The biggest foreign-policy challenge before Donald Trump isn’t North Korea, where the usual pattern of diplomacy and deception persists. Nor is it Russia; it doesn’t have the muscle to take on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which isn’t dead yet. Nor is the most imminent problem China, which doesn’t have the navy and air force to tempt fate in the South and East China Seas. It will one day really challenge the United States and East Asia’s democratic and anti-Chinese authoritarian states—the type of fascist confrontation that could lead to carnage—but Washington probably has years to check Beijing’s ambitions.
The most troublesome, immediate challenge comes from Iran. Trump’s decision to walk away from his predecessor’s deeply flawed arms-control agreement will likely soon consume the administration’s attention since, depending on what the mullahs do, war may once more be on the horizon. If the president fails to corral the clerics and the Revolutionary Guards through sanctions and the threat of force, the reverberations will surely weaken, if not gut, the administration’s capacity to play hardball elsewhere. Barack Obama punted the Iranian nuclear problem down the road slightly (and didn’t really pivot to Asia). Trump has probably eliminated the possibility of punting. He now may have to deal with Iran more decisively than his predecessors.
So far, the administration has developed a somewhat contradictory yet potentially successful Iran policy. The White House has all the elements of a regime-change strategy despite its denials; yet Donald Trump aspires to new nuclear negotiations, even suggesting a meeting could take place with Iranian president Hassan Rouhani without prerequisites. Some have called this Reaganesque. After all, Ronald Reagan sought the end of the Soviet empire. “While we must be cautious about forcing the pace of change [inside the Soviet bloc], we must not hesitate to declare our ultimate objectives and to take concrete actions to move toward them,” he declared at Westminster in 1982. “It is time that we committed ourselves as a nation—in both the public and private sectors—to assisting democratic development.” Putting “Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history” clearly meant regime change in Mother Russia. Yet Reagan welcomed nuclear talks with an array of Soviet leaders, from Leonid Brezhnev to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Can Donald Trump tailor-make an approach to an Iran that is suffering from many of the same kind of authoritarian afflictions that the Soviet Union did in the 1980s? Can he, his senior staff, and the essential worker bees understand enough Iranian history—its peoples’ long quest for representative government—to realize that what Reagan envisioned for the Soviet empire is applicable to the Islamic Republic? Reagan’s vision—“The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means”—is within reach in Persia if the clerical regime starts cracking. Iran is an empire that has, at least at its core, become a coherent nation-state. It carries many of the Middle East’s cultural liabilities, but it manifestly isn’t a land of tribes and oil wells. That it had the Muslim world’s only Islamic revolution 39 years ago is actually an enormous asset in its continuing religious and political evolution. Unlike most Muslims, Iranian Shiites and Sunnis know what it’s like to live in a theocracy. Most have found it wanting.
Post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan, the primary American question is whether Washington’s political elite is capable of imagining interventionism. A successful regime-change approach isn’t likely if one doesn’t really believe, as Reagan did, that American aid to those seeking freedom is both good and strategic. The loss of faith in this idea within the United States is profound and dovetails with an analysis that depicts the Middle East as no longer a compelling strategic theater (killer drones and American military bases in Bahrain and Qatar can handle the post-9/11 threat and the oil of the Persian Gulf). Even the Iranian nuclear quest doesn’t disturb this mindset. The Iraq syndrome has convinced the foreign-policy establishment and a not inconsiderable segment of the American public that the Muslim Middle East is a hopeless mess.
Can Trump carve out a democratic exception for Iran, where religious dictatorship appears to be secularizing the society it rules? Trump seems to have a serious animus against the Islamic Republic—he isn’t in the revisionist right-wing and libertarian camps (see Tucker Carlson, Patrick Buchanan, the American Conservative, and the Cato Institute) that veer toward Obama in their reassessment of, or disinterest in, the mullahs’ ambitions. Can Trump energetically try to collapse the clerical regime and advance democracy there while forging a détente with the repressive Sunni states? Such a contradiction isn’t difficult to handle operationally. The issue is whether the White House can overcome those within the bureaucracies who resist anything too forward-leaning. It’s a good bet that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and Emirati ruler Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who don’t want to see democracy bloom in their kingdoms, would be fine with American efforts to foster representative government in Persia.
