The Race for Iran

It has been announced that there will be both P5+1 and “Vienna Group” discussions with Iran during November 15-18.  Any policymaker working on Iranian nuclear issues, as well as all of us who study them, would benefit enormously from reading the following original article, “Needed:  An Iran Policy Adjusted to the Threat”, by Peter Jenkins. 

The article develops, in an exceptionally thoughtful way, an argument that we have made for some time—namely that, at this point, there is no plausible diplomatic outcome whereby the Islamic Republic would agree to “surrender” its uranium enrichment program in exchange for some package of economic, technological, and/or strategic “goodies”.  It also takes, as a point of departure, an assessment that there is no evidence indicating Iran is seeking to fabricate nuclear weapons, and considerable evidence that/reasons why Tehran will not go down that road. 

From these premises, Peter—who has published on www.RaceForIran.com before, see here—explores what it would mean, in strategic terms, for the United States and its regional and international partners to accept the principle and reality of internationally-safeguarded enrichment in Iran as part of a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue.  More specifically, what would it mean if the Islamic Republic came increasingly to be perceived as a “threshold nuclear state”? 

Peter’s analysis of this question is sober, persuasive, and deserves careful reading and consideration.  Among other points, Jenkins notes that the most significant prospective strategic challenges linked to Iran’s emergence as a threshold nuclear state are not military but political in nature, and would be felt not primarily by the United States directly, but rather by America’s Israeli and Arab allies.  We very much agree with his suggestion that this is a situation which calls out for alliance management by the United States, rather than hyping the Iranian nuclear threat and pursuing policies that increase the risk of an eventual and unnecessary military confrontation with the Islamic Republic.     

Peter Jenkins is a former member of the British diplomatic service who served as the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency from 2001 to 2006.  He is currently a partner in ADRg Ambassadors, a dispute resolution company, and an associate fellow of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. 

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett 

www.RaceForIran.com recently reproduced five reasons why Gareth Evans, QC, former foreign minister of Australia, has come to the conclusion, see here, that Iran’s Islamic leaders do not intend to acquire nuclear weapons, in breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).  To those five reasons, all of which are persuasive, could be added the following:

–Brazil and Turkey decided earlier this year to work for a peaceful resolution of Iran’s nuclear quarrel with the West.  It is most unlikely that President Lula and Prime Minister Erdogan would have undertaken such a task if they had had doubts about Iran’s commitment to its NPT obligations.  Their involvement can be seen as a sign that these two states—responsible, experienced members of the international community—do not believe that Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons.

–Iran’s leaders have confided to another state—a state that matters to them—that their aim is to acquire a “threshold” or “break-out” capability.  It can be inferred that they intend to refrain from acquiring nuclear weapons in the absence of the kind of supreme threat envisaged in article X of the NPT.

–Neither the IAEA nor Western agencies have come across any sign of nuclear weapons intent since 2004.  With respect to the agencies, this statement needs qualifying.  It is possible they have come across something and not revealed it.  The odds are against it, though, since some would have seen it as in their interest to leak any evidence of nuclear weapons intent that the agencies had acquired.

If Iran intends to be content with a threshold capability and to respect its NPT obligations, should its nuclear activities still be seen by other states as threatening their security?  In what sense are these activities still a threat to others?  Is there a case for revisiting the threat assessment that has underpinned the whole Western approach to “Iran Nuclear” over the last decade?

It is not obvious that a threshold-capable Iran does or would pose a military threat to its neighbours or other states.  There are already a number of threshold-capable states in the world; their threshold status is not seen as a security threat by their neighbours or the international community.  Conventional wisdom has it that it is the possession of weapons by an adversary that constitutes a threat, not the capacity to produce weapons, since production can take time and it may prove possible for the potential target to disrupt production in the early course of hostilities.

In Iran’s case, even the possession of nuclear weapons would not be an unqualified military threat since their use by Iran would risk cataclysmic retaliation from one of the nuclear-weapon states or from a nuclear-armed state.  The Iranian government possesses a relatively sophisticated, bureaucratic decision-making capability, quite capable of understanding the relevant calculus.  Incendiary statements by individual Iranians can be misleading.

It seems to follow that, contrary to prevailing belief in the West, the primary threat is not military but political in nature.  Some of Iran’s Arab neighbours are loath to see Iran acquire the prestige and status that are conventionally accorded to nuclear weapon states, and, to a lesser extent, to threshold states.  Both Arab neighbours and Israel fear that a threshold capability will enhance Iranian self-confidence and encourage Iran to intervene still more in regional politics.

These Arab and Israeli perceptions have security implications for the West.  It is logical for Western analysts to fear that rivalry with Iran may resolve some of Iran’s Arab neighbours to acquire matching nuclear capabilities—which could lead eventually to a proliferation of nuclear weapons in South West Asia, jeopardising the nuclear non-proliferation regime, and raising issues for Western energy security.  Another risk is that Israel may seek to disrupt Iran’s enrichment and plutonium production programmes by attacking Iran; Iranian reactions could entail prolonged interruption of Gulf oil supplies and terrorist attacks on Western targets.

But for the West these risks are indirect.  They can be averted by changing Arab and Israeli perceptions.

This is the problem into which the original Iranian nuclear proliferation threat has mutated.  The question is:  can Arabs and Israelis, and their Western friends, be brought to look upon Iran’s nuclear capabilities as a development to which responses other than halting enrichment in Iran are available?

