The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat

by Vali Nasr

  Iran has since become a growing headache for American policy makers. At issue is Iran’s ever-expanding nuclear program, which first came into public view in 2003. Washington might have turned down two offers to negotiate a grand bargain, but it would certainly like to see an end to the nuclear program. Iran, however, sees no value in giving up the program without resolving all outstanding issues between the two countries. As former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaie has put it, “Either talks resolve all outstanding issues between the U.S. and Iran or there is no point in talking at all.” Iranian leaders have come to believe that what the United States wants is not just an end to their nuclear program, but an end to their regime. There is plenty of truth in that.

  With mutual suspicion so high, it should not be surprising that Iran’s nuclear program has unfolded like a game of cat and mouse. As Muhammad Javad Larijani, a senior adviser to Khamenei, put it, “America will never let Iran into the nuclear club through the front door, so we will have to jump over the wall.”15 And that is pretty much what Iran has been doing: confounding diplomats and inspectors while building its program inside hidden sites, spread around the country and fortified to withstand military strikes.

  Iran has all along claimed that it does not want nuclear weapons. Khamenei is on record saying in 1995 that “from an intellectual, ideological and fiqhi (religious law) perspective, the Islamic Republic of Iran considers the possession of nuclear weapons as a big sin and it believes that stockpiling such weapons is futile, harmful and dangerous.”16

  Iran says that its nuclear program is intended for peaceful purposes. It wants nuclear power, the regime insists, in order to address its growing electricity needs. That is why the Shah first invested in a civilian Iranian nuclear program in the 1970s—he wanted Iran to be the world’s fifth-largest economy by the turn of the millennium. It was he who created nuclear research facilities in Iran’s universities, built the Tehran Research Reactor, and started the construction of Iran’s only nuclear power plant in the southern city of Bushehr on the Persian Gulf. He also ordered another two dozen reactors from Canada and France and sent dozens of students to study nuclear physics at places like MIT in the United States or Imperial College in England. Many of these foreign-trained students now run Iran’s nuclear program.

  Iran’s rulers have similarly told their populace that by mastering nuclear technology, Iran can leap to the head of the development pack. The atom, they claim, can do for Iran what software has done for India. Ali Larijani told a 2007 gathering I attended in Dubai that the key technologies for emerging economies are 1) nanotechnology, 2) biotechnology, and 3) nuclear technology. Iran, he went on, has settled on number three to win its future. By denying Iran nuclear technology, argue the country’s leaders, the West wants to keep Iran backward and subservient.17 Going nuclear is a matter of claiming equal rights to progress—an issue of what Iranians routinely call “international technology democracy.”

  There is an overlay of Third Worldist rhetoric in the way Iranian leaders talk about their nuclear program and the U.S. opposition to it. An Indian diplomat told me, “there is a spirit of Bandung [the Indonesian city where the non-aligned movement of Third World countries was born in 1955] at play in Iran’s conversation … they tell us ‘today it is us, tomorrow it will be you.’ ”

  This line of argument plays well on the street in Iran, but there are also clear strategic reasons why Iran wants nuclear technology and perhaps the potential to build a nuclear arsenal. The Shah thought Iran would need nuclear know-how—just short of an arsenal—in order to emerge as a great power and assert hegemony over its neighborhood. Iran’s rulers today may rail against the Shah, but they have bought into his ambitions lock, stock, and barrel. The theocracy’s current vision of grandeur, of a nuclear Persia reigning unimpeded from the Volga to the Tigris, with the Persian Gulf as an Iranian lake, is, ironically, the Shah’s vision.18 Nuclear capability then, as now, was a passport into the global elite. The main difference between the Shah and the ayatollahs who toppled him is that the Shah was a lot better at the game of pushing toward this ambition. He skillfully used the Cold War to persuade the West to recognize Iran’s strategically supreme position in the Persian Gulf, and to give him all the nuclear technology and expertise he could buy with Iran’s considerable oil wealth.

