Iran’s Nuclear Chess: Calculating America’s Moves

 

            In Iran, the nuclear issue is a surrogate for the more fundamental 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 masquerading 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, remains the final arbiter of any prospective agreement. His decision, based on a strategic calculus that has regime stability as its paramount objective, will hinge on how he manages the unresolved tension in Iran’s competing identities—revolutionary state/ordinary country. In short, Khamenei’s dilemma is 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 is that this “breakout” period for converting a latent capability into a weapon should be long enough (12-18 months is frequently cited) 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 will crucially affect the Supreme Leader’s decision to accept or reject terms for a comprehensive agreement that meaningfully bounds Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Such an accord would be transformative because of the nuclear issue’s proxy status in Iranian politics—and for that reason Khamenei may balk.

 

            A breakdown in diplomacy will 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 well 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 Non-Proliferation Treaty—that would openly cross the red line of weaponization.

 

            Obama’s disavowal of “containment” is a reflection of the meaning the term has taken on in the contemporary 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.

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