Stunning

Hassan Rouhani’s first-round win in Friday’s Iranian presidential election is stunning.  It is no mean feat to reach 50% against five other candidates.  The celebrations in Tehran make clear that his constituency included those reformists who voted–though presumably others boycotted.  But he must have had a much broader constituency than just the committed reformists.  Iranians seem to want to change their country’s relations with the West.

If, like me, you are trying to absorb what this means for Iran, the United States, and the nuclear issues that have plagued the relationship between the two, the best read I’ve seen so far today is from our SAIS dean, Vali Nasr.  He notes the that Rouhani will have to convince the Supreme Leader to compromise on nuclear issues and underlines that the US will have to offer serious sanctions relief to get anything like what it wants.  The ball, he says, is in Washington’s court.

He is certainly correct to think that serious sanctions relief has to be part of any serious deal, but Washington has its own problems unifying for a deal with Iran.  Sanctions relief requires Congressional action, or at least Congressional willingness to permit the Administration to invoke exceptions.  This will not be easy to obtain.  It will depend not only on real limits on Iran’s enrichment and reprocessing but also on strict verification provisions.  It will be a minor miracle if Tehran’s and Washington’s hardliners can be satisfied at the same time to enable a deal to go through.

Still, Iran’s citizens have in essence repudiated the uncompromising attitude of the Supreme Leader as well as the shenanigans of outgoing President Ahmedinejad.  This election legitimizes moderate attitudes towards the West and Iran’s own economic difficulties that in the past were labelled defeatist and even treasonous.  Washington often talks about supporting moderates.  It has made a good start by welcoming the election and its result.  It now has to figure out how to make it easier for Rouhani to turn the Iranian security establishment in the direction of recognizing that development of nuclear weapons, or even of nuclear ambiguity, will make the country less secure rather than more.

How can that be?  The way I see the issue is this:  once Iran is capable of developing nuclear weapons without any assurance that military action can stop it, Israel has a serious problem.  An Iranian attack would destroy the country, even if the Israelis maintain a second strike capability that could in turn destroy Iran.  So the Israelis are put in a situation where their best bet is to launch on warning.  Any indication that Iran might be getting ready to launch a potentially nuclear assault would trigger an anticipatory Israeli response aimed at destroying every possible Iranian attack capability.  That could likely be done only by nuclear means.

This is not the kind of hair-trigger situation the United States and the Soviet Union faced during the Cold War.  Both had second strike capabilities that ensured they could respond.  The two adversaries also had excellent communications and more or less an hour of transit time to sort out any misunderstandings.  Israel and Iran have at best slow and unreliable communications and only minutes of transit time.

So to make a long story short, an Iranian patriot concerned about his country’s survival might well want a nuclear agreement, in order to make the country safer.  It could include transparently and definitively stopping nuclear weapons efforts, even limiting enrichment to something like 5% and shipping most 20% enriched out of the country.  But this patriot will need to get significant sanctions relief in the bargain if he is to win over the Supreme Leader and maintain popular support.

The problem of course is that the Supreme Leader seems a lot less concerned about his country’s security and a lot more concerned about preserving the Islamic Republic.  Regime preservation by development of nuclear weapons is becoming the rule rather than the exception.  If Khamenei decides to limit or eliminate Rouhani’s role in the nuclear portfolio, we could end up right back where we are today:  at an impasse that leads eventually to war.  That too would be stunning.