Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei arrives to deliver a speech in a meeting with military commanders in Tehran, Iran on February 7, 2017.Reuters

Updated on February 10, 2017


Step 1: Provocations







Step 2: Sanctions




Step 3: Escalation

The Obama administration was reluctant to vigorously counter Iran’s regional activities for fear of jeopardizing the nuclear deal; the Trump administration has expressed no such concerns. Trump has routinely denounced the deal as a “disaster” and recently began to taunt Tehran on Twitter. Iran is playing with fire,” he tweeted, “they don't appreciate how ‘kind’ President Obama was to them. Not me!”


The opportunities for confrontation are multifold. The U.S. and Iran are on opposing sides of numerous regional military and political disputes, including in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Israel-Palestine, Bahrain, and most recently Afghanistan, where Iran has been accused of becoming “increasingly close” to the Taliban. Despite the U.S.’s overwhelming conventional military superiority over Iran, however, today’s Middle East wars are increasingly unconventional fights involving nonstate actors in weak or failing states where America has no strong allies, unclear interests, and no desire to be. Iran has thrived in filling power vacuums the U.S. military helped create. While the 2003 Iraq war, for example, intended to spread Iraqi democracy to Iran, it instead spread Iranian theocracy to Iraq.

In contrast to the United States, and other democratic countries, the Iranian regime’s foreign-policy adventurism is far less constrained by popular opinion. Countless billions of dollars spent and over a thousand casualties lost in Syria are simply explained away as “fighting terrorism.” While previous U.S. administrations, especially that of George W Bush, tried to appeal to Iranian public opinion by distinguishing between the regime and the people, the Trump administration has ignored such nuance. Trump’s Executive Order attempting to prevent Iranian visa and green-card holders—although no Iranians have been implicated in terror-related deaths in the U.S. since at least 1975—antagonized one of the most pro-American populations in the Middle East.   

Days after the Trump administration sanctioned Iran, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander warned that “should the enemy make a mistake, our roaring missiles will rain down on them.” Days later a hardline Iranian MP named Mojtaba Zonour boasted that Tehran would respond to Washington’s “slightest aggression” by “razing to the ground” the U.S. military base in Bahrain. And if the U.S. were to fire a missile at Tehran, he said, “Only seven minutes is needed for an Iranian missile to hit Tel Aviv.” After that Trump, not in reaction to Iran but in an attempt to defend himself against charges of being a lackey for Russia, tweeted that Iran was “#1 in terror.”

Over the last four decades the U.S. and Iran have regularly engaged in rhetorical, maritime, aerial, and proxy battles. More recently this cold war has also moved to cyberspace. Yet such brinksmanship, while at times close, has never deteriorated into a full-blown conflict. Given the confluence of explosive issues and explosive personalities, however, this time may be different.  

Step 4: Unraveling

In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a Scottish war veteran named Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” Similarly, a U.S.-Iran escalation could potentially build for years before the nuclear deal collapses. Though politicians on both sides routinely denounce the nuclear deal, it remains unclear whether they would truly welcome the deal’s collapse. Neither the U.S. nor Iran will want to be blamed for unilaterally tearing up the agreement and potentially triggering a global crisis. A more likely scenario is one in which the deal gradually unravels, with each side blaming the other for its demise.   

Iran’s supreme leader signed the deal under economic duress but never offered a strong endorsement of it, nor gave the impression he is firmly committed to the deal’s 10-year duration. On the contrary Khamenei regularly complains about its unmet economic expectations, blaming the “devilish” United States for scaring away foreign business while at the same time regularly denouncing foreign investment as a Trojan horse for Western imperialism. In a meeting with a group of Iranian poets he suggested they write “to-the-point poetry ... expressing the Americans’ instances of treason in the issue of JCPOA” in order to sour popular views about the deal.


I asked my Carnegie colleague Mark Hibbs—a renowned nuclear researcher—how, specifically, Tehran might go about this. “If Tehran aimed to divide the P5+1 and aggravate Israel and Western countries,” Hibbs told me, “it might do things not expressly forbidden by the JCPOA but that would not be in the spirit of the accord. Iran's scientists might do theoretical studies suggesting they are interested in nuclear weapons, enriching uranium with lasers, and plutonium metallurgy; Iran's diplomats might get suddenly tougher in negotiations with the IAEA over access to places inspectors want to visit.”

