of warheads, or to curtailing its centrifuges to a level that still leaves a substantial margin for a military nuclear program. Under such a scheme Iran would enshrine in an international agreement its Supreme Leader’s alleged fatwa against building nuclear weapons (a ruling that has never been published or seen by anyone outside the Iranian power structure); it would pledge to the P5+1 not to build nuclear weapons, and grant inspection rights to observe compliance. The practical effect of such undertakings would depend on the amount of time it would take Iran to build a weapon after it abrogated or broke such an agreement. In view of the fact that Iran managed to build two secret enrichment plants while under international inspection, this breakout estimate would have to consider the possibility of undisclosed violations. An agreement must not leave Iran as a “virtual” nuclear power—a country that can become a military nuclear power in a time frame shorter than any non-nuclear neighbor could match or any nuclear power could reliably prevent.
Iran has brought exceptional skill and consistency to bear on its proclaimed goal of undermining the Middle East state system and ejecting Western influence from the region. Whether Iran were to build and test a nuclear weapon in the near term or “merely” retain the capability to do so within months of choosing to do so, the implications on regional and global order will be comparable. Even if Iran were to stop at a virtual nuclear weapons capability, it will be seen to have achieved this level in defiance of the most comprehensive international sanctions ever imposed on any country. The temptations of Iran’s geostrategic rivals—such as Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—to develop or purchase their own nuclear programs to match the Iranian capability will become irresistible. The risk of an Israeli preemptive attack would rise significantly. As for Iran, having withstood sanctions in developing a nuclear weapons capability, it will gain prestige, new powers of intimidation, and enhanced capacity to act with conventional weapons or non-nuclear forms of unconventional war.
It has been argued that a new approach to U.S.-Iranian relations will develop out of the nuclear negotiations, which will compensate for the abandonment of historic Western positions. The example of America’s relationship with China is often cited to this effect, because it moved from hostility to mutual acceptance and even cooperation in a relatively short period of time in the 1970s. Iran may be prepared, it is sometimes said, to constrain the diplomatic use of its virtual nuclear military program in exchange for the goodwill and strategic cooperation of the United States.
The comparison is not apt. China was facing forty-two Soviet divisions on its northern border after a decade of escalating mutual hostility and Chinese internal turmoil. It had every reason to explore an alternative international system in which to anchor itself. No such incentive is self-evident in Iranian-Western relations. In the past decade, Iran has witnessed the removal of two of its most significant adversaries, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—ironically by American action—and it has deepened its influence and its military role in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Two of its principal competitors for regional influence, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have been preoccupied by internal challenges even as Iran has moved swiftly and apparently successfully to crush its internal opposition following a 2009 pro-democracy uprising. Its leaders have largely been welcomed into international respectability without committing to any major substantive change in policy and courted by Western companies for investment opportunities even while sanctions are still in place. Ironically, the rise of Sunni jihadism along Iran’s frontiers may produce second thoughts in Iran. But it is equally plausible that Tehran regards the strategic landscape as shifting in its favor and its revolutionary course as being vindicated. Which option Iran chooses will be determined by its own calculations, not American preconceptions.
Until this writing, Iran and the West have attached different meanings to the concept of negotiation. While American and European negotiators were speaking with cautious optimism about prospects for a nuclear agreement and exercising utmost restraint in their public statements in hopes of fostering a favorable atmosphere, Ayatollah Khamenei described the nuclear talks as part of an eternal religious struggle in which negotiation was a form of combat and compromise was forbidden. As late as May 2014, with six weeks remaining in the interim agreement period, the Iranian Supreme Leader was reported to have described the nuclear talks as follows:
The reason for the emphasis placed on the continuation of combat, is not because of the war-mongering of the Islamic establishment. It is only rational that for crossing a region filled with pirates, one should fully equip themselves and be motivated and capable of defending themselves.
Under such circumstances, we have no option but to continue combat and allow the idea of combat to rule all domestic and foreign affairs of the country. Those who seek to promote concession-making and surrendering to bullies and accuse the Islamic establishment of warmongering are indeed committing treason.
All the officials in the country in the field of economy, science, culture, policy-making, lawmaking and foreign negotiations should be aware that they are fighting and are continuing the combat for the establishment and survival of the Islamic system … Jihad is never-ending because Satan and the satanic front will exist eternally.
For nations, history plays the role that character confers on human beings. In Iran’s proud and rich history, one can distinguish three different approaches to international order. There was the policy of the state preceding the Khomeini revolution: vigilant in protecting its borders, respectful of other nations’ sovereignties, willing to participate in alliances—in effect, pursuing its national interests by Westphalian principles. There is also the tradition of empire, which viewed Iran as the center of the civilized world and which sought to eliminate the autonomy of its surrounding countries as far as its power could reach. Finally, there is the Iran of jihad described in the preceding pages. From which of these traditions does the changed comportment of some high-ranking Iranian officials draw its inspiration? If we assume a fundamental change, what brought it about? Is the conflict psychological or strategic? Will it be resolved by a change in attitude or a modification of policy? And if the latter, what is the modification that should be sought? Can the two countries’ views of world order be reconciled? Or will the world have to wait until jihadist pressures fade, as they disappeared earlier in the Ottoman Empire as a result of a change in power dynamics and domestic priorities? On the answer to these questions depends the future of U.S.-Iranian relations and perhaps the peace of the world.
