Authors: Henry Kissinger
The Islamic Republic announced itself on the world stage with a massive violation of a core principle of the Westphalian international system—diplomatic immunity—by storming the American Embassy in Tehran and holding its staff hostage for 444 days (an act affirmed by the current Iranian government, which in 2014 appointed the hostage takers’ translator to serve as its ambassador at the United Nations). In a similar spirit, in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini claimed global juridical authority in issuing a fatwa (religious proscription) pronouncing a death sentence on Salman Rushdie, a British citizen of Indian Muslim descent, for his publication of a book in Britain and the United States deemed offensive to Muslims.
Even while simultaneously conducting normal diplomatic relations with the countries whose territory these groups have in part arrogated, Iran in its Islamist aspect has supported organizations such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Mahdi Army in Iraq—non-state militias
challenging established authorities and employing terror attacks as part of their strategy.
Tehran’s imperative
of Islamic revolution has been interpreted to permit cooperation across the Sunni-Shia divide to advance broader anti-Western interests, including Iran’s arming of the Sunni jihadist group Hamas against Israel and, according to some reports, the Taliban in Afghanistan; the report of the 9/11 Commission and investigations of a 2013 terrorist plot in Canada suggested that al-Qaeda operatives had found scope to operate from Iran as well.
On the subject of the need to overthrow the existing world order, Islamists on both sides—Sunni and Shia—have been in general agreement. However intense the Sunni-Shia doctrinal divide erupting across the Middle East in the early twenty-first century, Sayyid Qutb’s views were essentially identical to those put forward by Iran’s political ayatollahs. Qutb’s premise that Islam would reorder and eventually dominate the world struck a chord with the men who recast Iran into the fount of religious revolution. Qutb’s works circulate widely in Iran, some personally translated by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As Khamenei wrote in his 1967 introduction to Qutb’s work,
The Future of This Religion
:
This lofty and great author
has tried in the course of the chapters of this book … to first introduce the essence of the faith as it is and then, after showing that it is a program of living … [to confirm] with his eloquent words and his particular world outlook that ultimately world government shall be in the hands of our school and “the future belongs to Islam.”
For Iran, representing the minority Shia branch of this endeavor, victory could be envisioned through the sublimation of doctrinal differences for shared aims. Toward this end, the Iranian constitution
proclaims the goal of the unification of all Muslims as a national obligation:
In accordance with the sacred verse
of the Qur’an (“This your community is a single community, and I am your Lord, so worship Me” [21:92]), all Muslims form a single nation, and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has the duty of formulating its general policies with a view to cultivating the friendship and unity of all Muslim peoples, and it must constantly strive to bring about the political, economic, and cultural unity of the Islamic world.
The emphasis would be not on theological disputes but on ideological conquest. As Khomeini elaborated, “
We must strive to export our Revolution
throughout the world, and must abandon all idea of not doing so, for not only does Islam refuse to recognize any difference between Muslim countries, it is the champion of all oppressed people.” This would require an epic struggle against “America, the global plunderer,” and the Communist materialist societies of Russia and Asia, as well as “Zionism, and Israel.”
Khomeini and his fellow Shia revolutionaries have differed from Sunni Islamists, however—and this is the essence of their fratricidal rivalry—in proclaiming that global upheaval would be capped with the coming of the Mahdi, who would return from “occultation” (being present though not visible) to assume the sovereign powers that the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic
temporarily exercises
in the Mahdi’s place. Iranian then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad considered this principle sufficiently settled to put it before the United Nations in an address on September 27, 2007:
Without any doubt
, the Promised One who is the ultimate Savior, will come. In the company of all believers,
justice-seekers and benefactors, he will establish a bright future and fill the world with justice and beauty. This is the promise of God; therefore it will be fulfilled.
The peace envisaged by such a concept has as its prerequisite, as President Ahmadinejad wrote to President George W. Bush in 2006, a global submission to correct religious doctrine. Ahmadinejad’s letter (widely interpreted in the West as an overture to negotiations) concluded with “
Vasalam Ala Man Ataba’al hoda
,” a phrase left untranslated in the version released to the public: “Peace only unto those who follow the true path.” This was the identical admonition sent in the seventh century by the Prophet Muhammad to the emperors of Byzantium and Persia, soon to be attacked by the Islamic holy war.