Much of the Washington bureaucracy wants new nuclear negotiations with Tehran. Trump and secretary of state Michael Pompeo have said they do, too. But the odds are poor that North Korean-style summitry will elicit flexibility from Tehran. It is possible to imagine the circles around Rouhani encouraging Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to authorize new talks with Washington. Given the way Rouhani sold the nuclear deal (that the agreement would allow the clerical regime to keep and then expand its atomic program, significantly increase the country’s wealth, and prevent Americans from using sanctions in the future), he is on the precipice of political oblivion. The nationwide protests that started last December and continue despite arduous efforts to squelch them have further wounded the mullah, trashing what was left of his dwindling support among the Iranian middle class and the young. It will be challenging, however, for Khamenei to grovel before Trump since any American-Iranian meeting would produce a volcano of discontent inside the ruling elite. The Islamic Republic’s overlords are capable of considerable hypocrisy and duplicity and have been willing, long before Obama, to communicate and meet with U.S. officials they loathe. Backtracking now, however, would be very tough given what the supreme leader has said since Washington withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
The administration has its own dilemmas: It relishes harsh rhetoric and sanctions against the Islamic Republic but is restrained by an Iraq syndrome that argues against confronting Iranian imperialism with boots on the ground. Containment is not in the cards. A Soviet parallel to the Islamic Republic, in which the United States wears its enemy down through wars on the empire’s periphery, isn’t going to happen. The clerical regime’s ambitions in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq may get checked, but that task will fall to the natives sans U.S. support or, in the Levant, to the Israelis, who are already de facto at war with the mullahs. Imperial overstretch may still doom Tehran’s attempt to craft its own Co-Prosperity Zone in the region.
America will either lose or win its struggle with the clerics at the center: by collapsing Iran’s economy, thereby paralyzing the atomic advance, or by meeting Tehran’s nuclear challenge head on, which may happen soon if Khamenei gives the green light to increase significantly uranium enrichment. The clerical regime could reinstall the primitive IR-1 centrifuges in large numbers, put the more advanced IR-2ms back in the under-the-mountain plant at Fordow to complete their development, or put the stress on the development (clandestine or open) of the more advanced IR-6s and IR-8s, which when perfected could operate with small, easily concealable cascades. The clever approach would be to opt for slow, clandestine progress, which would test the West’s intelligence services, while publicly playing the aggrieved victim of Trump’s unilateralism. The regime would wait for the next U.S. presidential election, hoping the Democrats win and restore what was lost. But such an approach may not be emotionally satisfying to the supreme leader and senior Revolutionary Guard commanders.
The telling question, then, is what Khamenei and his praetorians, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, think Washington will do if they start reconnecting centrifuges or obstructing International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. The ruling elite, especially Rouhani’s circle, is still waiting to see whether Europe can stand against the United States. Foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has spoken of a European banking and oil package, insulated from U.S. sanctions, being delivered to Tehran. Iranian commentary on the Europeans has, however, become increasingly despairing—despite the best efforts of Federica Mogherini, the European Union External Action boss, to keep the Iranians hopeful. The Europeans have, so far, failed to meet the demands that Khamenei issued in May. Those demands—that they keep investing in Iran while blocking U.S. sanctions—appear beyond the capacity of even the Western European governments most angered by the president’s decision. Adventurous and, for the Iranians, vital European companies, like the energy giant Total and the German engineering behemoth Siemens, have shown they have no intention of risking their access to the American market or the U.S. dollar for the JCPOA.
