Checkmating Iran

Doves keep talking about the Iranian nuclear problem like it is a unilateralist Ungame, the game where you win by not seeking to win. It is better thought of as multilateralist chess.  

Doves have argued that the primary obstacle to reaching a grand bargain with Iran has been the unwillingness of the United States to make a sufficiently generous offer. Doves believed that President Bush willfully ignored hopeful signs out of Iran and poisoned the well of negotiations by setting "unreasonable" conditions, for instance requiring that Iran pause its enrichment program while negotiating over the issue. Doves were encouraged by Obama’s campaign critique of Bush on Iran and especially by his promise to sit down face-to-face with Iranian leaders to hammer out a deal. Doves take a unilateralist approach to the international coalition, focusing almost exclusively on U.S. concessions as the engine of their strategy. The dove position is remarkably immune to bad news out of Tehran. Whenever the Iranian regime spurns a U.S. offer, the problem can be pinpointed in the alleged unfairness of the offer — unfair to Iran, that is. Be more generous, and the Iranians might play along. Whenever the Iranians are caught in a deceit, the doves propose a bold gambit of making further concessions to Iran as a way to capitalize on the momentum. Pushed to its logical conclusion, the dove position is an irrefutable tautology: If we are willing to live with an Iranian nuclear weapon, and we should be, then we can have a grand bargain with Iran and we can put this matter behind us. Like the Ungame, we only need to focus on moving our pieces and listening to others. Provided we don’t really care about "winning," then the game is really quite simple.

If you do care about winning, where winning is defined as "Iran abandons its nuclear weapons program," then the game is better viewed as multilateral chess — strategic interaction along several vectors with multiple players holding conflicting interests.

The most obvious vector is with Iran, which wants to keep its nuclear weapons program and wants all sorts of other goodies including keeping its support for global terrorism, gaining greater access to global markets, establishing a hegemonic position in the region, preserving regime stability, and so on. Our challenge is to set Iran’s various desiderata in opposition with each other, raising the costs of the ones contrary to our interests and enhancing the benefits of the ones consonant with our interests, thereby inducing Iran into making compromises we can live with. 

The only way we can do this, however, is by pursuing robust diplomacy, meaning credible offers of carrots simultaneous with imposition of sticks (what diplomats call the "pressure track"). By sticks, I mean non-military pressure, specifically multilateral economic sanctions; such sticks, by the way, are double-edged because they can also count as carrots — "make a deal with us and we will lift the sanction." The sticks tweak the costs, the carrots tweak the benefits. If applied in sufficient measure, the strategic calculus might be influenced and a deal might be struck. However, our ability to influence the regime’s strategic calculus depends heavily on the sticks side of the business and almost all of the sticks remaining to be played depend on the cooperation of others. This is why President Bush pursued a multilateral approach to Iran for many years, and for which he received considerable partisan abuse. Which brings us to the other vectors.

The next most important vector is with our European allies, who fervently want Iran to abandon its nuclear program and almost as fervently want the United States to shoulder the lion’s share of the costs of achieving that goal. For a while, the Europeans embraced a good cop, bad cop approach (guess which role they wanted to play). For the last several years, however, the Europeans have leaned a bit further forward in favor of imposing sticks, but have insisted that they cannot do so without successive waves of authorizing U.N. Security Council resolutions. Which brings us to the next vector.

Additional Security Council resolutions can only be achieved with the cooperation of the Russians and the Chinese, who have a different conflict of interest with us. Neither particularly wants Iran to develop nuclear weapons, but both want all of the costs of preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon to fall upon the United States and our European allies. The ideal situation from the Russian/Chinese point of view is a final deal which Iran accepts but which permanently orients Iran towards Russia-China outreach rather than towards the West. This conflict of interests is so profound it is almost irreconcilable except for one vital point: Russia and China want least of all a situation in which a nuclear negotiation deadlock collapses into military conflict. The challenge, therefore, is to convince the Russians and the Chinese that if they cooperate in imposing multilateral pressure on Iran, thus giving diplomacy a chance, they can help forestall a resort to force; but if they do not, they increase the likelihood of a U.S. (or an Israeli) resort to force. Hence the need to keep the military option on the table while also demonstrating a credible desire for a non-military solution. Structured this way, Russian and Chinese cooperation buy a peaceful resolution and Russian and Chinese free-riding hastens an undesirable military outcome. (Note, substitute Europe for Russia and China in the preceding sentences and you have a fair description of our challenge in 2005-2006.  The Europeans have moved closer to the United States since then, in part through the deft diplomacy of the Bush and then Obama Administrations, and in part through the daft diplomacy of the Iranians.)

This multilateral chess game is so daunting that the failure of the Obama team (and before them the Bush team) to win it is hardly an indication of strategic incompetence. But there have been avoidable missteps. The Bush team made a bold offer to Iran in May 2006, but did not maximize the leverage from that offer with sufficiently dramatic and concurrent steps, such as a major Presidential speech and letter directed over the heads of the regime and to the Iranian people, posting the details of the offer so the world (and critics) could see how generous it was, and seeking a simultaneous increase in economic pressure deferring instead to the European request to try out the carrots before imposing additional sticks. The Obama team fixed the publicity mistake, but repeated the mistake of first-carrots-then-sticks sequencing. They also added some mistakes of their own. The Obama team was slow to capitalize on the domestic turmoil inside Iran after the widespread election fraud. The failure to wield this pressure lever has caused even erstwhile doves to shift to a more hawkish position. An even more profound misstep — and one that has garnered far less attention — was the decision to treat sticks as an alternative to diplomacy rather than acknowledging that they are a crucial component that makes diplomacy work.  As a result, they have delayed the sticks far past the time when they could have maximum effect. Thus, Obama played an ace card in September — the evidence that the Iranian regime had systematically deceived the IAEA on a uranium enrichment program — but did not push for sticks at that time. Each self-declared declared deadline was missed, and each promised response was further delayed. Now we are well into 2010 and the pressure track is barely further advanced from where it was 6 months ago.

I was never very optimistic that the Iranian nuclear saga would end well. I am a bit less optimistic today. The best hope for success now appears to be with the Iranian people. If they seize the moment to change the trajectory of Iran, they could fundamentally alter the calculations of the Iranian regime. Tomorrow, on the 31st anniversary of the last time the Iranian people dramatically changed the trajectory of their country, we will get a sense of how likely that is.