Who is right?

When it comes to vital American interests, little trumps stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons.  Bruce Riedel may be right that we need to begin to imagine how we can live with the prospect, but most of those who worry about these issues would want to maximize at least the non-military effort to prevent it from happening. Ken Pollack and Ray Takeyh think we need first to “double down.”  Stephen Walt says that would be counterproductive.  Instead we should ease up and try to get an agreement that Iran will not weaponize its nuclear technology.  Who is right?

Walt starts from the obvious:  pressuring the Iranians hasn’t worked.  Regime survival is Tehran’s primary concern.  Increasing the pressure implicitly or explicitly threatens the regime, which sees nuclear weapons as a guarantee of regime survival.  Pressure will only solidify Tehran’s determination to get them.  So why would redoubling work?

Pollack and Takeyh agree that regime survival is Tehran’s primary concern.  They propose that we threaten it.  Doing so, they argue, will require that we support the Green Movement–Iran’s so far failed popular uprising–as well as ethnic opponents of the regime, try to block (mostly Chinese) investment in the energy sector, target the Revolutionary Guards in ways they claim we have been reluctant to do, and increase criticism of Iran’s human rights record.

I’ll be accused of straddling, or maybe of mixing and matching, but it seems to me the sweet spot lies somewhere in between these stark perspectives.  Yes, the United States should talk with the Green Movement and the ethnic groups in Iran and provide what support they think will be productive, so long as they remain nonviolent (violence, especially from the Baloch and Kurds, gives the regime the excuse it needs to crack down).  It should certainly be focusing global attention on Iranian human rights abuses.

But it is unlikely that the Chinese are going to pass on energy investment in Iran unless there is a broad international agreement (read Security Council resolution) that asks them to do so, and we’ve got to be cautious about the ways and means used to support the Greens and other oppositions.  American support, especially in covert form, can do more to harm them than to help.

Walt may be correct in his analysis of the failure of current policy.  But it does not follow that if we ease up now the Iranians will be interested in accommodating our interest in seeing them stop their nuclear program short of weaponization.  Why wouldn’t they just plow ahead if there is no clear cost associated with doing so?  If making the benefits of stopping clear would help, why wouldn’t it also help to make the costs of plowing ahead clear?

Walt concludes his piece with his “real concern”:

…by falsely portraying the United States as having made numerous generous offers, by dismissing Iran’s security concerns as unfounded reflections of innate suspiciousness or radical ideology, and by prescribing a course of action that hasn’t worked in the past and is likely to fail now, Pollack and Takeyh may be setting the stage for a future article where they admit that “doubling down” didn’t work, and then tell us — with great reluctance, of course — that we have no choice but to go to war again.

That is a separate issue, perhaps the most important of war and peace question of this decade.