Logic suggests that the possession of a nuclear threshold capability ought to be seen as bringing only a modest enhancement of Iran’s status in South West Asia.  A threshold capability may be of defensive value to Iran, but it will not strengthen Iran’s ability to impose its will on its neighbours.  It certainly will not transform Iran into a regional “hegemon” as some like to claim.  North Korea, which has gone at least one step further than Iran, and has cobbled together primitive nuclear devices, has not become a regional hegemon; far from it.

And Iran’s nuclear programme is only one element in a broadly based movement towards recovery of the regional status that Iran has enjoyed for much of the past 2600 years.  Iran is treading a similar path to other Asian civilisations that have emerged or are emerging from periods of eclipse.  Japan, China, India and Turkey come to mind.  There is a historical inevitability about this movement.  Neighbours must find ways of adjusting to it that are consistent with international law, as Turkey appears to have understood.  Halting uranium enrichment in Iran will not stem the tide.

Easier to accept is the assertion that acquiring a threshold capability will influence Iranian self-confidence.  It is indeed likely to do so.  Iran’s leaders will see themselves as having taken a step towards restoring Iran to the ranks of Asia’s more powerful civilisations.  They will also feel more secure, having made enforced regime change in Iran, or invasion of Iranian territory, more risky for Iran’s adversaries.

What, though, can be the implications of enhanced self-confidence?

Is the Islamic regime likely to embark on the conquest of neighbouring territory?  No, they lack the conventional military strength to do so, and have given no sign of entertaining revanchist fantasies about recovering past possessions (though as recently as 1800 Persia occupied large parts of the Caucasus, Central Asia and Afghanistan).  In any case, the Arab states of the Gulf, collectively and, in at least one case, individually, are far stronger conventionally than Iran and would have no difficulty in obtaining reinforcements from the West, if one day a conventional Iranian threat to any of their territories or to Iraq were to materialise.

Is enhanced self-confidence likely to encourage the Islamic regime to maintain support for Hezbollah and Hamas, and to continue supplying arms and explosives to US enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan?  Yes, very likely.  But these are threats that are familiar to Israelis, Egyptians, Arabs and the Western powers.  They can be countered by conventional means.  Coercing Iran to abandon enrichment or crippling Iran’s nuclear capabilities for a few years through a military strike would not eliminate these threats.  Indeed, though a strike might temporarily deprive Iranian leaders of grounds for enhanced self-confidence, it would supply other motives for the Islamic regime to pursue this kind of low intensity conflict through proxies. 

Conversely, Iranian proxy attacks on US forces in Afghanistan might well cease if the US were to come to terms with Iran’s possession of a threshold capability.  Iran played a constructive role there until it began to fear that the US was going to use some of Iran’s nuclear activities as a pretext for aggression.

Is enhanced self-confidence likely to encourage the Islamic regime to continue meddling in Lebanese and Iraqi politics and in the Middle East Peace Process?  Again, yes.  But these interventions are also susceptible to conventional responses.  Depriving Iran of a nuclear threshold capability would make no difference.

In short, halting enrichment in Iran by persuasion, coercion or the use of force could lower the risk of a threshold-capable Iran becoming an even more troublesome neighbour (for those who are unwilling to follow Turkey’s example and to pursue rapprochement and détente).  But it may not have that effect, and other more practical solutions to the non-nuclear problems posed by Iran are at hand.

To conclude:  Events have moved on since IAEA inspectors were first shown the fledgling enrichment plant at Natanz in February 2003, and told of plans for a plutonium-producing research reactor at Arak.  The balance of probability has shifted.  The assumptions on which Western policy was first based now look unlikely.

It made sense in 2003 to give priority to denying Iran nuclear weapons.  Now that most of the evidence points to Iran having opted for self-denial, a new policy is needed, a policy that gives priority to allaying Israeli and Arab fears that a threshold capability will enhance Iran’s regional status and self-confidence.

–Peter Jenkins

Our friend and colleague, Alastair Crooke, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum, has written the following post about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon.  We heartily commend it to our readers’ attention. 

by Alastair Crooke

Firstly, let us put to one side the nonsense: The President of Iran’s visit was not about embedding Lebanon as a part of the Iranian state, nor was it about paving the way for any Hizbullah ‘take-over’ of Lebanon; and nor can the visit be described as a ‘provocation’. It was of course self-evidently intended to express defiance towards Israeli military hegemony and to assert a stand of counter-deterrence to any Israeli military threat, but that it is very different from an ‘act of provocation’ deliberately intended to draw an Israeli response.  All these claims for the purpose of the visit are just a part of the psychological warfare mounted against Iran, and can be ignored.

The visit was, in fact, a State visit. The Iranian President was formally invited by the Maronite Christian President of Lebanon some while ago. Iran is a prominent regional state, just as Turkey is – whose Prime Minister happens to be visiting Beirut today.

Iran’s popularity on the streets should not surprise anyone.  It is real, and it is heartfelt – and extends beyond the Shi’i of the south of Beirut.  Having been present here in Beirut throughout the war of 2006, I experienced the almost universal shock at how leaders and so-called ‘friends of Lebanon’ such as Tony Blair and Condoleezza Rice tried to fend-off and delay a ceasefire – in order to allow Israel more time to ‘finish the job’, i.e. to destroy more bridges, more infrastructure and impose civilian casualties – as our ‘price’ to be paid for Hizbullah’s seizure of Israeli soldiers. Feelings here are still raw on this point, and all sectors of opinion know that the only real support for Lebanon in those dark hours came from Syria and Iran.  Unsurprisingly, there was a direct element of gratitude in expression to Iran in recent days both for the support then, and its subsequent economic assistance to repair the damage.

