WarSclerotic

After the Syrian debacle, (2) seems surreal. Hardly a day goes by that senior Revolutionary Guard officers don’t mock the military will of an America that they see in a headlong retreat from the Middle East. When White House officials castigate Democratic senators who want to pass new sanctions legislation, which would only come into effect if Iran failed to dismantle its nuclear-weapons program, as hell-bent or careless warmongers, it clearly signals to Tehran that the Syrian retreat, even more than the withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, is the administration’s defining moment. 

Barack Obama might still be obliged to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, but surely this would only happen if Khamenei or the Revolutionary Guards, who have direct control of the nuclear-weapons program, did something monumentally stupid—like organize another big terrorist strike against Americans. Given the president’s allergic reaction to having Congress stipulate that any terrorist strike by Iran would trigger new sanctions, and given the reasonable conjecture that an American military response to Iranian terrorism could possibly lead to a war with, even an American invasion of, the Islamic Republic, an Iranian act of terrorism might have to be really big to force Obama to take out Tehran’s nuclear sites. That leaves either (1) or (3). 

Although (3) is probably what the administration is banking on, and is certainly where the president’s men will rhetorically slide if sanctions relief proves to be worth much more to Iran than the $7 billion claimed by the White House, this reasoning makes no historical sense. The Iranian regime has already lost at least $100 billion because of nuke-related sanctions. And freer, easier trade would have an explosive effect on the entire economy. If the regime had at any time been as pragmatic as American “realists” have thought (and hope of a new pragmatism has flowered in Washington after every Iranian presidential election since Khomeini died in 1989), the Islamic Republic would already be hundreds of billions of dollars richer. A simple “Hi!” from Khamenei to an American president, let alone the restoration of diplomatic relations, would have led to a tidal wave of Western investment. This did not happen because the supreme leader, Revolutionary Guard commanders (like Qasem Suleimani, who heads the Quds Force, the terrorist-nurturing, insurgent-supporting expeditionary unit), and the ordinary hard-core revolutionary faithful believe the United States really is, as Khamenei puts it, “Satan Incarnate.” 

From 1992 until 2005, Europeans embraced an invest-and-moderate strategy with the Islamic Republic. Although it’s certainly possible that increasing European trade helped to improve Iran’s economy in the mid-1990s, perhaps strengthening the college-educated and middle-class contempt for the regime, which in turn led to the unexpected presidential landslide in 1997 for the reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami, there’s no evidence whatsoever that increasing Western trade lessened Khamenei’s and the Revolutionary Guards’ attachment to revolutionary principles, especially implacable hostility towards the United States. Then, of course, in 2005, the populist, Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president, and the supreme leader decided to advance an “in-your-face” acceleration of the nuclear program.

The Islamic Republic is caught in a perverse evolution. The country’s youth is Westernizing. First-rate sociological studies by French scholars show that Westernization, aka “globalization,” among the children of the Iranian elite continues, undermining the “Islamic” values of first-generation revolutionaries. The supreme leader and his guards, meanwhile, have become internally more oppressive and externally no less aggressive. The brutality that Khamenei used to crush the pro-democracy Green Movement in 2009 harks back to the nastiness unleashed in the early revolutionary years when the regime’s guiding lights—Khamenei, Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, and Rouhani prominent among them—feared for the revolution’s future. 

The “realist” dream of an Iranian version of the Chinese model, where private and state-sanctioned capitalism annihilates the revolutionary ideology, doesn’t appear to be imminent, for one simple, obvious reason: The Islamic revolution has at its white-hot core Islam as a religion and as a 1,400-year-old civilization at odds with the West. Iran’s revolutionaries have so far been able to overlay their creed onto the faith and culture, most successfully among the non-college-educated. Iran’s revolution is still fairly young: The Soviet Union’s ideology didn’t start to crack apart in Mother Russia until the 1970s, more than 50 years after it was born. And Allah in Iran is likely to outlast Marx in Europe. 

If President Rouhani can actually reform Iran’s centrally planned, corrupt economy (and the tepid free-enterprise efforts of his mentor Rafsanjani in the early 1990s suggest that he will fail), the regime will likely become even more paranoid and unstable, not less, as more wealth allows more Iranians again to feed their Western desires. President Rouhani’s lack of interest in pushing any internal political reform suggests that he doesn’t believe that political and economic reforms are organically tied; rather, that the Islamic Republic’s fundamental fusion of church and state can remain the same so long as the regime is better at economics and diplomacy. 

