US policy toward Iran in 2013

Unrealistic though it may sound in the wake of Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei’s trenchant rejection of Vice President Biden’s offer of bilateral talks, negotiations represent the best tool to deal with the nuclear challenge Iran poses for the US.  The key to successful negotiations is a credible US threat to use force, Ambassadors Jim Jeffreys and Tom Pickering agreed at the release this week of the Washington Institute’s new paper on US policy towards Iran.

It will not be easy to mount a credible threat.  The memory of the Iraq war and the drawdown of the US presence in Afghanistan leave little political appetite for the use of force against Iran. Israel may eagerly throw around the idea of a pre-emptive strike, but American political and economic realities cast the military option in an unfavorable light.  A military strike against Iran could at best set the program back by four to five years. The boots on the ground needed to eradicate the threat of a nuclear Iran are politically and economically inconceivable.

Regime change is another woefully inadequate tool to cracking Iran. As Pickering put it,

Regime change is not something we do successfully.

US influence on the prospects for regime change inside Iran is at best limited and at worst undesirable. Iranian-led regime change is desirable, but would suffer from US endorsement. Any attempt to openly encourage regime change during a burst of popular regime opposition in Iran would be counter-productive.

The ambassadors disagreed on “containment” of Iran’s nuclear capability. Jeffreys prefers “confront and resist” to “containment.” He recommends this approach, among others. According to Pickering, adopting a strategy of containment now would represent a “premature capitulation to failure.”  Containment in the classical sense amounts to treating Iranian nuclear break-out as inevitable and deterrence as the only available course of action.  Such a fatalistic approach would weaken the nuclear non-proliferation regime, unnerving regional actors Turkey and Saudi Arabia and setting in motion a regional arms race with cataclysmic implications.

Both ambassadors praised the American-led mobilization of the international community to isolate Iran, mainly through the use of sanctions. But at the end of the day, both Ambassadors called for the pursuit of negotiations, even in the face of resistance and distrust.

Negotiations must proceed on the premise that a solution to the Iranian nuclear issue exists. To stop Iran from dismissing American engagement as a ploy to trigger a regime change, Jeffreys insisted that the Obama administration set clear red lines establishing which Iranian actions the US would not tolerate (nuclear break-out), and which actions the US could live with (human rights violations). Presenting military action as the consequence of nuclear break-out would prove to the Iranians that negotiation means negotiation, not mind games.

Pickering agreed with making lines clear, just not so red. He cautioned against trying to trade “horses for rabbits.” The degree of distrust between the two countries is too great for early negotiations to tackle the big ticket items head-on.  The US cannot expect Iran to halt it’s nuclear program in exchange for reversal of a few sanctions.  Engagement can result in small steps. The US would ask that the Iranians cap their enrichment at 3.5 to 5.0 percent. In exchange, the US would promise no new sanctions and repeal the more easily reversible (European) sanctions.  The Iranians would also reserve the right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes.

Challenges between the US and Iran will continue even after resolution of the nuclear issue. In Jeffreys‘ words, Iran’s regional “hegemonic schemes” at the core of the nation’s foreign policy since “time immemorial” are not going away anytime soon.