IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROJECT can probably be stopped by significantly cutting its oil income. A meaningful decline in this main source of Iran’s income would force its leadership to choose between butter and guns. This is a critical choice; the ayatollahs cannot hope to maintain their hold on power if they cannot feed the tens of millions of destitute citizens now kept afloat with immense welfare outlays. As long as high oil prices and exports provide them with enough income to finance both their costly welfare program and their ambitious, expensive nuclear project, they can and will do both. If reduced means compel a choice, the survival instinct will force them to choose rice rather than enriched uranium.

So why has so little been done to reduce Iran’s oil income? Military and diplomatic experts in the West have not yet considered the full extent of Iran’s economic vulnerability. Like the Kremlinologists of yore, whose chief efforts were directed at avoiding a nuclear conflagration between the Soviet Union and the West, those dealing with Iran have become totally enmeshed in diplomatic moves to head off Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, ignoring the less obvious but more crucial economic processes that underlie Iran’s power. Very few Kremlinologist predicted the implosion of the powerful Soviet empire, an implosion that had far more to do with economics than with diplomatic efforts at containment. The same may be happening now with regards to Iran.