  Iran’s desire for a nuclear deterrent today has much to do with how it sees its security needs in the region. In Iran’s immediate neighborhood the main strategic threat comes from the U.S. military presence, which is far stronger than Iran’s and prevents it from asserting its hegemonic ambitions. Tehran wants the United States out of the Persian Gulf so that Iranian power can run unimpeded and make the Persian Gulf states (which currently rely on American military power) fall into line.

  A senior German journalist told me that at the end of a 1974 interview with the Shah, he mentioned to the monarch that he was headed for Abu Dhabi. “When the plane gets to the other side of the Persian Gulf,” the Shah told him, “I want you to look out the window. You will see clear black circles visible in the golden desert sand. A thin black line juts out of each circle, connecting it to the next circle further inland. The chain stretches for miles. These are the remnants of the ancient Iranian irrigation system [qanat]. For as far as those circles and lines go is Iranian territory.”

  The Shah did not intend to literally invade Abu Dhabi the way Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 (although Iran did take over three strategic islands in the Persian Gulf from the UAE in 1974). But he did mean that Iran sees the Persian Gulf as its natural zone of influence stretching back millennia. That fundamental nationalist attitude is embedded in the Islamic Republic’s view of the region. The clerical regime does not speak the language of imperial Persian glories, but it believes in them nevertheless. Iran thinks of the Persian Gulf as its “near abroad,” and in the same way that Russia, China, and India (which for decades blamed America for enabling Pakistan to resist Indian hegemony) resent America’s shielding of their smaller neighbors, Iran sees the U.S. presence in the Persian Gulf as hindering its great-power ambitions. It is for this reason that Iran peppers its statements on resolving the nuclear crisis with demands for talks about “regional security”; it is code for Iran’s role in the Persian Gulf.

  Nuclear capability combined with the U.S. departure from the Persian Gulf will enable Iran to realize foreign policy ambitions going back at least to 1971, when Britain’s departure from the Gulf first allowed Iran to imagine the area as its zone of influence.

  Iran also has broader ambitions to spread its influence over the whole Middle East. Before the Islamic revolution, Iran saw the Arab world as hostile territory. There may have been alliances of convenience with Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia, but Iranians were outsiders to a fiercely nationalist Arab world. The Shah saw no point in trying to gain regional leadership.

  But Khomeini thought Iranians could lead Arabs if it was in the name of Islam. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has spent blood and ample treasure to make its influence felt all the way to the shores of the Mediterranean. Yet Iran’s Shia faith separates it from the dominant Sunni creed that reigns supreme in the Arab world, where Shias are an often despised and even hated minority. The more Iran pushed for Islamic unity, the more the Arabs resisted by mobilizing Sunni sectarianism.19

  Iran had to settle for influence over pockets of Shiism in the Arab world, in Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Where the Shias could wield power—via Hezbollah in Lebanon, in conjunction with the Alawites (who stand close to Shiism and Iran) in Syria, and within the government of post-Saddam Iraq—Iran could realize its goal.

  Iran achieved its greatest success with Sunnis by harping on the “secular” Islamic cause: Israel and the Palestinians. Khomeini’s strategy had always been that Iran had to be more Arab than the Arabs, and that meant straining every nerve to stand tall against Israel. Iran could and should lead the Arabs against Israel, thought Khomeini and his successors, for success there would win Ar
ab hearts and minds and convince Arabs of the value of Iranian leadership. The strategy was at its most successful when Iran’s Holocaust-denying President Ahmadinejad attained rock-star status on the Arab street with his rhetorical attacks on Israel. He lost no opportunity to call for the Jewish state’s demise and back the forces of Arab rejectionism.

  But Arab favor proved fickle. When a rebellion against Syria’s Assad regime erupted into a thinly disguised sectarian knife fight in 2011, the Arab world stopped lauding Iran for opposing Israel and took up denouncing the Persian Shia outsiders for foisting a minority Alawite regime on Syria’s mostly Sunni populace.