But this does not constitute the deeper significance of the welcome extended to the representative of Iran in Lebanon – Lebanon, the bellweather of the wider politics of the Middle East.  It goes beyond a belated ‘thank-you’.

In May this year, Zbig Brezezinski gave a brief talk at the Council for Foreign Relations (CFR) in Montreal.  He told his audience that there were two factors shaping global politics in the world today. The first, he said was that “for the first time in all of human history, mankind is politically awakened and stirring”, adding that “all over the world people were aware of what was happening politically and are “consciously aware of global inequities, inequalities, lack of respect, and of exploitation”.

His second point was that the élites that rule us are less united and more diversified than before (he gave the transition of the G8 into the G20 as example); the élite is both less homogeneous and less restrained by adherence to traditional values and culture; the consequence of this is a more surveilled, and a more controlled society, Brzezinski has written.

On this latter point, Brzezinski is echoing the warnings of Michael Young’s (1958) ‘The Rise of the Meritocracy’ whereby a social revolution was shaping by ‘sieving people according to education’s narrow band of values’ and a new [élite] created, which – at least until recently – saw their position in society and their individual ‘lifestyles’ as validation of their ‘ability’ and ‘talent’; but who saw those who were excluded, merely as symptoms of others’ personal weakness, lacking and failure.

It scarcely needs adding that such a description is not confined to the élites of the West:  The ultra-rich, narcissitic and disdainful élites of the Middle East are as just as divorced from the rest of humanity, and just as exploitative and in love with themselves as any member of the Wall Street űberclass.

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hassan Nasrallah quote Imam Ali (the son-in-law of The Prophet)’s dictum that Muslims should be the ‘friend of the oppressed; and enemies of the oppressor’, or speak of western ‘double-standards’, New York Times sophisticates may sneer at this talk as ‘all hat and no cattle’; but they simply miss the point.

Simplistic to some, perhaps – Islamist movements and Iranian leaders do harp continuously on just those global inequities, inequalities, lack of respect and of exploitation to which Brzezinski attributes the unprecedented political ‘awakening’. The tables are turned: as the values of ‘the market’ and the secular liberal world order appear increasingly hollow to those who see in it only privilege, disparity of wealth and self-enriching self-interest, the language of resistance and defiance of western political and business élites, who style themselves as ‘the international community’ of course resonates deeply in a Middle East that is ‘awakening politically’ and ‘stirring’.

This, it should be understood, is the underlying dynamic to the shift in the strategic balance of the Middle East and to the emergence of an ‘resistance axis’ to that very that very élite dominated ‘world order’ and its systems of control imposed upon societies. The élites fear this awakening; and are determined to ensure its failure.

In short Islam – particularly Shi’i Islam – is taking over the clothes of the European early Renaissance (before the Enlightenment); Islam stands, for many Muslims, for a humanism and a respect for justice, human dignity and defiance of tyranny that Europe once espoused.  Of course, few in the West will see it in these terms: they have been too busy creating an inverted mirror image of what they perceive still to be western ‘virtues’ – and call it Iranian ‘theocracy’.

The significance of President Ahmadinejad’s visit was the popular articulation of this awakening, and the profound struggle ahead that it portends – more than just a signal of gratitude to an Iranian President.

One year ago this month, we launched www.RaceForIran.com.  As self-acknowledged foreign policy realists, we believed there was an urgent imperative to provide fact-based analyses of Iranian foreign policy and domestic politics and offer interest-based arguments as to how the United States could deal more constructively and effectively with the Islamic Republic.  We thought it might be useful—and, hopefully, interesting for our readers—to pause and take stock of how this enterprise has developed over the last 12 months, and what that says about the political and policy state of play regarding the Islamic Republic. 

On reflection, three themes strike us as notable.  First, we are very pleased with how much www.RaceForIran.com has grown during its first year.  We started out in October 2009 attracting a couple of hundred page hits a day.  Since then, we have grown to several thousand page hits a day, and currently average around 10,000 unique visitors each month.  Given the trend, we can reasonably anticipate further growth in our readership over the next year.  We are especially struck by the energetic readers’ community that has grown up around www.RaceForIran.com, as manifested in the comments to the posts.  When we launched www.RaceForIran.com, we said that one of our goals was to “provide a forum for an ongoing conversation about Iran and its geopolitics, for interested persons all over the world”.  Our readers deserve the credit for helping us make as much progress as we have toward that goal.  We are deeply gratified by readers’ response.  

The work presented on www.RaceForIran.com is disseminated even well beyond our direct readership, through multiple channels.  Pieces from www.RaceForIran.com are regularly disseminated by Monthly Review and the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII).  A growing number of blogs focusing on the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy, and related subjects identify www.RaceForIran.com as a recommended link for their readers, including POLITICO’s Laura Rozen.  Our own articles and opinion pieces—published in The New York Times, POLITICO, Foreign Policy, and The International Spectator—and media appearances (e.g., Charlie Rose) help both to get our message out and to draw attention to www.RaceForIran.com.  And, for the last few months, The Huffington Post has been publishing some of the more substantial analytic pieces we prepare for www.RaceForIran.com.  In addition, we think it is fair to say that our work has been widely commented on in the blogosphere and (at least parts of) the mainstream media—including The Economist, Glenn Greenwald at Salon, Stephen Walt’s blog and Dan Drezner’s blog at Foreign Policy, Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, David Frum at FrumForum, Andrew Sullivan and Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, Tony Karon (of Time) on Rootless Cosmopolitan, The Dreyfuss Report (The Nation), Tom Engelhardt on antiwar.com, Matthew Yglesias, Daniel Brumberg in the Newsweek/The Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog, Huffington Post, TPM Café, Real Clear Politics/Real Clear World, Tapped (The American Prospect), Eunomia (The American Conservative), and The New Republic.              

