A year after abandoning the Iran nuclear agreement, President Donald Trump is doubling down on a risky and an ill-fated “maximum pressure” campaign. He’s tried to brand this strategy as a kind of coercive diplomacy, purportedly aimed at an elusive “better deal.” But so far, his strategy is all coercion and no diplomacy. His aggressive escalation of sanctions, the blustery rhetoric of his senior officials, and his administration’s lack of direct engagement with Tehran betray a fundamentally different goal: the capitulation or implosion of the Iranian regime.
Painful experience has shown that neither of those objectives is realistic. In the meantime, two sets of risks loom large.
The first is the risk of a violent collision, whether intended or unintended. In the past week, we’ve seen the U.S. announce the dispatch of an aircraft carrier and B-52 bombers in response to perceived Iranian threats against American personnel in the region. We’ve also seen reported attacks on shipping and oil infrastructure around the Persian Gulf. With American forces and Iranian proxies in tight quarters across Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf, and no direct communications between Washington and Tehran, either side could misjudge or misinterpret the other’s moves.
Trump’s hawkish advisers and the hard-liners in Tehran could easily become mutual enablers in pushing a crisis up the escalatory ladder. The idea that the conflict is inevitable can produce momentum of its own, as can the sort of hubris that led to a disastrous war in Iraq in 2003. And should Iran abandon the deal altogether, the odds of conflict will grow larger still.
An escalating conflict brings with it an increased risk of significant collateral damage. Fissures between the U.S. and our European allies are widening as a result of our withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran, our subsequent pressure campaign, and our erratic saber-rattling. We’re also eroding the long-term utility of economic sanctions with our reckless unilateralism. Even our closest partners have begun to talk publicly about reducing exposure to the American financial system as a hedge against U.S. economic pressure.
We’ve seen coercive diplomacy succeed with Iran—this is not how it works.
We’re the two negotiators who led the secret bilateral talks with the Iranians that paved the way for the interim and comprehensive nuclear deals between Iran and the so-called P5+1, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany. The United States built broad international pressure to bring Tehran to the table—the political leverage of an international community united in its determination to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon; the military leverage of a credible threat of force; and the economic leverage of sanctions that ultimately produced a 50 percent drop in Iran’s oil exports and in the value of its currency.
That pressure was necessary but not sufficient, because pressure is not an end in itself. It was coupled with a realistic aim—a sharply constrained, tightly limited, and closely monitored civilian nuclear program—and a willingness to engage directly with the Iranians, not through empty summitry but over many months of arduous negotiations.
Now, after more than a year of coercion, with no capitulation or implosion in sight, and no shortage of risks on the horizon, it’s time to take diplomacy seriously again. That means going beyond the repetition of terms the other side won’t ever accept. The best way forward for the Trump administration is to signal privately that its maximalist demands are not carved in stone and pursue a more realistic agenda on nuclear issues. That starts with working to extend the nuclear deal’s timelines, and recognizing that further sanctions relief will be necessary to encourage Iranian acceptance; it means talking quietly about securing the release of Americans detained in brutal Iranian prisons; it means probing for possible understandings on Iran’s ballistic-missile programs; and it means encouraging dialogue on the wars in Afghanistan and Yemen, where Iran will be a player in any eventual settlement.
Contacts with the Iranians are not a reward for bad behavior, and we should have no illusions that they will engage productively on all our concerns. But diplomacy is the best way to test intentions and define the realm of the possible, repair the damage our unilateral turn has inflicted on our international partnerships, and invest in more effective coercion if and when it’s needed to focus minds in Tehran.
Coercive diplomacy—when both elements of the approach are carefully synchronized—can deliver. On the other hand, coercion without diplomacy can lead to huge blunders in the Middle East. We’ve seen that before. A lot is at stake over the coming months. Given the impulses and track record of this administration, it’s hard to be optimistic, and easy to see more trouble ahead.