  Part of the problem feeding this regional wavering toward Iran is that its political ambitions lack economic legs. Iran does not have the checkbook power of Qatar or Saudi Arabia, or the commercial muscle of Turkey. Islamic unity and anti-Israeli posturing go only so far. They cannot build the kind of interdependencies that bind countries and amount to real and long-running influence. The catch is that the more Iran tries to win influence in the Arab world, especially by baiting Israel, the more it invites international isolation and thereby undermines its economy.

  Nuclear capability is in many ways a solution to these problems. It pushes back against American intervention and reinforces Iranian claims to be fighting the real battle against Israel. Nuclear capability, Tehran calculates, will cow the Arabs and compensate for Iran’s economic weakness.

  The Islamic Republic first dusted off the Shah’s nuclear program when it was worried that Saddam Hussein was going to resume his war against Iran, possibly with chemical weapons. The West would not stand in his way; only a credible deterrence could dissuade Saddam from carrying out such savagery.20 Saddam is gone, but the strategic threat facing Iran remains. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2011 Iran spent $8 billion (2 percent of GDP) on military purchases. In the same year, Saudi Arabia spent more than six times that sum ($43 billion, or 11.2 percent of GDP); the United Arab Emirates spent almost twice as much ($15.7 billion, or 7.3 percent of GDP), and Israel spent 1.5 times as much ($13 billion, or 6.3 percent of GDP). Nor is the disparity merely one of dollar amounts; Iran’s regional rivals have weaponry that is technically superior and more advanced.

  International sanctions—which began right after the 1979 revolution—have cost the Iranian military access to the latest technology. Iran’s air force, for instance, is hopelessly outdated. It relies heavily on old F-14 Tomcats (the plane made famous by the 1986 Tom Cruise movie Top Gun) and F-4 Phantoms that the Shah bought from the United States decades ago. Iran will not be able to close the yawning technology gap anytime soon. And the lesson of the two Gulf wars is clear: Middle Eastern militaries are no match for what the United States and other Western militaries can bring to a fight.

  Nuclear capability is a convenient shortcut—the poor man’s path to strategic parity. Iran has learned the lesson of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had many more tanks and soldiers on its side of Europe, but that mattered little. America’s nuclear arsenal created a balance of power that kept the Red Army out of Western Europe.

  The nuclear program is also at the heart of the Iranian regime’s survival strategy. The atom seems as if it can make any dictatorship untouchable (though it did not save the Soviet Union), and that notion has clearly been swirling around in the minds of Iran’s rulers as they have pressed ahead with the nuclear program despite international objections over the past decade.21 It was common wisdom in Iran in 2003 that the big difference between North Korea and Iraq was that Kim Jong-il had nuclear arms and Saddam did not. And let us not forget that it was after the failed Bay of Pigs attempt at regime change that Fidel Castro invited the Soviet Union to station nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. Nor was American handling of India and Pakistan when those two countries went nuclear much of a discouragement. After decades of objecting to Indian nuclear weapons, the Bush administration reversed course and signed a civilian nuclear deal with India, proving that with time all will be forgotten and that once-illicit nuclear programs could become accepted and legitimate. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons have given the West an enormous stake in that troubled country’s stability. Western governments may lament Pakistan’s bad behavior, but they keep pouring billions into the bottomless pit of its economy as insurance against a collapse into mayhem and extremism. Iran draws from these cases the lesson that “forgiveness is much easier to obtain than permission.” Make nuclear Persia a fait accompli, and the world will accommodate the new reality.

