'Containing' Iran Makes No Sense

Karim Sadjadpour offers the Biden administration some advice on Iran policy in a new article that shows the limitations of so much conventional thinking about Iran in this country. The article is called “How to Win the Cold War with Iran,” which conjures up a deeply misleading comparison with the Soviet Union and suggests that the ongoing hostility between the U.S. and Iran might be resolved in the same way. He acknowledges the major differences between the USSR and Iran, but nonetheless concludes that “the strategy used to contain, counter, and communicate with the U.S.S.R. remains the soundest template for Iran.” While it is popular to talk about “containing” Iran and to use Cold War containment policy as a model, it doesn’t really make any sense. Containment implies that there is some dangerous expansion that needs to be contained, but in Iran’s case this simply isn’t accurate.

Iran wields influence in a few countries in its own region, and that influence has increased when other governments have committed colossal blunders by launching unwise and unjust wars that create openings for Iran. The most recent and destructive of these disastrous wars has been the Saudi coalition’s war on Yemen, which was sold to the West as an anti-Iranian campaign. Arguably the only state in the region that has benefited from the catastrophe in Yemen has been Iran, which has exploited the conflict to inflict damage on Saudi Arabia at very low cost and with minimal involvement. While claiming to “contain” Iran, the Saudi coalition’s war led to closer ties between the Iranian government and the Houthis while doing incalculable harm to the civilian population for the last six years.

Sadjadpour goes all in on the containment idea, and urges Biden to apply a “variation” of it to Iran:

In his classic work Strategies of Containment, the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis noted that America’s successful containment of the Soviet Union—conceived by the famed Cold Warrior George Kennan—had three critical parts: fortifying American allies and partners (including Iran, in 1946); fragmenting the international Communist movement; and employing both pressure and inducements to attempt to “modify Soviet behavior.”

All of this is a solution in search of a problem. Iran does not threaten the U.S. directly, nor does it actually threaten any vital U.S. interests. One looks in vain for genuine treaty allies that Iran threatens, and the few clients that might have reason to worry are already armed to the teeth with U.S.-made weapons. Iran’s military is weak, its military spending is a fraction of that of many of its neighbors, and its ability to project power is limited. This is not a behemoth that needs to be caged. There is nothing to be contained, and even if there were it would not be our responsibility to contain it.

The best way to “win” the standoff with Iran is to stop participating. At the close of the Cold War, Georgi Arbatov told an American audience, “We are going to do a terrible thing to you--we are going to deprive you of an enemy.” The best thing that the U.S. could do for itself, the region, and the people of Iran is to deprive the Iranian government of its enemy. This doesn’t require an elaborate, three-pronged containment strategy. It requires only scaling back our involvement in the region in keeping with our few limited interests there and desisting in the hostile policies toward Iran that have helped to stoke the antagonism between our two countries for almost half a century.