Second, interest in www.RaceForIran.com and the issues it treats is clearly global.  Today, www.RaceForIran.com is read in 136 countries.  A slim majority of our readers are based in the United States.  But we also have substantial concentrations of readers in the United Kingdom, non-UK Europe (with Germany, France, Belgium, and Scandinavia figuring especially prominently), Canada, and (we are pleased to note) Iran itself.  Our audience in the other 100-plus countries is smaller; however, personal communications from readers in many of these countries indicates that we have an influential, “elite” readership—e.g., national security and foreign policy advisers to heads of state/government, senior foreign ministry officials, parliamentarians, and leading journalists.   

The global scope of interest in the subjects treated on www.RaceForIran.com is also reflected in the range of contributors we have published during the last year.  When we launched www.RaceForIran.com, we said that we wanted to “present cutting-edge analyses of Iran and its geopolitics”, and that while “many of the analyses presented here will come from us”, we also wanted to “provide a platform for other commentators, writing from their own intellectual and national or regional perspectives”.  We want to thank Jasim Husain Ali, Eric Brill, Ed Chow, Reza Esfandiari, Mark Fitzpatrick, Peter Jenkins, Christian Koch, Farid Marjai, Pierre Noël, and Jean Francois Seznec for contributing original pieces to www.RaceForIran.com over the past year.  We have also excerpted and linked to analyses, opinion pieces, and interviews published elsewhere by a wide range of commentators, including Celso Amorim, Kayhan Barzegar, Mohamed ElBaradei, Steve Clemons, Juan Cole, Alastair Crooke, Ahmet Davutoğlu, Robert Dreyfuss, Dan Drezner, Mark Fitzpatrick, Chas Freeman, Graham Fuller, Nikolas Gvosdev, Djavad Salehi Isfahani, the International Crisis Group, Ibrahim Kalin, Tony Karon, Rami Khoury, Suat Kiniklioğlu, Dan Kurtzer, Daniel Larison, Hooman Majd, Farid Marjai, Manouchehr Mottaki, Sami Moubayad, Gareth Porter, Colin Powell, Ariel Ilan Roth, Ali Akbar Salehi, Dimitri Simes, Siddharth Varadarajan, Stephen Walt, and Robert Wright.  In addition, we want to express our gratitude to Ben Katcher, who was indispensable in getting www.RaceForIran.com up and running, for the posts he contributed during our first nine months in operation.        

Third, www.RaceForIran.com is having an impact.  Western discussion of the Islamic Republic’s internal politics has always been distorted by ill-informed and agenda-driven commentary.  But, in the wake of the Islamic Republic’s June 2009 presidential election, ungrounded claims about a “fraudulent” election and the Islamic Republic’s impending “collapse” reached a fevered pitch, and became the cutting edge for an orchestrated campaign to push the United States to embrace coercive “regime change” in Iran as a pillar of its own national security policy—in much the same way that fraudulent claims about Saddam Husayn’s weapons of mass destruction and support for al Qaida helped push the United States to invade Iraq in 2003.  Although we did not start this blog primarily to write about Iran’s domestic affairs, our commitment to providing fact-based assessments of Iran-related issues compelled us to push back against that sort of commentary. 

Our analyses of Iranian politics over the last year have been—and, in some quarters, remain—controversial.  Earlier this year, The Economist went so far as to suggest that, in many ways, “the substance of [the Iran] debate is what we should think of Hillary and Flynt Leverett”. 

But, of course, the point is not to be controversial for controversy’s sake—our first job, as analysts, is to tell the truth as we see it and, above all, to be right.  In that regard, we believe that any fair and sober reading of what has actually transpired in Iran over the last year would demonstrate that our analyses have consistently been proven right over time.  Most Western commentators still seem determined to spin almost any manifestation of normal politics in Iran as evidence of deep and “unprecedented” cleavages in the political elite that threaten the overall integrity of the Islamic Republic’s political system.  But, slowly, the delusion that the current political order is going to collapse under the pressure of massive popular discontent and protest has a bit less of a stranglehold on public debate about Iran in the United States and other countries.

On foreign policy questions, Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation calls www.RaceForIran.com “essential”.  Certainly, our longstanding and ongoing identification of the strategic imperatives for the United States to realign its relations with the Islamic Republic draws critical attention from neoconservatives and others with neoconservative-like foreign policy views.  Michael Ledeen recently described us as the “Flynt and Hillary Iran appeasement team”; Ron Kampeas, Washington bureau chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, characterizes us as the founders of the “Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett school of Iran suck-uppery” (he even cites former Senator Chuck Hagel as a disciple of our “school”). 

Ledeen, Kampeas, and others who share their views react so strongly to our work because, first of all, we ask the kinds of “hard questions” about claims of Iranian “threats” and bad “intentions” that should have been asked, but largely were not, in the run-up to America’s invasion of Iraq–when many of our neoconservative critics and their Democratic enablers were helping manufacture, promulgate, and legitimate fraudulent arguments for a war that has cost the lives of at least 100,000 Iraqis and more than 4,000 American soliders, while also seriously damaging America’s strategic position. 

In this regard, we believe that www.RaceForIran.com is having some effect in exposing that neoconservatives and others working to lay the ground for a U.S.-initiated war against the Islamic Republic do not have better answers to those questions today than they had before the Iraq invasion (if such questions had been asked in a serious and sustained way then).  We fully intend that www.RaceForIran.com will continue being a voice of reason and sobriety on these issues.    