For decades Western observers have sought to pinpoint the “root causes” of such sentiments, convincing themselves that the more extreme statements are partly metaphorical and that a renunciation of policy or of past Western conduct—such as American and British interference in Iranian domestic politics in the 1950s—might open the door to reconciliation. Yet revolutionary Islamism has not, up to now, manifested itself as a quest for international cooperation as the West understands the term; nor is the Iranian clerical regime best interpreted as an aggrieved postcolonial independence movement waiting hopefully for demonstrations of American goodwill. Under the ayatollahs’ concept of policy, the dispute with the West is not a matter of specific technical concessions or negotiating formulas but a contest over the nature of world order.
Even at a moment hailed in the West as auguring a new spirit of conciliation—after the completion of an interim agreement on Iran’s nuclear program with the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany—the Iranian Supreme Leader, Khamenei, declared in January 2014:
By dressing up America’s face
, some individuals are trying to remove the ugliness, the violence and terror from this face and introduce America’s government to the Iranian people as being affectionate and humanitarian … How can you change such an ugly and criminal face in front of the Iranian people with makeup? … Iran will not violate what it agreed to. But the Americans are enemies of the Islamic Revolution, they are enemies of the Islamic Republic, they are enemies of this flag that you have raised.
Or, as Khamenei put it somewhat more delicately in a speech to Iran’s Guardian Council in September 2013, “
When a wrestler is wrestling
with an opponent and in places shows flexibility for technical reasons, let him not forget who his opponent is.”
T
HIS STATE OF AFFAIRS
is not inevitably permanent. Among the states in the Middle East, Iran has perhaps the most coherent experience of national greatness and the longest and subtlest strategic tradition. It has preserved its essential culture for three thousand years, sometimes as an expanding empire, for many centuries by the skilled manipulation of surrounding elements. Before the ayatollahs’ revolution, the West’s interaction with Iran had been cordial and cooperative on both sides, based on a perceived parallelism of national interests. (Ironically, the ayatollahs’ ascent to power was aided in its last stages by America’s dissociation from the existing regime, on the mistaken belief that the looming change would accelerate the advent of democracy and strengthen U.S.-Iranian ties.)
The United States and the Western democracies should be open to fostering cooperative relations with Iran. What they must not do is base such a policy on projecting their own domestic experience as inevitably or automatically relevant to other societies’, especially Iran’s.
They must allow for the possibility that the unchanged rhetoric of a generation is based on conviction rather than posturing and will have had an impact on a significant number of the Iranian people. A change of tone is not necessarily a return to normalcy, especially where definitions of normalcy differ so fundamentally. It includes as well—and more likely—the possibility of a change in tactics to reach essentially unchanged goals. The United States should be open to a genuine reconciliation and make substantial efforts to facilitate it. Yet for such an effort to succeed, a clear sense of direction is essential, especially on the key issue of Iran’s nuclear program.
The future of Iranian-American relations will—at least in the short run—depend on the resolution of an ostensibly technical military issue. As these pages are being written, a potentially epochal shift in the region’s military balance and its psychological equilibrium may be taking place. It has been ushered in by Iran’s rapid progress toward the status of a nuclear weapons state amidst a negotiation between it and the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (the P5+1). Though couched in terms of technical and scientific capabilities, the issue is at heart about international order—about the ability of the international community to enforce its demands against sophisticated forms of rejection, the permeability of the global nonproliferation regime, and the prospects for a nuclear arms race in the world’s most volatile region.
The traditional balance of power emphasized military and industrial capacity. A change in it could be achieved only gradually or by conquest. The modern balance of power reflects the level of a society’s scientific development and can be threatened dramatically by developments entirely within the territory of a state. No conquest could have increased Soviet military capacity as much as the breaking of the
American nuclear monopoly in 1949. Similarly, the spread of deliverable nuclear weapons is bound to affect regional balances—and the international order—dramatically and to evoke a series of escalating counteractions.
