International sanctions on Iran were lifted on Saturday. It was determined that Iran had carried out its obligations under its agreement with the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, and Germany to stop pursuing the development of an atomic bomb. At Geopolitical Futures, we expected sanctions to be lifted and Iran to agree to halt these activities. However, our forecast was not based on the issue of nuclear weapons. Rather, it was based on our model, which indicated there would be cooperation between the US and Iran as a result of converging strategic interests. Nuclear weapons were at one point the main issue when it came to Iran. But by the time an agreement began to emerge, they had become a minor issue. There were much more important problems that needed to be addressed. These problems included the future of the region, the Islamic State, and the common interests of the United States and Iran on both subjects.
Let’s begin with the question of Iran and nuclear weapons. Ever since the 1990s, some had argued that Iran was likely to develop nuclear weapons in the near future. By the mid-2000s, the expectation was that it would have these weapons within two years. As each year passed, the due date for when they would be developed moved by another year. The fact that the predictions were constantly wrong didn’t deter the predictors at all. At a certain point, it became necessary to address this question: If Iran was hard at work on nuclear weapons, and was on the verge of building one, why did an underground test never take place?
Building a deliverable nuclear weapon is hard and involves much more than simply enriching uranium. Just consider the stresses a completed nuclear weapon, miniaturized to rest on top of a missile, has to undergo. It has to withstand the massive G-forces and vibration of a launch, enter a vacuum where the temperatures vary by hundreds of degrees each second, then re-enter the atmosphere at thousands of degrees, and then explode. Even building a sufficiently ruggedized and miniaturized atomic bomb that can be delivered by aircraft is difficult. But detonating a nuclear device (it’s not yet a weapon) underground as part of a testing process is much easier. The device can be as fragile and sprawling as you want. It isn’t going anywhere. It was my view that Iran might possibly manage a test explosion, but a weaponized system was beyond its capacity.
A nuclear test, however, was a risky move. Having a uranium enrichment program, just secret enough that every intelligence agency in the world knew about it, was extremely useful. It allowed others to obsess over Iran’s nuclear power, and that’s exactly what Iran wanted. It had learned the North Korean gambit. The West, and particularly the United States, is obsessed with the mere possibility of nuclear weapons. If you actually build one, the risk is the US may attack you. If you aren’t building one, you will be ignored. But have a nuclear program, without a nuclear bomb, and you will neither be attacked nor ignored. That’s what Iran wanted and what it got. It gained international leverage and attention far beyond what it would have received without a program. And that attention could be used domestically to demonstrate the power of the regime, and regionally to block any extremely aggressive move against Iran, as had happened in Iraq. Bec oming too aggressive toward Iran risked the unknown, since it might have been further along in developing a nuclear weapon than was thought. Therefore, Iran’s nuclear program was less about building a weapon than building uncertainty.
This strategy came with a price. The US and European sanctions hurt the Iranian economy substantially. However, the sanctions did not have an immediate impact on Iran’s public pursuit of the bomb. The sanctions began in 2006 and escalated from there. So clearly, as much as the West would like to think that it was the sanction regime that changed Iranian policy, the lapse of a decade would seem to indicate that this was not what broke them. The freezing of assets mattered of course, and the lack of substantial oil revenue and investments also took a toll. But given that the Iranians were not compelled to agree to a settlement when oil was at $100 a barrel and sanctions on oil sales would have had the biggest impact, they were unlikely to feel compelled at $30 a barrel. Sanctions hurt, but not enough to force a change in policy.
That’s because sanctions helped the Iranian government politically. Here were six countries, five of them nuclear powers, obsessed with stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The sanctions were used to demonstrate both the injustice with which the West treated Iran and the fear they had of Iran. This was a heady brew, and the Iranian government used it as more than a counterweight to sanctions. The ability of the Iranians to absorb economic difficulties was substantial. But the pictures of Iranian officials meeting with global powers as equals and challenging their hypocrisy were political gold. And the nuclear program opened the long-term possibility of reaching an agreement that would benefit Iran.
Then the region was transformed, and the putative nuclear program decreased in importance to both the United States, in particular, and Iran. This transformation was caused by the emergence of a powerful Sunni movement that was able to take and hold territory in a large region: the Islamic State. The Iranians had experienced the difficulty of dealing with a Sunni-controlled state in the 1980s, when it fought a war with Iraq under Saddam Hussein that cost them about a million casualties. Iran’s worst-case scenario wasn’t war with the United States, but war with a strong Sunni force to their west. The Islamic State was not yet that powerful, but its existence was sufficient to cause Iranian foreign policy to swerve in a new direction. Put differently, a civil war appeared to be breaking out between Sunnis and Shiites, and it was an overwhelming imperative that the Sunni coalition be broken before it could dominate Iraq, and certainly before it could thr eaten Iran.
Iran proved incapable of breaking IS by itself. It needed an anti-IS coalition, and the United States had to play some role in that coalition. By this point, nuclear programs were simply irrelevant to the reality of Iran.
The United States also shifted its regional strategy. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States discovered a core lesson. It could defeat any conventional or near-conventional enemy army, but it could not occupy either country without fighting an extended war against insurgents and terrorists who were deeply committed to their cause. This was not a new discovery. The Romans, British, and Germans learned this lesson as well. During World War II, in Germany and Japan, the US did succeed in peaceful occupation, not only by waging a military war, but by smashing the society as well. But at that time, it had 10 million men under arms, an economy entirely devoted to the war effort, and powerful allies like Britain and the Soviet Union. Without these things, the only goal that could be achieved was winning hearts and minds and, as it learned in Vietnam, that was easier in theory than practice.
Therefore, the United States developed a new strategy. Since it could not control the region through its military, it had no choice but to allow the region to evolve as it would. It was now up to regional powers, who had far more at stake than the United States—and couldn’t withdraw—to manage the situation. The United States would provide air power, intelligence, weapons, and training, but it would not take the primary responsibility on the ground for shaping the situation—because trying consistently led to failure, and continuing to do the same thing hoping for a different outcome is the definition of insanity, to use an appropriate cliché.