More broadly, for those who are not neoconservatives and who think that a war with Iran would be very bad for U.S. interests, we define the only real strategic alternative to U.S.-Iranian military confrontation.  As we have written previously, the Iran policy debate in Washington is slowly narrowing into a more-or-less binary choice between military confrontation and some form of militarized “containment” of the Islamic Republic.  But that is not much of a choice—because containment will ultimately lead to a U.S.-initiated military confrontation with Iran. 

The only alternative to a conflict that will be disastrous for America’s strategic position (as well as damaging for many in the region) is for the United States to pursue strategically-grounded rapprochement with the Islamic Republic.  And www.RaceForIran.com has become a key forum for developing and promulgating this argument.          

Likewise, over the past year, www.RaceForIran.com has played a role in pushing back against ill-informed conventional wisdom about Iran’s regional and international position and the nature of the Obama Administration’s policies toward the Islamic Republic.  For example, we believe that www.RaceForIran.com contributed significantly to the ongoing discussion of America’s approach to the Iranian nuclear issue by pointing out how (to put it frankly) dishonest the Obama Administration was in its response to the Iran-Brazil-Turkey Joint Declaration.  Similarly, our argument that, if there is to be a negotiated solution to the nuclear issue, the United States and its international partners will have to accept the reality and principle of internationally-safeguarded enrichment in Iran is gaining wider endorsement in American foreign policy circles—though, sadly, not yet within the Obama Administration. 

There is still a widely accepted conventional wisdom—embraced by critics as well as defenders of President Obama’s foreign policy—that Obama “tried” engaging the Islamic Republic, but was rebuffed by an intransigent Iranian leadership.  Over the past year, www.RaceForIran.com has introduced a very different argument into the mix:  Obama cannot rightly be said to have failed at engagement with the Islamic Republic, because he has never really tried it in a serious and strategically-grounded way.  Obama has never been prepared to take the hard choices needed to make successful engagement possible and—as a result of his overly hedged and strategically unfocused “offers”—has succeeded only in giving engagement a bad name.  We anticipate that www.RaceForIran.com will be a critical forum for developing and promulgating that argument, as well.           

In the end, blogs only have impact because of the people who read them.  And it has certainly been our experience over the past year that interaction with our readers makes our analyses and arguments better, in countless ways, big and small.  So, as always, we thank our readers for their continuing interest and support.  We are looking forward to another busy year.   

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Twenty years ago, Harvard’s Joseph Nye famously coined the term “soft power” to describe what he saw as an increasingly important factor in international politics—the capacity of “getting others to want what you want”, which he contrasted with the ability to coerce others through the exercise of “hard” military and/or economic power.  The question of soft power, when it comes to Iran, is contentious.  Most analysts seem prepared to acknowledge that the Islamic Republic’s soft power in the Middle East rose significantly in the first several years of this decade.  But many Western analysts now argue that Tehran’s regional soft power has declined over the last couple of years, following the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, the fallout from the Islamic Republic’s June 2009 presidential election, and the imposition of new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear activities. 

Others—including the two of us—argue that Iranian soft power remains strategically significant and is perhaps even still growing.  In this regard, we are struck by two developments today.  First, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad traveled to Beirut—the first visit by an Iranian president to the Lebanese capital since President Mohammad Khatami went there in 2003.  Although White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the visit demonstrated that Ahmadinejad was continuing his “provocative ways” and that Hizballah “values its allegiance to Iran over its allegiance to Lebanon”, the Iranian president received what the Christian Science Monitor’s Nicholas Blanford described as a “rapturous” welcome from tens of thousands of Lebanese who turned out to greet him on his drive into Beirut from the airport.  We include photographs of Ahmadinejad’s reception in Beirut today at the end of our text below.

During his trip to Lebanon, Ahmadinejad is scheduled to visit Dahiya, a heavily Shi’a southern suburb of Beirut, and tour southern Lebanon.  We would anticipate strongly positive and enthusiastic reactions from populations in both settings.  As Rami Khouri aptly put it today, see here, in The Daily Star,

“If Ahmadinejad, as planned, goes to south Lebanon and visits Hizbullah-controlled villages near the Israeli border, we should expect political emotions to go through th roof in both the pro-Iranian and anti-Iranian camps.  This will not be a surprise, because Ahmadinejad overlooking the northern border of Israel in the company of his Hizbullah allies is a nightmare for most Israelis and many of their friends in the West, while for Hizbullah and its allies in the region this would be a prize-winning moment of defiance to be savored for a long time.” 

We do not believe that any Western leader—or even any Arab leader—could travel to Beirut today and move about in an open motorcade, as Ahmadinejad did, let alone do so and attract crowds of tens of thousands of eager well-wishers.  Security concerns alone would preclude such a scenario.  And this is the reality even though the United States and its European and Arab allies have put significant sums of money and political capital into trying to consolidate a “pro-Western” political order in Lebanon. 