All Cold War American administrations were obliged to design their international strategies in the context of the awe-inspiring calculus of deterrence: the knowledge that nuclear war would involve casualties of a scale capable of threatening civilized life. They were haunted as well by the awareness that a demonstrated willingness to run the risk—at least up to a point—was essential if the world was not to be turned over to ruthless totalitarians. Deterrence held in the face of these parallel nightmares because only two nuclear superpowers existed. Each made comparable assessments of the perils to it from the use of nuclear weapons. But as nuclear weapons spread into more and more hands, the calculus of deterrence grows increasingly ephemeral and deterrence less and less reliable. In a widely proliferated world, it becomes ever more difficult to decide who is deterring whom and by what calculations.
Even if it is assumed that proliferating nuclear countries make the same calculus of survival as the established ones with respect to initiating hostilities against each other—an extremely dubious judgment—new nuclear weapons states may undermine international order in several ways. The complexity of protecting nuclear arsenals and installations (and building the sophisticated warning systems possessed by the advanced nuclear states) may increase the risk of preemption by tilting incentives toward a surprise attack. They can also be used as a shield to deter retaliation against the militant actions of non-state groups. Nor could nuclear powers ignore nuclear war on their doorsteps. Finally, the experience with the “private” proliferation network of technically friendly Pakistan with North Korea, Libya, and Iran demonstrates the vast consequences to international order of the spread of nuclear weapons, even when the proliferating country does not meet the formal criteria of a rogue state.
Three hurdles have to be overcome in acquiring a deployable nuclear weapons capability: the acquisition of delivery systems, the production of fissile material, and the building of warheads. For delivery systems, there exists a substantially open market in France, Russia, and to some extent China; it requires primarily financial resources. Iran has already acquired the nucleus of a delivery system and can add to it at its discretion. The knowledge of how to build warheads is not esoteric or difficult to discover, and their construction is relatively easy to hide. The best—perhaps the only—way to prevent the emergence of a nuclear weapons capability is to inhibit the development of a uranium-enrichment process. The indispensable component for this process is the device of centrifuges—the machines that produce
enriched uranium. (
Plutonium enrichment
must also be prevented and is part of the same negotiation.)
The United States and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council have been negotiating for over ten years through two administrations of both parties to prevent the emergence of such a capability in Iran. Six UN Security Council resolutions since 2006 have insisted that Iran suspend its nuclear-enrichment program. Three American presidents of both parties, every permanent member of the UN Security Council (including China and Russia) plus Germany, and multiple International Atomic Energy Agency reports and resolutions have all declared an Iranian nuclear weapon unacceptable and demanded an unconditional halt to Iranian nuclear enrichment. No option was to be “off the table”—in the words of at least two American presidents—in pursuit of that goal.
The record shows steadily advancing Iranian nuclear capabilities taking place while the Western position has been progressively softened. As Iran has ignored UN resolutions and built centrifuges, the West has put forward a series of proposals of increasing permissiveness—from insisting that Iran terminate its uranium enrichment permanently (2004); to allowing that Iran might continue some enrichment at low-enriched uranium (LEU) levels, less than 20 percent (2005); to proposing that Iran ship the majority of its LEU out of the country so that France and Russia could turn it into fuel rods with 20 percent enriched uranium (2009); to a proposal allowing Iran to keep enough of its own 20 percent enriched uranium to run a research reactor while suspending operations at its Fordow facility of centrifuges capable of making more (2013). Fordow itself was once a secret site; when discovered, it became the subject of Western demands that it close entirely. Now Western proposals suggest that activity at it be suspended, with safeguards making it difficult to restart. When the P5+1 first formed in 2006 to coordinate the positions of the international community, its negotiators insisted that Iran halt fuel-cycle activities before negotiations could proceed; in 2009, this condition was dropped. Faced with this record, Iran has had little incentive to treat any proposal as final. With subtlety and no little daring, it has at each stage cast itself as less interested in a solution than the world’s combined major powers and invited them to make new concessions.