This week, President Trump will be chairing his first ever session at the U.N. Security Council. While the subject of the session is combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the president and his advisers have made it clear that Iran will be receiving special attention during the meeting. Trump’s participation at the U.N. will come less than a week after Brian Hook, the Trump administration’s point man on Iran policy, delivered a speech on the Trump administration’s wider Iran policy, one centered on dialing up the financial pressure on key sectors of the Iranian economy until such a time that Tehran fundamentally transforms its foreign policy.
Four months earlier, the Trump administration delivered a long list of non-negotiable demands to the Iranians, all of which needed to be met if Tehran hoped to form a more cordial relationship with the United States. They included everything from a full redeployment of Iranian military personnel and Iranian-funded militia fighters from Syria to “unqualified access” across Iran’s entire nuclear infrastructure. Hook’s policy speech was largely an extension of this theme.
Unfortunately, his remarks were also notable for rampant overexaggeration and fearmongering. The Trump administration’s description of Iran was off-kilter from reality and threat inflation at its worst — an attempt to convince the American public that the mullahs that have been running the country for the last four decades are the biggest threat to U.S. and international security since the Soviet Union. The focus given to Tehran’s development, testing, and export of ballistic missile technology was designed to highlight Iran as a menace that not only seeks a 21st-century Persian Empire in the Middle East, but a revisionist power that may one day launch a ballistic missile in Europe’s direction.
The underlying concern about Iran’s missile production is legitimate, even if it is also tends to be blown out of proportion. Evidence of Iranian work on missile silos is overwhelming; Iranian defense officials frequently boast about it. Last August, Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami reiterated the regime’s continuing efforts in improving the quantity and quality of the country’s ballistic missile capability. “As promised to our dear people,” Hatami said, “we will not spare any effort to increase the missile capabilities of the country, and we will certainly increase our missile power every day.”
All of this sounds frightening on the surface. But taken in full context, Iran’s work on missiles is not at all surprising.
Iran is located in an incredibly mercurial region of the world and confronted by rivals in the Gulf who spend an enormous amount of money on military equipment (in 2017, Saudi Arabia became the third-highest military spender in the world, allocating $69.4 billion). The mullahs in Tehran, like national security officials in China, France, South Korea, or the U.S., don’t want to be caught unprepared during an escalation. Indeed, if the U.S. were watching an adversary in their own hemisphere rearming at an unprecedented rate, it is highly likely Americans would expect their political leaders to take precautionary measures in order to ensure America’s flexibility is preserved. Iran’s search for national defense is no different.
The missile program, however, is a microcosm of a broader trend in the U.S. foreign policy establishment of heightening Iran’s military, political, and economic power and giving its leadership far more credit than it is due. While there are a bevy of worries for the international community to have about Iran’s conduct, from its support of terrorist groups and proxies in multiple Arab countries to its use of assassination against dissidents on foreign soil, Iran is not the tyrannical and messianic hegemon that conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C., wants the public to believe.
The Iranian economy is vulnerable due to extreme and systemic levels of corruption and nepotism. Its $16 billion defense budget is peanuts compared to that of Riyadh ($69.143 billion); is less than Iraq ($19.3 billion) and Israel ($18.5 billion), two nations whose militaries are composed of high-end U.S. defense equipment; and only $7 billion more than Oman, a relatively tiny Arab nation on the eastern Arabian Peninsula. Iran’s Air Force remains antiquated and numerically inferior to the Gulf Cooperation Council’s capacity (according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the GCC holds a 2:1 advantage over Iran in the number of combat aircraft and spends eight times more than Tehran on military expenditures). Periodic threats from Iranian officials of a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz would in truth hurt Iran financially and likely plunge its economy into a recession. And were it to be brazen enough to launch a missile attack against Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, the act would result in such devastation to Iran as a society that it would be practically suicidal.
Economic indicators are no more encouraging for the Iranians. Iran may possess one of the more diversified economies in the region due in part to the necessity of finding alternative sources of revenue outside of an energy industry often limited by U.S. sanctions, its GDP ($418.977 billion in 2016) simply can’t compete when measured against the collective weight of the oil-rich GCC ($1.364 trillion).
None of this is to minimize the threat Iran poses to U.S. allies in the region. Tehran is no doubt a destabilizing actor in the Middle East. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in particular has demonstrated its willingness time and again to make the region more susceptible to Iranian influence — even if it means arming and organizing proxies in several Arab countries and meddling in its neighbors’ internal politics.
But Washington should stop inflating Iran’s power and engaging in unhelpful and unwarranted hyperventilation. Threat inflation does not serve America’s interests, nor is a sound basis for making critical foreign policy decisions. What the United States needs and the public desire is cool-headed, rational deliberation based on the full and accurate picture.
When Iran presents an imminent threat to the United States or its partners, Washington should not hesitate to snuff it out. Any response should send an unequivocal warning to the Iranian regime that an attack on American citizens interests, however small, will he met with ferocity at a time and place of our choosing.
What the foreign policy community should not do, however, is substitute logic and fact-based analysis with emotional overreaction. Iran is not King Kong, but a fly on America’s back.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a fellow at Defense Priorities.