In principle, the United States should be prepared to reach a geopolitical understanding with Iran on the basis of Westphalian principles of nonintervention and develop a compatible concept of regional order. Until the Khomeini revolution, Iran and the United States had been de facto allies based on a hard-nosed assessment of the national interest by American presidents from both parties. Iranian and American national interests were treated by both sides as parallel. Both opposed the domination of the region by a superpower, which during that period was the Soviet Union. Both were prepared to rely on principles of respect for other sovereignties in their policy toward the region. Both favored the economic development of the region—even when it did not proceed on an adequately broad front. From the American point of view, there is every reason to reestablish such a relationship. The tension in Iranian-American relations has resulted from Tehran’s adoption of jihadist principles and rhetoric together with direct assaults on American interests and views of international order.
How Iran synthesizes its complex legacies will be driven in large part by internal dynamics; in a country of such cultural and political intricacy, these may be unpredictable to outside observers and not subject to direct influence by foreign threats or blandishments. But whatever face Iran presents to the outside world, it does not alter the reality that Iran needs to make a choice. It must decide whether it is a country or a cause. The United States should be open to a cooperative course and encourage it. Yet the ingenuity and determination of Western negotiators, while a necessary component of this evolution, will not be sufficient to secure it. Abandonment by Iran of support for such groups as Hezbollah would be an important and necessary step in reestablishing a constructive pattern of bilateral relations. The test will be whether Iran interprets the chaos along its frontiers as a threat or as an opportunity to fulfill millennial hopes.
The United States needs to develop a strategic view of the process in which it is engaged. Administration spokesmen explaining the reduced American role in the Middle East have described a vision of an equilibrium of Sunni states (and perhaps Israel) balancing Iran. Even were such a constellation to come to pass, it could only be sustained by an active American foreign policy. For the balance of power is never static; its components are in constant flux. The United States would be needed as a balancer for the foreseeable future. The role of balancer is best carried out if America is closer to each of the contending forces than they are to each other, and does not let itself be lured into underwriting either side’s strategy, particularly at the extremes. Pursuing its own strategic objectives, the United States can be a crucial factor—perhaps the crucial factor—in determining whether Iran pursues the path of revolutionary Islam or that of a great nation legitimately and importantly lodged in the Westphalian system of states. But America can fulfill that role only on the basis of involvement, not of withdrawal.
VISION AND REALITY
The issue of peace in the Middle East has, in recent years, focused on the highly technical subject of nuclear weapons in Iran. There is no shortcut around the imperative of preventing their appearance. But it is well to recall periods when other seemingly intractable crises in the Middle East were given a new dimension by fortitude and vision.
Between 1967 and 1973, there had been two Arab-Israeli wars, two American military alerts, an invasion of Jordan by Syria, a massive American airlift into a war zone, multiple hijackings of airliners, and the breaking of diplomatic relations with the United States by most Arab countries. Yet it was followed by a peace process that yielded three Egyptian-Israeli agreements (culminating in a peace treaty in 1979); a disengagement agreement with Syria in 1974 (which has lasted four decades, despite the Syrian civil war); the Madrid Conference in 1991, which restarted the peace process; the Oslo agreement between the PLO and Israel in 1993; and a peace treaty between Jordan and Israel in 1994.
These goals were reached because three conditions were met: an active American policy; the thwarting of designs seeking to establish a regional order by imposing universalist principles through violence; and the emergence of leaders with a vision of peace.
Two events in my experience symbolize that vision. In 1981, during his last visit to Washington, President Sadat invited me to come to Egypt the following spring for the celebration when the Sinai Peninsula would be returned to Egypt by Israel. Then he paused for a moment and said, “Don’t come for the celebration—it would be too hurtful to Israel. Come six months later, and you and I will drive to the top of Mount Sinai together, where I plan to build a mosque, a church, and a synagogue, to symbolize the need for peace.”
Yitzhak Rabin, once chief of staff of the Israeli army, was Prime Minister during the first political agreement ever between Israel and Egypt in 1975, and then again when he and former Defense Minister, now Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres negotiated a peace agreement with Jordan in 1994. On the occasion of the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement, in July 1994 Rabin spoke at a joint session of the U.S. Congress together with King Hussein of Jordan:
Today we are embarking on a battle which has no dead and no wounded, no blood and no anguish. This is the only battle which is a pleasure to wage: the battle of peace …
In the Bible, our Book of Books, peace is mentioned in its various idioms, two hundred and thirty-seven times. In the Bible, from which we draw our values and our strength, in the Book of Jeremiah, we find a lamentation for Rachel the Matriarch. It reads:
“Refrain your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears: for their work shall be rewarded, says the Lord.”
I will not refrain from weeping for those who are gone. But on this summer day in Washington, far from home, we sense that our work will be rewarded, as the Prophet foretold.
Both Sadat and Rabin were assassinated. But their achievements and inspiration are inextinguishable.
Once again, doctrines of violent intimidation challenge the hopes for world order. But when they are thwarted—and nothing less will do—there may come a moment similar to what led to the breakthroughs recounted here, when vision overcame reality.