If Iran today has substantial soft power in the Middle East—as we believe it does—it has that power in no small part because it has picked winners rather than losers as its allies in key regional theaters.  Whether we speak of Hizballah in Lebanon, HAMAS in Palestine, or Shi’a Islamist parties in Iraq, Iran’s regional allies are genuine political forces—that is, forces that win elections because they represent important and unavoidable constituencies with legitimate grievances.  And, in many cases, those allies engage in what their constituents believe is thoroughly laudable resistance against what those constituents see as America’s (and Israel’s) hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East.  Again, Rami Khouri put it very well: 

“The United States and other Western powers are unhappy with the Iranian-Hizbullah link because these two parties represent an advanced form of indigenous Middle Eastern defiance of Western power, threats and sanctions.  Western global powers are not used to having smaller Middle Eastern countries or movements ignore the orders or threats that emanate from Washington, London or other Western capitals.  Lebanon has been a central test case of American support for the majority in the Lebanese government that confronts Hizbullah in some respects, so this visit represents a blow to Washington’s strategy of bringing Lebanon firmly into its orbit.”

Second, Colum Lynch, of the Washington Post and Foreign Policy, published an interesting piece today, see here, on the United Nations General Assembly’s election of Germany, India, and South Africa to rotating seats on the UN Security Council.  (It should be noted that, while Turkey will give up its rotating seat on the Security Council at the end of this year, Brazil will stay on the Council for another year.)  As Lynch writes,

“The election provides these emerging powers, all of whom aspire to become permanent members of the council, with an opportunity to show their stuff on the global stage.  But it also poses a challenge to the United States. New members India and South Africa, as well as current member Brazil, differ sharply from the United States on everything from the use of economic sanctions to constrain Iran’s nuclear program to the importance of human rights in international affairs.  And they plan to be assertive about that opposition.”

All of this underscores an important strategic point that we have been making for some time—in relative terms, the United States is becoming less capable of achieving its stated policy objectives in the Middle East and the Islamic Republic is becoming more capable of achieving its objectives.  This reality should prompt a fundamental recasting of America’s “grand strategy” in this critical part of the world. 

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

This academic year, both of us hold appointments as senior fellows at Yale University’s new Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, which has us teaching at Yale one day a week.  (It is in this role that Hillary is teaching the graduate seminar on U.S.-Iranian diplomacy which had the opportunity to meet with President Ahamdinejad last month in New York, see here.)  The Jackson Institute’s senior fellows program was set up to bring “scholar-practitioners” to Yale to teach graduate and undergraduate courses on various aspects of international relations.  We are gratified to be part of the Jackson Institute’s initial “crop” of senior fellows, which also includes Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley, Marwan Muasher (former Jordanian foreign minister), Rakesh Mohan (the former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India), and General Stanley McChrystal. 

Recently, The Politic—the “Yale Undergraduate Journal of Politics”—asked us to sit for an interview about Iran, focusing on the nuclear issue.  Founded in 1947, The Politic “has served Yale and the larger intellectual community by providing top-notch analysis of international relations, domestic politics, strategic-military affairs, and the art of statecraft for over fifty years”.  Former editors-in-chief of The Politic include Robert Kagan, Gideon Rose, and Fareed Zakaria—an impressive roster of high-profile commentators on foreign affairs, to be sure, though, from our perspective, that particular troika hardly has a record of positive distinction in commenting on Iranian issues.  However, The Politic’s current editor-in-chief—Edward Fishman, a clearly extremely capable Yale senior—did a commendably serious and fair interview with us.  The interview was just published today, entitled “Countdown to a Nuclear Iran?” (just inserting the question mark after the words “Countdown to a Nuclear Iran” puts Eddie several notches above most professional journalists in the United States who write about Iranian issues).  We thank Eddie and his colleagues at The Politic for reaching out to us, and are pleased to share the interview with our readers; see here to read it on The Politic website (worth a visit) or see below.      

You have pushed for a U.S.-Iranian “grand bargain” to resolve existing tensions.  In your view, would such a “grand bargain” require the United States to accept an Iranian nuclear-weapons capability?

FL:  That depends on your definition of a nuclear-weapons capability.  If your definition is uranium enrichment, then yes: the Iranians are already enriching uranium at levels far from weapons grade, but they are enriching uranium.  They are stockpiling low-enriched uranium in quantities where in theory, if you took it out of storage, ran it back through the centrifuges and knew what you were doing, you could produce usable amounts of weapons-grade material.  So if that is your definition of a nuclear-weapons capability, then yes.  But I think that’s a really silly definition of a nuclear-weapons capability.  There’s no shortage of countries in the world that by that definition have a nuclear-weapons capability, and I think over time the number of countries that have a nuclear-weapons capability by that definition will only grow.  Under the NPT this is perfectly legal, permissible, and legitimate.

HML:  That is critical:  we’ve already reached a grand bargain with Iran and other countries under the NPT.  We are both signatories of it.  And the grand bargain we signed up to in the NPT was that countries would be able to have fuel-cycle capabilities.  We’ve already agreed to that.  If you’re asking whether we should change the agreement to which we are bound by the NPT, that is another question.  But the grand bargain that already exists between the U.S. and Iran allows Iran to have those capabilities.

That is fine, but the main issue the United States and others have about Tehran’s nuclear program is the secrecy that hangs over it, not to mention the regime’s aggressive rhetoric.  What could the United States do that would convince the Iranian regime to prove its lack of intentions to weaponize by permitting full inspections of all its nuclear facilities?

FL:  The Iranians have said to us and others on many occasions that if the United States and its partners would stop insisting on suspension of uranium enrichment—if they would accept the reality and principle that Iran was going to enrich uranium—things such as the ratification and implementation of the Addition Protocol to the NPT and other verification measures that control the risks of fuel-cycle activities would become eminently possible.  If the principle of enrichment is accepted, and Iran is not treated differently than other countries, then Iran is prepared to ratify and implement the Additional Protocol, and negotiate other verification measures that should, properly implemented, give the international community confidence that the proliferation risks of its uranium enrichment are under control.

