Michael Rubin
Word from Vienna suggests a further American collapse is in progress as Europe tries to broker a renewed Iran nuclear deal. With sanctions lifted and oil sales permitted, Iranian authorities will reap tens of billions of dollars, much of which will flow to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps coffers. While the White House is trying to spin this deal as one that is robust and foolproof, facts suggest otherwise.
The original 2015 Iran nuclear deal reversed decades of counterproliferation precedent; the 2022 analog manages to do even less. Not only will clauses of the deal expire, leaving Iran an industrial-scale program not beholden to many controls, but the Iranian government also claims that the deal on paper closes the file on investigations into Iranian cheating. President Joe Biden’s team may applaud themselves, but they’re not fooling anyone in the region.
The reality is the new Iranian deal is a tacit acknowledgment that Biden has no Plan B. While there are tangible steps that a much more creative administration might take, starting with the renewal of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s “maximum pressure” campaign, Biden simply seeks to kick the can down the road and hope that Iranian leaders are polite enough to wait until he leaves office so that his surrogates can blame Iran’s nuclear bombs on his successor.
It’s one thing to craft an illusion and another to deal with reality. The question with which the United States must deal is what it will mean when the Islamic Republic, like North Korea in 2006, declares itself a nuclear state.
For one, the U.S. will lose its ability to deter Iran. For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic has been extraordinarily lucky to have the U.S. as its adversary. It has waged an unremitting war against America but consistently avoided retaliation. Iran never paid much price for seizing the U.S. Embassy and holding 52 diplomats hostage for more than a year. Likewise, it suffered no military retaliation for the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut or the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. In 2003, Iranian officials promised American and British diplomats they would not interfere in Iraq but then proceeded to mastermind the murder of more than 600 Americans — again without consequence. Ditto the torture and murder of former FBI agent Bob Levinson and the continued drone strikes on U.S. facilities in Iraq. Only in 1988, when a U.S. ship hit an Iranian mine, did the Iranian military suffer any meaningful consequence.
Still, the threat of U.S. retaliation always loomed large. It likely caused second-guessing inside Iran. The Revolutionary Guards knew that if they blew up an American embassy or encouraged its proxies to attack American airports, schools, or shopping malls, they would likely face a devastating response. Iranian air defenses are poor, and the U.S. has the ability to repeat Qassem Soleimani’s end with almost every Iranian general.
However, all bets are off once Iran has its own nuclear deterrent. Not even the most hawkish American administration would counsel a military strike on Iran if it meant the real possibility that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps would launch its nuclear weapons against U.S. regional facilities or, as they develop their missiles, at the continental U.S. itself.
This, in turn, means drawing a new baseline in which the Islamic Republic calculates that it can ramp up regional aggression and terrorism without consequence. Expect the terrorism of the mid-1980s to appear like a calm day as Iran mines the Persian Gulf and launches drone swarms to attack regional rivals, all in the belief that, as the IRGC Navy’s banners read, “The Americans Can’t Do a Damned Thing.”
Wars in the Middle East erupt not because of oil or water but rather because of overconfidence. This is the real danger. Biden may believe he is furthering diplomacy, but he is setting the stage for a real “forever war” across the region by convincing Tehran that it can act without consequence.
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