Taking on Tehran

Kenneth Pollack and Ray Takeyh

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2005

Summary:  If Washington wants to derail Iran's nuclear program, it must take advantage of a split in Tehran between hard-liners, who care mostly about security, and pragmatists, who want to fix Iran's ailing economy. By promising strong rewards for compliance and severe penalties for defiance, Washington can strengthen the pragmatists' case that Tehran should choose butter over bombs.

Kenneth Pollack is Director of Research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and the author of The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America. Ray Takeyh is a Senior Fellow in Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

It may now be possible to fashion a multilateral policy that can persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear program. Working together, the United States and its allies should lay out two dramatically diverging paths for Iran. On one course, Iran would agree to give up its nuclear program, accept a comprehensive inspection regime, and end its support for terrorism. In exchange, the United States would lift sanctions and settle Iran's claims over the assets of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The West would also consider bringing Iran into international economic organizations such as the World Trade Organization, granting Iran increased commercial ties, and perhaps even providing it with economic assistance. Western nations could sweeten the deal by agreeing to assist Iran with its energy needs (the ostensible reason for its nuclear research program) and to forswear direct military attack. The United States could also help create a new security architecture in the Persian Gulf in which Iranians, Arabs, and Americans would find cooperative ways to address their security concerns, much as Washington did with the Russians in Europe during the 1970s and the 1980s. If, on the other hand, Iran decided to stay its current course, U.S. allies would join Washington in imposing precisely the sort of sanctions the mullahs fear would scuttle Iran's precarious economy. These sanctions could take the form of everything from barring investment in specific projects or entire sectors (such as the oil industry) to severing all commercial contacts with Iran if it proved utterly unwilling to address Western demands.

UPPING THE ANTE

In an ideal world, the Iranians would agree to work out all their differences with the West in a single grand bargain. Such a comprehensive deal would serve Washington well, as it would be the fastest way to resolve current disputes and the surest platform from which to build a new, cooperative relationship. In fact, under the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, Washington repeatedly offered such an approach. But conservative ideologues in Tehran repeatedly quashed the efforts of any Iranian who attempted to take up the United States' conciliatory offers. The Clinton administration made nearly a dozen unilateral gestures toward Iran, including the partial lifting of sanctions, to enable the reformist government of President Muhammad Khatami to participate in such negotiations. But these overtures triggered a conservative backlash that eventually debilitated Khatami's government.

Even if a grand bargain seems unlikely given Iran's complicated domestic politics, a policy of true "carrots and sticks" remains a viable option. In this case, Western nations would lay out the same two paths for Iran but would do so as statements of a joint policy, rather than as the goals of bilateral negotiations with Tehran. Officials from the United States, European countries, and Japan--as well as from any other country willing to participate, including China and Russia--would explicitly define what they expect Iran to do and not do. To each of these actions, the allies would attach positive and negative inducements (the "carrots" and the "sticks"), so that Tehran could clearly understand both the benefits it would gain from ending nuclear and terrorist activities and the penalties it would suffer for refusing to end them.

Such an effort will not be easy. The United States and its allies will have a hard time defining clear benchmarks to measure Iran's compliance, and they will likely disagree over how much to reward or punish Tehran at each step. But the approach can work, so long as a few critical measures are applied.

First, the strategy requires that both the potential rewards and the potential penalties be significant. Iranian hard-liners will not abandon their nuclear program easily. Although the mullahs are not as stubborn as North Korean leader Kim Jong Il continues to be--they would not knowingly allow three million fellow citizens to die of starvation just to preserve their nuclear program--they unquestionably are willing to tolerate considerable hardship to keep their nuclear hopes alive. In order to change Tehran's behavior, therefore, the inducements will have to be potent: big rewards that could revive the economy or heavy sanctions that would surely cripple it.

Second, Tehran must be presented with the prospect of serious rewards, not just punishments; Washington must be willing to make concessions to Iran in return for real concessions from it. The most obvious reason for this condition is that the Europeans insist on it. European diplomats have consistently said that they can persuade their reluctant governments to threaten serious sanctions for Iran's continued misbehavior only if the United States agrees to reward compliance with real economic benefits.

The carrots, moreover, need to be as big as the sticks. Only the prospect of significant bonuses will provide ammunition to pragmatists in Tehran who argue that Iran should revise its nuclear stance to secure the benefits necessary to revitalize its troubled economy. Current levels of trade and investment from Europe and Japan have not been adequate to solve Iran's deep-seated economic problems. The pragmatists' case will become convincing only if Tehran's compliance with Western demands can help the Iranian economy do better than it does now. Granting enough economic concessions to maintain the status quo probably would not sway undecided Iranians; significantly more generous incentives might.

The painful experience of trying to make the Iraq sanctions stick during the 1990s suggests another prerequisite for the approach that must be adopted with Tehran. One of the lessons learned from Iraq was that, although many governments threatened Saddam Hussein with sanctions if he defied the international community, few imposed them when he did. Spelling out in advance all of the steps Tehran is expected to take or to avoid, as well as the specific rewards and punishments they would incur, is the best way to prevent Iran and U.S. allies from reneging on their commitments as they did in Iraq.