For anyone who can remember Rafsanjani’s two presidential terms (1989-97), Rouhani’s actions are not unexpected or innovative or reformist. It’s no coincidence that Iran’s improving economy under Rafsanjani also saw the launch of the regime’s nuclear-weapons quest and a much more aggressive, terrorism-fond foreign policy. In the Islamic Republic, among the pragmatic revolutionary set, there is no contradiction between avarice and the quest for nuclear weapons, or between less socialism and more terrorism against God’s enemies. 

Benjamin Rhodes and his boss may actually believe that the supreme leader and the Revolutionary Guards are willing to forsake the nuclear program for trade, that their enmity for the United States is just the product of misunderstandings and really bad American foreign policy (George W. Bush, the CIA-aided 1953 coup d’état against Mohammad Mossadegh, and all the other things that Bill Clinton once apologized for when Washington thought Khatami might transform U.S.-Iranian relations). Candidate Obama’s speeches and radio interviews from 2007 and 2008 displayed his ignorance of Islamic and Iranian history. But for the last five years, President Obama has had access to all the classified material on the clerical regime’s nefariousness and mendacity about the nuclear program, most glaringly about the Fordow site, which the regime didn’t fess up to until September 2009, and he has had the opportunity to learn from unfolding events—his two unrequited, let’s-make-up presidential entreaties to Khamenei; the crushing of the Green Movement; Iran’s lethal actions against American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; the thwarted terrorist strike in a Georgetown restaurant in 2011, which was approved by Quds Force officers; Tehran’s all-in support to the Assad regime in Damascus; and, last but not least, all the speeches, interviews, and books by Iran’s ruling VIPs since 2008. Yet all this may not be enough to overwhelm the president’s ideology telling him how the world ought to work and what his own historic possibilities are. 

It’s hard to know, since senior administration officials give the impression that all the president wants is to escape the “binary choice” between accepting the unacceptable and launching a preemptive strike. Seeing a chance for détente between Washington and Tehran, which senior White House officials now cautiously confide might lie just beyond a successful nuclear deal, is just a “realist” reflex that ticks up when the administration runs away from hard choices and Rouhani and Zarif smilingly beckon. 

Which takes us back to (1), the possibility that the economic pain from sanctions could be so intense that Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards would relent on the nuclear program. This is a highly dubious proposition—Rhodes is undoubtedly correct about Khamenei’s willingness to walk away from nuclear talks. Except economic pain is the only proposition now open to us that has any chance of convincing the supreme leader to cease and desist. 

In all probability, Khamenei will walk as soon as the Western powers insist that Tehran actually make concessions that enfeeble the nuclear program—regardless of what sanctions the West piles on the regime. The Joint Plan of Action was acceptable to the supreme leader because it didn’t demand anything from Tehran that wasn’t quickly reversible. Deputy foreign minister Araghchi, an unanimated, mainstream, process-oriented, revolution-loyal diplomat, was thoughtful and precise in his description of the interim deal.

In a recent speech in the clerical headquarters city of Qom, Khamenei himself made it clear that sanctions will not break him, that the economic pain Iran is now suffering is a “joke” compared with the “crime” that “all of the great powers of the world .  .  . perpetrated against our nation” in the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88). Iranian society today may be more volatile than during the war years; certainly the regime’s revolutionary base is smaller, and Khamenei knows that he is less loved, and less feared, than his predecessor. Economics has gained ground on revolutionary passion. The supreme leader assented to Rouhani’s new diplomatic offensive against the West because Rouhani argued, as he had in his nuclear memoirs: I can get you what you want with less pain; the United States and its European allies can be divided and defeated through clever diplomacy. The supreme leader wasn’t lying when he said in Qom that he hadn’t been forced to the negotiating table in Geneva; he came “to negotiate with the Devil to eliminate its evil,” to beat the Devil at his own diplomatic game. 

The Obama administration will eventually have to test the proposition that Khamenei’s and the Revolutionary Guards’ will cannot be broken by economic means since the Iranian regime will give the Americans no other choice. The current nuclear negotiations will fail. The White House, which is obviously willing to bend a lot in the direction of Tehran, will most likely be unable to bend far enough to satisfy the supreme leader and his men. Even the most acquiescent of American administrations has its limits. So, too, Congress. So, too, the French, who have been trying to tell Washington that concessions now are more likely to shatter the Western alliance than are new sanctions. 

We will soon see how many hawks and doves there are in Washington. Odds are, the doves are much more numerous. They’re certainly much more powerful in Obama’s Washington. 

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.