  Iranians have always been ambiguous about precisely what “going nuclear” will mean. The official line is that Iran wants only the nuclear know-how needed to satisfy domestic energy needs—a curious claim from a country sitting atop such a large chunk of the world’s oil and natural gas reserves. Many among the country’s leaders, however, want the Japan option—which was also what the Shah was after. This means developing the knowledge and infrastructure needed to make nuclear weapons, but stopping “one turn of the screw short.” A smaller but growing segment of the ruling elite wants an actual nuclear arsenal. The harsher Western sanctions become, the more compelling becomes this last group’s argument. The seventy-three-year-old Khamenei, however, has not been willing to go along with it. In 2012, as domestic pressure to build the bomb continued to intensify, he repeated his 1995 fatwa declaring nuclear weapons a “great sin.”22

  Efforts to put a stop to Iran’s nuclear program began shortly after it first caught the attention of the West in 2003 with the discovery of a uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz in central Iran. The United States, France, Germany, and Britain joined forces to demand that Iran abandon enrichment altogether and sign the Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which gives the nuclear watchdog agency, the IAEA, considerably greater ability to monitor a nuclear program.

  The hardest and most exacting part of a nuclear program to master is uranium enrichment. Low enrichment levels will suffice to fuel nuclear power plants, but a bomb needs highly enriched uranium. Very little time and knowledge separate mastering enrichment from building a bomb. Iran claimed that its right to enrichment is protected under the NPT, and that it was merely trying to produce fuel for medical centers and experimental reactors. Those outdated reactors need 20 percent enriched fuel (more modern reactors can make do with lower enrichment levels), and once you get to the 20 percent threshold (the real hurdle in mastering enrichment) it’s a breezy dash to 90 percent or more (bomb-grade enrichment). One idea was that the United States should sell Iran newer research reactors that would take away Iran’s argument for 20 percent enrichment.23 Before that could be agreed, however, Iran decided it wanted to produce fuel for nuclear power plants too. The United States and its European allies bristled at the idea, and tensions grew as Iran expanded its enrichment capacity.

  From the outset, Washington declared a nuclear Iran to be unacceptable. Iran would use its nuclear capability to annihilate Israel, and short of that could provide a nuclear shield from behind which Hezbollah and Hamas could escalate their attacks on Israel. Similarly, a nuclear Iran would pose a newly alarming threat to its Arab neighbors, bullying them on regional issues or oil prices. Iran’s nuclear capability could also breathe new life into Islamic fundamentalism, energizing an ideology that Washington hopes will end up in the trash bin of history. Finally, Iran’s nuclear arsenal could spark proliferation throughout one of the world’s most volatile regions—not a comforting prospect for the West or Israel, which would surely find itself the target at which many of the weapons would be pointed.

  The immediate strategic threat to Israel would be less Iranian nuclear missiles than the boost that Hezbollah, Hamas, and other “asymmetric” foes of Israel would gain from being able to hide behind Iran’s nuclear skirts. The record of Hezbollah’s actions in Lebanon or Hamas’s in Israel (not to mention Iraqi Shia so-called special groups responsible for violence in Iraq and radical Shia outfits in Pakistan or the Persian Gulf)
makes this a serious threat. Some have even argued that instead of threatening war with Iran, America should have focused on knocking out the Assad regime in Syria. Without its Syrian outpost, Iran’s asymmetric capabilities would collapse (because Iran would not be able to support Hezbollah as effectively without using Syrian territory) and leave any possible Persian nukes with nothing to shield.24

  With so many arguments arrayed against Iran going nuclear, Washington made preventing Iran from doing so a top foreign policy objective. And to underscore its determination, it threatened Iran with military action. “All options are on the table” became the phrase meant to signal that America was ready to use air strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites.25

  But first America looked to the Europeans to negotiate an end to Iran’s nuclear program. And to make Iran go along, economic sanctions would be key. This policy of imposing sanctions while keeping open the prospect of talks (dubbed the “dual-track” policy) was the brainchild of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Undersecretary Nicholas Burns. It had its origins in Washington’s desire to patch things up with European governments still stewing over the Iraq war. Washington knew that the Europeans would ignore or even oppose its efforts on Iran unless they were kept on board and, indeed, in the forefront.

  Yet Washington remained wary of talks and worried that without some form of pressure on Tehran they would go nowhere. In practice, Washington embraced European-led talks, but it remained focused on coercion, lobbying to include Russia and China, whose support at the UN would be critical if serious sanctions were ever to become a reality.