Comments(5)
"Sharply constrained, tightly limited, and closely monitored"? This is hardly an apt description of a mere decade and a half long nuclear program which is best described as unrealistic due to sunset clauses, monitoring concessions and future advanced research on centrifuges. Why indeed would Tehran continue work on long-range missile testing if they estimated a perpetual breakout time of at least a year. The answer is they don't estimate a future breakout time of anything even close to twelve months. Also, the JCPOA was premised on the false assertion that Iranian moderation was possible without continued tough sanctions. But Iran in Syria proved the Obama-Kerry-Sherman team absent a clear strategic perception, a distinct reluctance to engage within the region, and a possible anti-Israel and anti-Saudi bias. The Iran nuclear deal should never have been divorced from the greater regional hegemonic designs of the Islamic Republic. Without an eye on the totality of the Levant, realism was the furthest thing from the negotiations and its highly elastic and dubious nuclear time frame. And now, has American diplomacy become so distorted by political partisanship that a future Democratic Party administration will merely advocate for a return to such a "flawed" executive document as the JCPOA? Such a policy boomerang would paint the US foreign policy establishment as politically dysfunctional and without alternatives other than party gamesmanship. Chancellor Merkel of Germany is wrong! There is an alternative to the Iran nuclear appeasement deal. That is, that the permanent members of the UN Security Council begin the diplomatic essentials of limiting their own biases toward conventional advantages. They must begin to work together to achieve a more permanent and structured balance leading to far greater prospects for peace. Once the world becomes safer from conventional hegemonic design, nuclear weapons (and their inevitable spread) will begin to be less important. This work must coincide with the necessary task of eliminating all nuclear weapons from the Middle East in conjunction with a formal rollback of Iranian attempts at conventional hegemony. Regime change cannot be a part of this program. But international cooperation toward a new Middle East will require from Iran a distinct change from highly dangerous and explosive revolutionary goals. Humanity is now on the cusp of a vast ecological endangerment. We must have bold new ideas for peace and cooperation.
SPEAK YOUR MIND NOW The Neocons have been visiting Putin in tandem; Netanyahu came first, John Bolton second, then Pompeo, and all had the same request “ISOLATE IRAN”. They are the same players who in 2003 pushed the US to invade Iraq under false pretences. They are it again and John Bolton is their point man. If the Iraq war cost taxpayers $2Trillion, the Iran world would cost double. The US Congress could stop this craziness, but a great number of them are in bed with Netanyahu. The last call to Putin was made by Trump, an nobody know what they talked about, except that Trump has been saying afterwards that he doesn’t want war with Iran. We remember the Mossad ( Netanyahu Intelligence Service) role in the uranium powder from Niger, Africa. Now the Saudi oil tankers were sabotaged near Iran, Mossad will continue finding an excuse for war against Iran, and the decent people in the US Congress, the few free press, Europeans, and the rest of the world should speak their mind now, time is of essence.
It’s not leaders, nor their governments, nor the people that embrittle hostile attitudes, it’s mostly what lies under their feet.
Mr. Horowitz, Does your vision of a denuclearized Middle East include a non-nuclear Israel? Hmmm. I wonder.
Yes, it does sir. My fourteen point peace plan has been published many times in Israel. You can find it here, on the Carnegie web page, in response to the opinion piece by Richard Sokolsky and Aaron David Miller,"A year after ditching the Iran Nuclear Deal, what is Trump's Iran policy? Saber rattling?" I submit that between Middle East nuclear proliferation and conventional war to prevent such nuclear proliferation, what other choice is there other than a diplomatic process leading to a nuclear free zone? The question becomes whether or not the UN Security Council's five permanent members (all nuclear powers) could achieve the vision and cooperation necessary to support such a zone? Without an all-encompassing structure for US-China-Russia peace, the Middle East will remain a global proxy battlefield and nuclear weapons expansion will become inevitable.
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