European resistance is, of course, fortified by the administration’s “national-security” tariffs. And many former Obama officials are advising Europeans to hang tight to the JCPOA. They want Berlin to use the German central bank, the Bundesbank, as a tool to increase German-Iranian trade, especially for midsize and small German firms without a significant presence in the American market. An E.U. plan to use the European Investment Bank in a similar commercial fashion is also taking shape. Such actions, if they actually happen on a certain scale, would oblige the White House to sanction a European central bank, the lending institution of the E.U., or European VIPs associated with these banks. Such U.S. designations would likely work (the power of the dollar and the political predilections of America-centric European business would probably win out), but they would be a convulsive first for transatlantic relations.
No matter what happens, it ought to be clear to Trump and his administration that regime change is the only pragmatic course open to them unless they are prepared to accept a nuclear-armed Iran. And if they are prepared for military action, they obviously should work seriously on advancing Iran’s internal rebellion. Sooner, not later. The option to punt, to repeat, is gone. The Europeans, most of whom have punting in their DNA, keep coming back to administration officials, hoping to discover that Trump is somehow willing to accept some equivalent of the JCPOA, differently named. The administration would have to eat a skyscraper’s worth of crow to find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian atomic conundrum that essentially reestablishes Obama’s nuclear concessions.
We need first to better understand the past to see clearly why an American strategy to collapse Iran’s theocracy makes sense. Misreading Persian history has almost become de rigueur in Washington, on both the left and the right. Too often Westerners have looked at Iran as an island of autocratic stability. This is even true today: Most American and European officials see the mullahs’ tools of repression as indomitable—just as they were for Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The true story of Iran for much of the past century is, however, of a convulsive struggle between rulers wanting to maintain their prerogatives and the ruled seeking freedom. It is this volatile tug-of-war that will define not just the future of Iran but the Middle East.
Regime change isn’t an abstract and mad idea: It’s what the Iranian people have sought through massive protests in 2009 and again beginning last December, when popular protest hit cities and towns across the country. The continuing unrest, which has helped to produce a tidal wave of vitriol and dissension in the ruling elite, may have convulsed the regime’s internal nuclear deliberations. The only sensible approach towards the mullahs is to focus on this caldera of popular anger. Secretary Pompeo’s speeches on May 21 in Washington and July 22 at the Reagan Library highlighted the plight of Iranians under theocracy—as well as any speech by any American official since the Islamic revolution has done—and set the stage for a coherent plan.
Philosophically and operationally, such a policy shift would be recognizing a basic truth: The Islamic Republic isn’t going to evolve peacefully into a nonthreatening Middle Eastern state. Or as Khamenei pithily put it: “ Ma doshmani ba Amrika ra lazem dareem” (“We require hostility towards the United States”). Obviously uncomfortable with the religious dimension of this clash, American officials have had a hard time accepting this irreconcilable conflict. Both Democrats and Republicans have really wanted to believe that Thermidor isn’t far off. (Thermidor briefly arrived with the presidential election of the cleric Mohammad Khatami in 1997; he and the reformist movement behind him got stuffed by both Khamenei and the “pragmatic” revolutionaries around Rouhani and his patron, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who helped Khatami rise to power and then turned on him.)
The Iranian struggle against religious dictatorship ought to ring our inner chimes since Westerners, above all others, ought to appreciate how religious overreach produces a secularizing, liberalizing backlash. Though often too timid or politically correct to say so, most Westerners surely would want to see Iranians freed from theocrats. It has become an article of faith for many, however, that Washington shouldn’t try to aid the Iranian people, that American actions are inevitably baleful. Often lurking in the background is the guilt-ridden tiers-mondiste view that the type of overt and covert support that Republicans and Democrats once gave to the peoples of Communist Eastern Europe is somehow morally wrong when applied to Iranians. (On the left, there are, of course, doubts about the wisdom, let alone the efficacy, of our support for the Eastern Europeans.)
First-worlders, the argument goes, just shouldn’t politically interfere in Muslim societies. But a serious glance at Iranian history ought to tell us the opposite: that we shouldn’t treat Iranians any differently than we treated Poles under communism. The intellectual, social, and political common ground between Eastern Europeans and Iranians ought to incline President Trump to let his national security adviser, John Bolton, start planning the containment, contraction, and collapse of the Islamic Republic.
