The following is the executive summary from a newly updated monograph by Robert Litwak, vice president for scholars at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former director for nonproliferation on the National Security Council staff in the first Clinton administration.
The nuclear agreement—the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” (JCPOA)—concluded on July 14, 2015, between the world’s major powers (the P5+1) and Iran is a deal, not a grand bargain. As a “deal,” the nuclear accord is transactional (addressing a discrete urgent national security challenge), not transformational (affecting the character of the Iranian regime).
The JCPOA permits Iran to retain a bounded nuclear program in return for assurances that it is not masquerading for a weapons program. That reaching this agreement required protracted negotiations and has generated such sharply divergent political reactions reflects the persisting nature of the debate over this proliferation challenge. In both Iran and America, the nuclear issue remains a proxy for a more fundamental question.In Iran, the nuclear issue is a surrogate for the defining debate over the country’s future relationship with the outside world—whether, in former President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s words, the Islamic Republic is a “revolutionary state” or an “ordinary country.” The embedded, proxy status of the nuclear question within this broader political context is a key determinant of whether nuclear diplomacy can prove successful.
In America, Iran’s nuclear challenge—concern that a weapons program is posing as a civilian program—has also been a proxy for a more fundamental debate about the threat posed by “rogue states” in the post-9/11 era. The Obama administration dropped the Bush-era “rogue” moniker in favor of “outlier.” This shift reframed the Iranian nuclear issue—from a unilateral, American political concept, in which threat is linked to the character of “rogue” regimes, to a focus on Iranian behavior that contravenes international norms. Yet the tension between the competing objectives of regime change and behavior change continues to roil the U.S. policy debate.
President Hassan Rouhani, a pragmatic centrist, campaigned on a platform of resolving the nuclear issue to end the country’s isolation and the punishing international sanctions that have weakened the economy. While acquiescing to Rouhani’s revitalized nuclear diplomacy in the wake of his June 2013 electoral mandate, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, remained the final arbiter of any prospective agreement. His decision, based on a strategic calculus that has regime stability as its paramount objective, hinged on his management of the unresolved tension in Iran’s competing identities—revolutionary state/ordinary country. In short, Khamenei’s dilemma was whether the political costs of an agreement—alienating hardline interest groups, especially the Revolutionary Guard, upon which the regime’s survival depends—outweigh its economic benefits.
The dilemma of the Iranian nuclear challenge is that Iran has mastered uranium enrichment: centrifuges that spin to produce low-enriched uranium (LEU) for nuclear power reactors can keep spinning to yield highly enriched uranium (HEU) for bombs. Since nuclear diplomacy with Iran is focused on bounding, not eliminating, Iran’s uranium enrichment program, the regime will retain the option—a hedge—for a nuclear weapon. A U.S. prerequisite for any comprehensive nuclear agreement was that this “breakout” period for converting a latent capability into a weapon should be long enough (12 months) for the United States to have sufficient strategic warning to mobilize an international response.
Iran’s nuclear program is determined and incremental, but is not a crash program to acquire a weapon in the face of an existential threat. From a national security perspective, a nuclear hedge is Iran’s strategic sweet spot—maintaining the potential for a nuclear option, while avoiding the regional and international costs of actual weaponization. A hedge strategy that keeps the nuclear option open is not incompatible with a nuclear agreement that would bring the tangible benefits of sanctions relief.
President Obama has argued that “the pressure of crippling sanctions…grinding the Iranian economy to a halt” presents the Tehran regime with the opportunity to make a “strategic calculation” to defer a decision to weaponize. Sanctions brought Iran to the negotiating table and crucially affected the Supreme Leader’s decision to accept a comprehensive agreement that meaningfully bounds Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
The “better deal” advocated by JCPOA critics would aim to dismantle large parts of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and significantly extend the constraints on Iran’s access to fissile material beyond the current 10-15 year period. Critics argue that if tough sanctions brought Iran to the table, still tougher sanctions pursued longer could have compelled (and still could compel) Iran to make such major concessions. Supporters reject the notion that increased coercive economic pressure on Iran could be mounted to extract better terms should the United States seek a return to the negotiating table. In the words of a British diplomat, multilateral sanctions had already passed “their high water mark” and would be difficult to sustain in the event of a diplomatic impasse or breakdown.
A breakdown in diplomacy should the JCPOA not be implemented would not inherently push Iran into a nuclear breakout. Iran has no immediate national security imperative to acquire nuclear weapons. President Obama has declared that the U.S. objective is “to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” By drawing this red line—preventing weaponization—the president has signaled that the United States would not undertake preventive military action to deny Iran any nuclear hedge option.
That Obama’s “red line” on weaponization pushes off a decision on the use of force is a reflection of how unattractive the option would be. That openly debated option “on the table”—what would be the most telegraphed punch in history—runs up against major liabilities: it would delay, not end, the program; could escalate into a U.S.-Iranian war; carries a significant risk of collateral damage to the environment and civilian population; and could well generate a nationalist backlash within Iran with the perverse consequence of bolstering the clerical regime.
The challenge of determining whether Iran has crossed the “red line” of weaponization is compounded by the Tehran regime’s hedge strategy, which cultivates ambiguity about its nuclear capabilities and intentions. Iran has made progress along the technological continuum toward weaponization but is unlikely to make a dramatic move—such as conducting a nuclear test or withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—that would openly cross the red line of weaponization.
The disavowal of “containment” is a reflection of the meaning the term has taken on in the contemporary U.S. debate—that is, acquiescing to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and then deterring their use through the retaliatory threat of U.S. nuclear weapons. That connotation is an unfortunate departure from George Kennan’s concept of containment—keeping regimes in check until they collapsed of their own internal weakness. An updated version of Kennan’s strategy for Iran would decouple the nuclear issue from the question of regime change and rely on internal forces as the agent of societal change.
The nuclear accord with Iran is transactional, but is embedded in the broader issue of the Islamic Republic’s societal evolution. The dilemma is that these critical timelines are not in sync—the nuclear challenge is immediate, while the prospects for societal change are indeterminate. Amidst that uncertainty, U.S. policymakers must make a judgment about how best to manage risks—and reasonable people can disagree. Obama and Khamenei are each making a tacit bet. Obama is defending the deal in transactional terms (that it addresses a discrete urgent challenge), but betting that it will empower Iran’s moderate faction and put the country on a more favorable societal trajectory. Khamenei is making the opposite bet—that the regime can benefit from the transactional nature of the agreement (sanctions relief) and forestall the deal’s potentially transformational implications to preserve Iran’s revolutionary deep state. For Obama, the tacit transformational potential of this transactional deal is a hope; for Khamenei, it is a fear.
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