If Anybody Knows Your Iran Policy, Does It Even Exist? Stephen M. Walt

What is the Trump administration’s objective with Iran? We’ve all been watching its efforts for months now—including National Security Advisor John Bolton’s announcement on Sunday that the United States had sent an aircraft carrier to the Middle East in response to “a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” from Tehran—and I still can’t figure out what it is trying to achieve. That’s partly because President Donald Trump prizes being unpredictable, and his chaotically run administration is either unable or unwilling to provide clear and coherent justifications for many of its policy decisions. If you never tell anyone exactly what you’re trying to do, it’s harder for outsiders to hold you accountable later.

We are forced, therefore, to divine the administration’s objectives for ourselves. Here’s my best guess at some of the possibilities.

Option 1: It’s just Kabuki theater. It’s possible that the broader drama about Iran is mostly posturing designed to keep the Saudis, Israelis, Gulf states, and wealthy Republican donors like Sheldon Adelson happy. Maybe Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor John Bolton know deep down that the regime isn’t going to fall and isn’t going to renegotiate a better deal than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). But having criticized former President Barack Obama’s handling of Iran, and under pressure from allies and domestic lobbies alike, it was inevitable that Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton would revert back to coercive pressure, even though that approach never worked in the past (at least, not on its own). This interpretation assumes the administration is under no illusions that it is going to work this time either.

To be honest, I don’t think this is what is really going on. If this policy was just smoke and mirrors, there would be little point in exacerbating already strained relations with some long-standing allies by threatening to punish them if they keep buying Iranian oil. That’s a step you’d take only if you really felt it would yield benefits greater than the diplomatic costs. For this reason, I don’t think Option 1 is the real story.

Option 2: Pressure Iran to sign a new deal. According to this view, the goal of “maximum pressure” is to force Tehran back to the table and convince President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to accept the 12 demands that Pompeo laid out a year ago. In this scenario, an increasingly desperate Iran will end its support for Hezbollah, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and the Houthis in Yemen; stop trying to influence politics in Iraq; and accept more stringent restrictions on its nuclear capabilities (or maybe even abandon them entirely).

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, as long as we’re dreaming, I’d like a private jet, along with a big pile of cash to pay for its operations.

The problem with this lovely vision is that it won’t work. Tighter sanctions on Iran are unlikely to convince it to accept all of America’s demands, especially when the United States no longer has the multilateral backing it enjoyed while negotiating the JCPOA. Even much weaker states don’t like giving in to blackmail, because doing so just invites new demands. External sanctions are painful, but they often strengthen authoritarian regimes in the short to medium term. More than a decade of tough sanctions didn’t convince Tehran to give up all its enrichment capacity before, and it’s not likely to do so now.

There’s a further problem with this rosy scenario: Why would Iran agree to any sort of deal with the same president who tore up the JCPOA and who has repeatedly broken promises to numerous business partners and boasted about lying to close U.S. allies? If Option 2 is what the administration is trying to accomplish, it is likely to be disappointed.

Option 3: Regime change. Instead of a new and better deal, Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton may well be genuinely interested in toppling the clerical regime, and they may have convinced themselves that inflicting ever increasing amounts of pain on the Iranian people will finally lead them to rise up and overthrow the mullahs. Bolton and Pompeo have said as much on various occasions, and Bolton’s close (and reportedly lucrative) association with Iranian exile groups is consistent with that objective as well.

No government is utterly impregnable, of course, so one can never rule out the possibility of an internal upheaval. But history suggests that the odds are slim. The United States embargoed Cuba for decades yet Fidel Castro’s regime remains in place despite his death in 2016. Sanctions eventually convinced the unlamented Muammar al-Qaddafi to give up Libya’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, but Libyans didn’t rise up against him until after sanctions were lifted, and it still took an external military intervention to topple him from power. There may be plenty of Iranians who don’t like the clerical regime, but most of the population is also intensely patriotic and likely to harbor even greater resentment toward the distant superpower that is working overtime to cripple their economy. Trump’s decision to abandon the JCPOA also played into the hands of Iran’s hard-liners because it vindicates their claims that the United States is irrevocably hostile and that its word cannot be trusted.

Moreover, regime change is hardly a reliable answer to America’s differences with Iran. There’s no guarantee that pro-American forces would gain power should the clerical regime collapse, and one suspects that pro-American voices in Iran are becoming scarcer as Washington inflicts more and more suffering there. If we’ve learned anything from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and Syria, it is that removing an unsavory regime often makes things worse, not better.