Our Irrational Iran Policy

The conceit that Iran poses a threat to the United States is as widely shared in Washington as it is untrue.

Michael Hirsch frames the failure of U.S. Iran policy this way:

After more than two decades of failed policies—fluctuating wildly between confrontation and cooperation—Washington and the West still find themselves facing down a hostile Iran.

U.S. policy has not been “fluctuating wildly between confrontation and cooperation” over the last twenty years. Since the turn of the century, there have been two brief periods of limited U.S.-Iranian cooperation: a very short time following the 9/11 attacks when Iran was willing to work the U.S. in the early stages of the war in Afghanistan, and a slightly longer period between the conclusion of the interim nuclear agreement in 2013 and the end of Obama’s presidency in 2017. The U.S. didn’t renege on the nuclear deal until 2018, but Trump’s election had already signaled the return of reflexive hostility. Even during the Obama years, cooperation was limited to the nuclear issue, and that happened in the context of overall hostility and arming Iran’s regional rivals to the teeth. Except for those small windows of engagement, U.S. policy towards Iran has been defined entirely by hostility and punitive measures, and when there was some engagement it was always overwhelmed by reflexive antipathy.

The nuclear deal was a remarkable breakthrough in relations on one level, but on another it had no real effect on how our government perceived theirs or vice versa. The U.S. has followed the hawkish playbook of condemnation, sanctions, and threats for twenty years, and it has served to ratchet up tensions and bring the U.S. and Iran to the brink of war. The confrontational approach is clearly bankrupt, but there are too many people with vested interests in confrontation for it to change in the foreseeable future.

The attempts at cooperation were few, tentative, and narrowly focused on one issue at a time. There was never a time when the U.S. was broadly pursuing cooperation with Iran. To the extent that the U.S. tried cooperation, it ended up with something to show for its efforts, but hardliners on our side kept sabotaging engagement and destroyed whatever gains had been made. Limited policies of cooperation did not fail in achieving something useful for the U.S., but they were killed off anyway. Policies of confrontation have repeatedly led to worse results for the U.S., Iran, and the region, but they remain firmly in place to this day. Biden’s decision to continue Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions is the latest example of the latter.

While both governments share responsibility for the antagonistic relationship, the U.S. has gone out of its way to pick fights with Iran when there was no reason to do so and when there were some good reasons to avoid it. This was most obvious during the Trump years, but it has been true ever since Bush lumped Iran in as part of the “axis of evil.” Whenever there has been a flicker of mutual understanding and compromise between our governments, hardliners in Washington have been tripping over each other to try to snuff it out. Regrettably, they have succeeded every time. If anyone wants to know why U.S. Iran policy has produced worse outcomes for U.S. interests, look no further than the hawks that desire to increase tensions and stoke conflict with Iran.

The hawkish obsession with Iran in this country is genuinely bizarre. The U.S. has fought major wars against some other states that are no longer vilified and distrusted to the extent that Iran is in our policy debates. The U.S. established normal relations with Vietnam twenty years after the fall of Saigon. The opening to China occurred less than twenty years after the armistice in Korea. Since the U.S. and Iran have never fought a war on that scale, it should be easier to pursue some form of détente with Iran than it was with the others, but as we all know there is no chance that any president could propose such a thing without being politically destroyed. This is completely irrational, but this is the reality.

The conceit that Iran poses a threat to the United States is as widely shared in Washington as it is untrue. Even many advocates of diplomatic engagement feel compelled to present their case by emphasizing the supposedly dire threat that Iran poses to our national security. One would think after the experience of the Iraq war that Americans would start to appreciate the absurdity of claiming to feel threatened by a much smaller, weaker country on the other side of the world that can’t do anything to us, but that has not happened. Until most Americans can be persuaded that Iran isn’t a threat to our security, the hostile obsession with Iran will continue in one form or another because the political price of rejecting it will be too high.