HML:  The nuclear component of what we’re proposing for a bilateral U.S.-Iranian grand bargain would try to put Iran’s nuclear program in a context where it could be more transparent and more open to sufficiently guaranteeing the United States that its nuclear fuel-cycle capability would not be diverted.

FL:  We have had IAEA officials tell us that the agency gets better physical access to the Iranian facilities that it inspects—Natanz, for example—than it gets to analogous facilities in Western countries.  The issue about the veil of secrecy is not really about what’s going on at Natanz, it’s about being able to access facilities that might not necessarily have been declared, which is covered under the Additional Protocol, and it’s about other issues that aren’t directly related to the fuel-cycle program, such as whether Iran has done some level of study, research, and exploration into other engineering issues that have to be solved in order to fabricate nuclear weapons.  That’s a different matter than its declared fuel-cycle program.

Many have argued that a nuclear-armed Iran would spark a dangerous arms race in the Middle East.  In your view, how would an Iranian nuclear weapon affect the region?

FL: That’s assuming that Iran actually wants to and has made a decision to go all the way to weaponization.  I actually don’t think there’s any evidence they’ve decided to weaponize.

If Iran were to weaponize, would it beget a nuclear arms race in the Middle East?

HML:  The Arab states have been in various states of war with Israel now for sixty years.  Some have made peace, but there have been various states of war going on for sixty years.  And for most of that time the Israelis have had nuclear weapons.  The Arabs have declared, whether this is genuine or not, that Israel is their enemy.  Yet when their enemy acquired nuclear weapons, the Arab states did not rush to acquire nuclear weapons.  So to say that the acquisition of nuclear weapons by another enemy of the Arab states [Iran], again whether this is genuine or not, would cause the Arab states to do so ignores history.  We have the precedent of how the Arab states reacted when Israel acquired nuclear weapons, and they did not follow suit.  To then draw the conclusion that an Iranian nuclear weapon would have a different effect is unfounded.  I think what you have here is the Arab states’ antagonism toward Iran operating at the same time that there is a huge incentive for Arab states to develop nuclear power, for issues that have nothing to do with concern for Iran or nuclear weapons, but have to do with the desire not to waste their oil and natural gas on internal consumption.

Nuclear terrorism has emerged as one of the greatest national security fears in the United States.  Given that Tehran is a known supporter of terrorist organizations, would a nuclear-armed Iran significantly enhance the risk of nuclear terrorism?

HML:  The real concern we have here is with a country like Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons, and has a close relationship to the Taliban, which has a close relationship to Al Qaeda.  I don’t think there has ever been anybody who has really made the case that Hezbollah or Hamas is looking to acquire a nuclear weapon.  It just does not make sense in terms of the conflict they have with Israel, in which their populations are on the same territory, to use a nuclear weapon.  So I don’t think that there is really a serious concern that those groups are looking for a nuclear weapon and that Iran would abet such an attempt to get a nuclear weapon.  It is not Iran and its proxies but the Pakistan-Taliban-Al Qaeda trifecta that is very, very disturbing in terms of nuclear terrorism.  I think it is more of this idea of Iran being threatening that bothers us—not so much a serious concern about their relationships with Hezbollah and Hamas.

If either the United States or Israel attempts to take out Iranian nuclear facilities with air strikes, would a full-fledged war break out?  If so, what would this war look like?

HML:  First of all I don’t think there would be very much difference between whether the Israelis or the Americans struck.  I think the perception in the region, both in Iran and throughout the Arab world, would be one and the same.  Israel would be striking because of its connections to the United States, the United States would be striking because it cares about Israel’s concerns.  I don’t think there would be any difference between the two other than that an American strike would be much more effective.  But either way the reaction inside Iran would be very serious.  It would not just be serious in terms of trying to strike back against the United States in all the place that Iran can do so, but also in terms of cutting off our supply lines to our troops in Iraq, cutting off supplies to our troops in Afghanistan, and threatening our troops in both of those arenas.

Would a war break out?

HML:  One of the most misunderstood but most important things about the Islamic Republic is that it does not have the ability to project conventional military force in any significant way beyond its borders.  So the war that would break out would not be a conventional one; it would be an unconventional one.  The two ways that the Iranians could fight back against an attack would be to either dramatically step up their capabilities in the nuclear field, or try to mobilize some of its proxies.  And it would not just be Hezbollah, but proxies through their relationships with a multitude of political factions, associations, and militias in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention Hamas and others.  They would not necessarily retaliate with a big bang in some place, but rather a slow bleed.  And it’s something you already see happening.  You already see the balance of power in the region dramatically shifting in Iran’s favor:  with Turkey, with Lebanon, with Palestine, with Syria, and with Iraq.  Slowly but surely there’s a northern tier forming in the Middle East with Iran at its core, with countries that are balancing against both the United States and Israel.  If you had a strike on Iran, you would only accelerate that process.

FL:  The Iranians’ most strategically effective response, I would argue, would be a political one.  I can guarantee that if either Israel or the United States strikes Iran there will be no international legitimation for it.  There will be no Security Council resolution or anything else that could be at all plausibly used to justify it.  And this is after the larger part of the world thinks that we went to war illegally in Iraq.  If we do it again, and we do it again with Barack Hussein Obama as President of the United States, I think the image of the United States as this unconstrained, even outlaw military power, would be really ratified in powerful ways for a lot of players around the world.  Rising powers like China will not confront the United States militarily over this, but let’s keep in mind that if we’re going to fight a war with Iran, we’re going to be fighting it on borrowed money, and we’re going to fight it on money borrowed in no small part from China, and from other countries that aren’t going to take too kindly to actions that are going to raise their energy prices and put the global economy into turmoil.  Are they really going to be willing to subsidize us this time around?

