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.

Last, all incentives must be applied in graduated increments, so that small steps, positive or negative, would bring Tehran commensurate gains or sanctions. For Iranians to even consider forgoing their nuclear ambitions, they will need to see tangible gains from the start, as well as be able to point to a pot of gold at the end. Conversely, Tehran probably will not change course if it does not systematically suffer increasingly severe consequences for its reticence. Without immediate and automatic penalties, it is likely to act as it did throughout the 1990s, dismissing the West's promises and warnings as empty rhetoric while continuing to advance its program under the status quo.

THE LEAST BAD OPTION

There is, of course, no guarantee that such an approach will persuade Tehran to end its nuclear projects or its support for terrorism. Even if Iran does halt these projects, the strategy is far from perfect: at the very least, it will require Washington to live for some time longer with a regime it abhors. But by setting out clearly the rewards Iran would accrue for cooperating and the penalties it would suffer for bucking, a carrots-and-sticks policy would force Iran's leadership to confront the choice it never wanted to make: whether to shelve its nuclear program or risk the crippling of its economy. Because Iran's economic woes have been a major factor in popular discontent with the regime, there is good reason to believe that, if forced to make such a choice, Tehran would grudgingly opt to save its economy and look for other ways to deal with its security and foreign policy aspirations.

This approach also is the best available, for it has a much greater chance of succeeding than the alternatives. Invading Iran simply should not be an option; Washington should not try to deal with Tehran's nuclear program and its support for terrorism as it did with the Taliban and Saddam's regime. The United States is now in the thick of reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving it with very limited forces available to invade another country. Iran's mountainous terrain and large, nationalistic population would likely make any military campaign daunting. Postwar reconstruction would be even more complex and debilitating there than it has been in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Although most Iranians want a different type of government than they have and a better relationship with the United States, it would be foolhardy to believe that Washington could solve its problems with Tehran's nuclear ambitions by staging a coup or inciting a popular revolution to topple the current regime. Young Iranians seem to have a better image of the United States than their elders did, but their greater open-mindedness should not be confused with a desire to see U.S. interference in Iranian politics, something Iranians have responded to with ferocity in the past. Furthermore, although many Iranians may want a different government, they have shown little inclination to do what would be necessary to dislodge the current one. Most are weary of revolutions: when they had the chance to start one, amid student demonstrations in the summer of 1999, few heeded the call. There is good reason to believe that this regime's days are numbered, but little to think that it will fall soon enough or that the United States can do much to speed its demise. Advocating regime change might be a useful adjunct to a new Iran policy, but it will not solve Washington's immediate problems with Iran's nuclear program and its support for terrorism.

Likewise, at present, the costs, uncertainties, and risks of waging an air campaign to destroy Iran's nuclear sites are too great to make it anything but a measure of last resort--the hopes of some in the Bush administration notwithstanding. Because Tehran has managed to conceal major nuclear facilities, it is unclear by how much even successful bombing could set back the country's nuclear development. Moreover, no matter how little damage it suffered, Iran would likely retaliate. It has the most capable terrorist network in the world, and the United States would have to stand ready for a full onslaught of attacks. Perhaps even more important, a U.S. military campaign would probably prompt Tehran to unleash a clandestine war on U.S. forces in Iraq. The Iranians are hardly omnipotent there, but they could make the situation far more miserable and deadly than it already is. Without better intelligence about Iran's nuclear program and better protection against an Iranian counterattack, the idea of a U.S. air campaign should be kept on the shelf as a last-ditch option.

Iran today is at a crossroads. It might restrain its nuclear ambitions to the parameters set out in the NPT, or it might rashly cross the threshold, brandishing the bomb as a tool of revolutionary diplomacy. It might play a positive role in rebuilding a stable Iraq, or it might be a dogmatic actor that exacerbates Iraq's sectarian and ethnic cleavages. As difficult as the U.S. predicament is in Iraq today, Tehran could make it much worse: it could dramatically inflame the insurgency and destabilize its already insecure neighbor. Since the demise of Saddam Hussein, Iran has dispatched clerics and Revolutionary Guards to Iraq and released funds to establish an intricate network of influence there. It is still unclear what the theocracy's specific goals are, but there is concern that they could be at odds with those of the United States.

Much now depends on Washington's conduct, the security environment that emerges in the region, and the extent to which Washington and its allies can force Tehran to choose between its nuclear ambitions and its economic well-being. Given Iran's economic frailty and shifting power dynamics within its leadership, a strategy offering strong rewards and severe penalties has a reasonable chance of discouraging Tehran from its nuclear plans, especially if the Europeans and the Japanese are willing to participate in full. In fact, it is the only plan that has any real prospect of success at present. Rather than continue to criticize everyone else's Iran policy, the United States should stop making perfect the enemy of good enough. Washington has a chance to curb Tehran's alarming behavior, with the help of its allies and without resort to force. If it does not seize the opportunity now, at some point soon it will likely wish it had.