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Contact Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry


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A Completely Unrealistic Iran Grand Bargain Proposal

A cropped Manmohan Singh version of File:IBSA-...

Manmohan Singh (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s a testament to how dim the prospects of a sustainable solution to Iran‘s nuclear weapons program that we’ve forgotten what a good Endgame would look like: a Grand Bargain where Iran gets a wholesale lifting of sanctions and introduction into the “respectable” international community, access to civilian nuclear technology and acceptable security guarantees in exchange for abandoning its nuclear weapons program, submitting to international control thereof, and ending its sponsorship of terror groups.

It’s at least possible to imagine a sanctions/sabotage program so crippling that the Iranian regime would fear losing the support of its middle class and seek a better way. The example of Burma shows that it’s at least conceivable that an international sanctions regime can motivate a tyrannical regime to implement some degree of reform.

If we grant that the Iranian leadership would at least be theoretically amenable to such a Grand Bargain, it seems to me that the biggest holdup concerns the security guarantees. The Iranian leadership evidently believes (and, from their perspective, not without reason) that the United States wants not so much a nuclear-free Iran as regime change, and sees building nuclear capability as the only insurance policy against regime change.

This is why I think that the US Libya intervention was such a blunder of epic proportions. Remember that Ghadafi struck a deal with the international community to abandon its WMDs, renounce terror and indemnize terror victims in exchange for respectability for the regime. The international community then reneged on the deal and militarily effected regime change in Libya (regardless of the humanitarian reasons for doing so, that is what happened). Much more than throwing the Sahel into turmoil (though that headache will be with us for decades), this is the key reason why Libya was such a fantastic blunder.

Think about it from your average tinpot dictator’s perspective; the combined examples of Libya, Iraq and North Korea point to a very simple conclusion: if you have nukes, the US will mostly leave you alone; if you don’t, the US will jump at any pretext to bomb you into oblivion. Why US policymakers haven’t looked at the whole chessboard is mystifying to me.

Any Grand Bargain deal that would have any chance of getting the Iranian leadership onboard would therefore have to square that circle and provide iron-clad security guarantees to the Iranian regime. It can’t be a “cross your heart” promise from the US and Israel not to attack Iran, because that wouldn’t be credible. Iran would have to get an ironclad, credible security guarantee.

So here’s my completely unrealistic idea: India must provide the security guarantee. In return for everything we want from Iran, India would sign a defense treaty with Iran similar to the one between the United States and Japan.

This could conceivably be acceptable for Iran because India is a nuclear state and a significant power; its security guarantee would therefore be credible. Israel or Iran just wouldn’t attack a country that has a security treaty with India. India is not aligned with the US in the way that, say, Great Britain is, which makes it good for Iran, but is totally acceptable to the US as a security guarantor in the region* because it’s (mostly) a peaceful democracy. India would obviously love it since it would instantly make it a key player in the Middle East and would validate its status as an emerging great power, which it craves.

Some obvious objections:

  • It’s just crazy! Crazy…or so crazy it might work?
  • The Iranians will never go for it. How do we know until we’ve tried it? If the Iranian regime is a self-interested entity which is interested in a) preserving its hold on domestic power; b) accruing domestic and international prestige, a no more sanctions/credible security guarantee combo is exactly the ticket, and India provides that. If the Iranian regime is a pack of death-loving jihadis who want to get nukes to carry out a second Holocaust, they’ll turn down the deal and then we’ll know exactly where we stand and exactly what we have to do when Iran reaches the nuclear threshold.
  • What if Iran signs the deal and then ignores it? What if Iran gets a defense treaty with India and then keeps developing nukes and funding Hezbollah? The international community would be powerless since Iran would be protected by its India treaty. Two answers: a) the treaty should obviously include carve-outs whereby India would not be bound by the treaty if Iran is found to be developing military nuclear technology or supporting terror; this could be enforced by an arbitration tribunal of uninvolved, unreproachable countries (let’s say: Norway, Switzerland, Bhutan, Malaysia, or something) that could say “Sorry, this evidence you’re working on nukes is pretty strong, the US can hit you with everything and India doesn’t have to move an inch”; b) it would be in India’s best interests to enforce the deal, if only to show credibility as an emerging great power (which, again, it craves very strongly); one reason why the Japan security treaty works is because everyone knows the US wouldn’t let Japan, say, build up its military and threaten South Korea with invasion.
  • Pakistan would completely freak out. Frankly, I view this as a feature and not a bug. Turning Iran into a key Indian ally/client would make Pakistan feel surrounded and angry, and would reinforce its solipsistic paranoia that the US and India are allied together to “get” Pakistan. But from everything I’ve read about the internal mechanics of Pakistan, there is nothing that won’t reinforce Pakistani paranoia about India and attendant anti-Americanism. Pakistan could react to this deal in two ways: a) support Taliban extremists and work hard to thwart US anti-terror efforts in Central Asia, but they’re already doing that (and with US money to boot!) and US anti-terror efforts in Central Asia are not working anyway; b) give nukes to terrorists, which is a sobering thought, but if they’re crazy enough to do that, then the problem isn’t the India security guarantee, it’s Pakistani craziness, which needs to be dealt with on its own terms. I’m not trying to be flip here, the Pakistani Freakout issue is key, but I think it can be managed, or at least thought through beyond seeing a Pakistani Freakout as an automatic dealbreaker. (One way to do this would be to fold the Iran Grand Bargain into a Kashmir Grand Bargain; India would give up its claims on Kashmir in exchange for the emerging great power status that the Iran deal would give them, and Pakistan might be willing to give up its claims in exchange for money + stopping drone strikes in the NWFP which aren’t working anyway + something else. This notion is perilously close to Fantasyland, but if you’re going to cut Gordian knots let’s do a bunch of them.)

There’s probably a lot of things that are very wrong with my idea but if there’s one thing I’m convinced of, it’s that the Iran question could certainly use more creative thinking, so let’s start there. I’m also convinced that Libya means that any Grand Bargain, to have any chance in hell of succeeding, needs to address the question of a security guarantee head-on.

There are plenty of smarter international relations bloggers than I. What am I missing? What do we think?

(* If you ask me, an even better security guarantor for Iran than India would be…China. China would absolutely love it since it would get them ready access to Middle Eastern commodities they crave, and appease their (justified) paranoia that stems from US Navy control of the oil routes between the Middle East and China. From an Iranian perspective China is even more credible than India. China’s incentive is to keep the oil flowing so they’d make sure the no-nukes parts of the deal are enforced. Giving China power in the Middle East, however, would be anathema to US policymakers who view China as a strategic rival to the US and view US Navy control of the world’s oil trade routes as its key insurance policy against China. My difference is that I think (for a bunch of reasons) that China isn’t any sort of strategic rival to the US and that the US should bend over backwards to build up, not contain, China. Russia is also an interesting candidate, but the problem with Russia is that it’s a “wild pony”; even if it didn’t want to, it would use its Iran presence to stir up trouble in the Middle East.)

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