HML:  Our concern particularly is that we could face a “Suez moment,” where the U.S. today would be playing the role of Britain in 1956, where we either orchestrate or coordinate with the Israelis to launch an attack that is so widely perceived as illegitimate, and that another power, an emerging superpower like the U.S. was in 1956—today it could be China—says, “You stop that or we’ll pull our money out from under the dollar, just like Eisenhower threatened to pull American money out from under the sterling, and you’ll be bankrupt over night.”  The Suez crisis was the beginning of the end of the British Empire.  Are we now about to have our own “Suez moment,” where the Chinese threaten to pull their money out from under the dollar and it’s the beginning of the end of American empire?

It has been widely assumed that the Stuxnet worm was a government-backed cyber attack aimed at Iranian nuclear facilities.  Do you think that cyber warfare is a good strategic option for dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue?

HML:  During the Bush administration there was at least $400 million that was allocated to undermine the government of the Islamic Republic through a variety of both covert and overt measures.  This could have been one of those projects, and certainly it is perceived inside Iran as being one.  The strategic question is, What do you want to achieve with it?  Do you want to achieve the downfall of the Islamic Republic?  If so, I don’t think it’s going to be effective.  Do you want to achieve a rapprochement with the Islamic Republic? I don’t think it’s going to be effective.  Do you want to somehow hold back their nuclear program?  I don’t know.  I don’t know whether this virus or other forms of cyber warfare could have the impact of retarding their technological progress.  I just don’t know.  But on the other two questions, it won’t bring about the government’s downfall, and it certainly won’t bring about reconciliation or rapprochement.

Emotions often run high in discussions of the Iranian nuclear issue.  Given your positions, some critics have gone as far as labeling you “apologists” for the Iranian regime.  How do you respond to these accusations?

HML:  They are just ridiculous.  What’s interesting though is that one of the most distorting elements of the Iran debate today is not even so much the emotionalism involved, but the fact that the U.S. government has prohibited U.S. officials for the most part from ever having a discussion with an Iranian official.  We’re two of the very few exceptions, from when we worked in the U.S. government.  I in particular had an extended negotiation with Iranian officials over Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and Iraq.  The problem is that most American officials, pundits, and commentators never seriously consider the Iranian government’s position.  You may reject it, like you may criticize the Syrian government’s position on a variety of issues, but at least Bashar al-Assad is heard—other countries and other people are at least heard.  The Iranian government’s voice is never heard.  What Flynt and I do is say we’ve had this discussion with these Iranian officials, and this is what they say about their strategy, this is what they say motivates them—we are simply reporting and analyzing it.  We are not apologists.  What’s unique about our perspective is that we took the authority we had in the U.S. government to actually talk to Iranian officials, and we have continued the discussions in what’s called a “track-two process,” in which former U.S. officials meet with similar Iranian officials in their personal capacities.  Ten years of discussions with these officials doesn’t make me apologetic, but it does at least allow me to understand the Iranian point of view.  The difference between our critics and us is that they can’t even begin to grasp the Iranian perspective because they’re simply not allowed to meet with them.

But is it not possible that Tehran is trying to game the system—that the regime is simply feeding the international community what it wants to hear, while not acting overtly defiant enough to inspire serious opposition, in an effort to buy time for their nuclear program?

HML:  First of all, in the discussions and negotiations the U.S. has had with Tehran, they did deliver what we asked of them.  They didn’t do everything we wanted, but of the things we asked them to do they did a lot of them.  And this track record is true not just in the discussions that I had.  Look at Iran-Contra during the Reagan administration—why did Iran-Contra fall apart?  It wasn’t because the Iranians didn’t hold up their side of the bargain; it was because Americans tried to divert the proceeds from selling weapons to the Iranians to arming the Contras, in violation of congressional mandates, and provoking a constitutional crisis here in the United States.  Every U.S. administration has reached out to the Islamic Republic because they needed Tehran’s help for something.  It was not just Iran-Contra.  George H.W. Bush reached out to Tehran to get U.S. hostages out of Lebanon.  The Clinton administration reached out to Tehran to help get weapons to the Muslims in Bosnia, again because U.S. congress refused.  The George W. Bush administration that I participated in needed Iran’s help in Afghanistan and with Al Qaeda.  In each one of these cases, the Iranians didn’t do everything that we asked, but they did most of it.  We have been the ones to cut off the dialogue.

FL:  The Iranians have their own narrative about this.  Whenever they try to reach out and cooperate with the United States, they get slapped in the face in return.  Take the Bonn Conference in December 2001, for example, where we agreed on the post-Taliban political order in Afghanistan.  It literally would not have succeeded without U.S.-Iranian cooperation.  And yet six weeks later Tehran gets labeled part of the “axis of evil.”

You are married and have frequently co-authored articles.  Is there anything you two disagree on?

HML:  We do come from very different backgrounds.  We are a mixed marriage.  I’m Jewish, Flynt is Catholic.  I went to Brandeis, he went to Texas Christian University.  In some ways we have a different impulsive approach to issues, but I think for both of us, the experience of being in government and analyzing issues outside of government has made us very firm believers in dealing with reality as it is.  We will often disagree in terms of an initial take, but then we both will say, “Let’s step back and think about how this actually played out,” and then, eventually, we basically do come to an agreement.

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett