DURING THE IRAN-CONTRA AFFAIR, Art Buchwald defined an Iranian “moderate” as an Iranian who has run out of ammunition. Despite this cynical view, there most likely are moderates in Iran — the vast majority in the country who are disgusted with the Islamist theocratic regime, and even some in the leadership who may question whether Iran benefits from its risky and provocative hostility toward the West. The real issue has always been not whether there are such people, but how the United States can strengthen their hand in whatever internal debates may be taking place.
This whole question is reopened by the May 23 presidential election in Iran, in which a supposedly moderate 54-year-old cleric, Mohammed Khatemi, won a stunning upset over the more hidebound Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, favored by the political and religious establishment. Khatemi won 69 percent of the vote, apparently with enthusiastic support from young people, women, intellectuals, and others who saw him as a force for change. The turnout was an extraordinary 91 percent, nearly double that of the last presidential election.
Whatever Khatemi may mean for Iran, his victory has, at the very least, shifted the ground of the policy debate in the United States. Long before the election, there were voices in America calling for a more flexible U.S. policy — easing economic sanctions, pursuing a dialogue with Tehran, seeking common ground with the Europeans. That this advice was wrongheaded is all the more obvious in retrospect, given that when it was put forward, Iran was still led by its unreconstructed leaders (the same gang named by a German court as systematic purveyors of international terrorism, and possibly responsible for 19 American dead in a Saudi barracks bombing) and Nateq-Nouri was universally expected to be the next president. The idea of relaxing pressures on Iran, recommended then on the ground that our policy had failed, will undoubtedly now be put forward again on the ground that our policy has succeeded. But it’s still bad advice.
Foreign policy did not figure in the recent Iranian election campaign, and there is no hint from the president-elect that he questions Iran’s revolutionary “internationalism.” The possibility of a change in Iran’s course does now exist. But it only brings us back to the question: What is our strategy? How exactly do we expect to influence Iran’s conduct or evolution?
The Clinton administration has adopted the concept of containment, borrowed from our long postwar experience with the Soviet Union. It’s not a bad model. When George F. Kennan propounded the original containment doctrine in 1947, the theory went as follows: The Soviet system was externally dangerous but deeply flawed internally. We could not affect it directly. But if the West firmly and patiently blocked the Kremlin’s external expansion, sooner or later a new group of leaders would come into power who would be forced to turn inward to confront the system’s internal contradictions. It was a brilliant forecast of what actually happened.
It was also a long-term strategy. It did not promise instant results, but rather, as noted, made firmness and patience the cardinal requirements.
Perhaps Khatemi will be the Mikhail Gorbachev of the Iranian revolution; perhaps not. Our job is to continue to shape the external conditions in which Iran must operate. Containment of Iran has meant doing the maximum to mobilize international pressures on Iran — keeping it off balance, compounding its economic problems, imposing costs for its obnoxious behavior. If we can maintain such a policy, we increase the probability that new leadership, Gorbachev-like, will undertake a wholesale reassessment of Iran’s role in the world as well as of its internal system. If Iran’s policies are discredited by failure, a rational leadership will think about changing them.
In the meantime, we have no choice but to enforce our laws and, when the facts warrant, to retaliate strongly for terrorist attacks against Americans. To fail to do either would be inexplicable and would signal a collapse of the U.S. position. The time has come, moreover, to lend some support to democratic opposition groups both inside Iran and outside and to set up a Radio Free Iran.
The present U.S. policy is full of holes, to be sure. Our allies in Europe and Japan are willing to go along with some important restraints (on arms sales, technology transfer, and new credits) but refuse to end normal trade and chafe at U.S. pressures on them. Nonetheless, as Churchill said about democracy, it’s the worst policy — except for all the alternatives. The alternative of relieving Iran of international pressures would be completely incoherent; nor do its advocates put forward any serious explanation of how exactly it would induce Iran to abandon its ideologically driven assault on the West’s vital interests. It is the product of impatience, not analysis.
The mullahs’ regime is in trouble. It is periodically shaken by riots and other social unrest, and prominent military figures have called on the clerics to leave politics; the election upset was eloquent testimony to the disaffection in the country. If Khatemi is Gorbachev, then the total unraveling that accompanied Gorbachev’s reformism is in itself a daunting prospect facing Khatemi. The West’s responsibility is to maintain the calculus of costs and benefits as before, so that the regime understands the high price it pays for its present policies — and (it goes without saying) the benefit of a more normal relationship with the West should Iran change its course in a fundamental way. The West should not sell its favors cheaply or, worse, give them away for free.
Peter W. Rodman is director of national security programs at the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom and a senior editor of National Review.
