The Obama administration continues to harbor hope that the recent nuclear deal with Iran will alter the Islamic regime’s behavior and produce a more stable and peaceful Middle East, according to recent reports, despite criticism from analysts who say the United States has a poor track record of using diplomacy alone to change the nature of rogue regimes.
While the administration is selling the agreement to skeptical lawmakers as a short-term measure that will prevent Iran from procuring a nuclear weapon, top U.S. officials still believe the deal could help achieve a new long-term equilibrium between warring Shiite and Sunni forces in the Middle East, the New York Times recently reported. A senior administration official told the Times that President Obama views the nuclear pact as an opportunity to help solve the "meta-conflict in the Middle East" between Shiite Iran and the Sunni leaders of Saudi Arabia.
However, previous U.S. efforts to transform rogue regimes through diplomacy were widely viewed as unsuccessful. In the case of North Korea, President Bill Clinton signed the Agreed Framework with Pyongyang in 1994, which placed constraints on its nuclear program but allowed it to eventually build two light-water reactors.
The Bush administration later discovered that North Korea was covertly enriching uranium, and Pyongyang tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006.
According to the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, who covered the breakdown in the Agreed Framework, "Some former Clinton administration officials will also concede that they never thought they would have to build the light-water reactors because they assumed, wrongly, that the regime would collapse before the reactors would be built. So one could argue that the Agreed Framework was built on a bad bet in the first place."
President Jimmy Carter also expressed hopes that the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in the late 1970s would convince the Soviet Union to assume a more conciliatory approach in the Cold War. But lawmakers declined to ratify the treaty and its prescribed nuclear limits after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, later concluded that "our almost fetishistic preoccupation with obtaining a SALT agreement made the Soviets feel that they could press us for concessions while one-sidedly exploiting détente elsewhere."
Some Obama administration officials have compared the Iran deal to more favorable historical agreements, such as President Ronald Reagan’s negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, before the Soviet regime collapsed in the early 1990s. But there were several other factors besides diplomacy that contributed to the Soviet downfall, said David Adesnik, policy director at the Foreign Policy Initiative, in an interview.
Reagan at one point walked away from his talks with Gorbachev on limiting the production of nuclear missiles, but the two countries later signed a treaty to impose the restrictions. He also applied pressure on the Soviet Union in other areas by arming anti-Soviet insurgents in Afghanistan and continually pressing them on human rights abuses. Obama, by contrast, limited the talks with Iran to nuclear issues only and has so far declined to support a robust armament program for anti-Iranian allies, such as the nationalist rebels in Syria.
Adesnik noted that Gorbachev was a more conciliatory leader who wanted to alter his regime—a situation that he said does not currently exist in Iran. Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president who has been described by some as a moderate, was previously involved in Tehran’s assassination campaign against expatriates and Jews in the 1990s and the maintenance of its nuclear program in the early 2000s.
"[Iran does not] have an equivalent for Gorbachev," Adesnik said.
Michael Rubin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official who researches the Middle East and Iran, said in an email that the sanctions relief Tehran is expected to receive under the deal—as much as $100 billion—is unlikely to moderate its behavior.
While Rouhani was still chairman of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council in the early 2000s, Tehran used increased trade with the European Union and soaring oil prices to expand its covert nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Now Tehran will have another "hard currency windfall," Rubin said.
"There is absolute certainty about the impact the nuclear deal will have on Iran's international behavior: it will make it far worse," continued Rubin, author of Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes. "It's all well and good to debate policy, but anyone who suggests that money will moderate Tehran betrays ignorance of Iranian history and the structure upon which Iran's economy is built."
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—which sponsors Iranian terrorist proxies abroad—stands to benefit enormously from the deal, Rubin said. The IRGC is linked to front companies that have a foothold in Iran’s oil, construction, defense, manufacturing, electronics, and import-export industries.
"To understand the role it plays, imagine that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers merged with Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, and Exxon," he said. "Such a conglomerate would pop the heads of progressives if it existed in the United States, but Obama seeks to want to empower it in Iran."
By giving up the leverage of sanctions in its dealings with Iran, Rubin added that, "Obama repeated not the lessons of Reagan but rather the weakness of Carter with predictable results."
As Congress continues its 60-day review of the Iran deal ahead of a likely September vote, the administration’s rhetoric is focused on the short-term goal of preventing an Iranian bomb, rather than the long-term vision of transforming Iran. A senior administration official said that, "we have been very clear that this deal was always only about Iran's nuclear program" and that "we are clear-eyed about the nature of the Iranian regime."
However, Adesnik said some of Obama’s comments in previous interviews—such as the potential for Iran to become a "very successful regional power" after a deal—reflect a "very conflicted" administration.
"[Obama] almost wants to entice [interviewers] with the vision that there could be cooperation," he said. "They want to believe that’s it not just the deal, but they have their own sense of how unrealistic that is."