In essence Tehran will likely move deliberately enough to split the P5+1 coalition—the U.S., China, Russia, France, Germany, and the U.K.—between those who argue Iran must be further penalized for violating the nuclear agreement (Washington) and those (Beijing, Moscow, and most of Europe) eager to preserve the deal who argue more diplomacy, not pressure, is needed.

Step 5: Disunity

The JCPOA builds in dispute-resolution mechanisms in case either Iran or the P5+1 countries feel the other side is in non-compliance. But any such mechanism is ineffectual when two parties are seemingly coveting an escalation. And any U.S.-Iran escalation may break the unity of the U.S. and its partners.


Despite Trump’s curious affinity for Vladimir Putin, rather than side with Washington in a U.S.-Iran dispute it is more likely that Putin will simply continue to play the U.S. and Iran off each other: supporting sanctions and pressure that make Iran more isolated and dependent on Moscow, while telling Tehran it has diluted Washington’s attempt to meaningfully sanction and pressure them.     

The Obama administration’s greatest ally in isolating Tehran, ironically, was the previous Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose bombast and holocaust denial convinced many countries around the world that the problem was Tehran, not Washington. In contrast, today much of the world perceives Iran to have a reasonable president in Hassan Rouhani—who is up for reelection in May 2017—and an urbane Foreign Minister in Javad Zarif, while Trump is perceived as America’s Ahmadinejad.


Step 6: Conflict



Trump’s confrontational style is coupled with a core national-security team that is universally cynical about Iran. Flynn, Vice President Mike Pence, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, and Elliott Abrams—whom Trump was reportedly, until recently, considering for deputy secretary of state—were all outspoken opponents of the nuclear deal. Last fall Abrams advocated “sinking an Iranian ship” to show resolve. While Mattis has not recommended scrapping the nuclear deal, he has called Iran “the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East.”

In addition to concerns that Trump’s social-media outbursts may cause an inadvertent conflict, serious observers also worry that Trump could use either a terrorist attack or an external conflict—preferably with a longstanding Islamist adversary—to expand his power. Trump’s strategic advisor Steve Bannon said in November 2015 that Islam was “the most radical” religion in the world and “we’re clearly going into … a major shooting war in the Middle East again.”    

To those looking for “shooting wars” in the Middle East, Iran provides an unparalleled opportunity. On numerous occasions over the past two years the U.S. Navy has fired warning shots against Iranian Revolutionary Guard patrol boats in the Persian Gulf and interdicted shipments of weapons bound for Yemen’s Houthis, whose recent attack on a Saudi ship was allegedly intended for the United States. In essence the opportunities for conflict with Iran are numerous and interrelated: An unraveling of the nuclear deal could trigger a regional war, or a regional war could trigger an unraveling of the nuclear deal.

Step 7: Repercussions

In one of his final interviews before dying at age 101, Kennan reflected that "Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before. War has a momentum of its own, and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. … War seldom ever leads to good results."

The chain-reaction of even “targeted” military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be unpredictable, enormous, and long-lasting. Hundreds of articles have been written over the last decade assessing its potential impact. Among its many retaliatory options Iran has the power to either attack, or potentially activate sleeper cells in, the oil-rich, predominantly Shia eastern province of Saudi Arabia, sending energy prices skyrocketing. Iran may also feel unrestrained attacking U.S. forces in the region, (mis)calculating that Trump is unlikely to respond given the American public’s fatigue with wars in the Middle East.

In addition to potentially triggering a global economic crisis and pouring gasoline on a region already in flames, military action against Iran would likely further entrench the most hardline elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards for years to come, revitalize their moribund revolutionary ideology, and compel them to pursue deterrent nuclear weapons in earnest. That possibility could turn what began as targeted, limited strikes into a full-blown regional war.

What is to be done?

The last four decades of U.S. policy toward Iran shows Washington’s limited ability to change the nature or behavior of the Iranian regime. The George W. Bush administration tried harder than any U.S. administration to intimidate Iran militarily and support Iranian democracy activists, yet during his time in office Iran relentlessly attacked U.S. forces in Iraq and the country’s reform movement withered. The Obama administration tried harder than any U.S. administration to improve relations with Tehran, including numerous letters Obama wrote to Ayatollah Khamenei, yet Iran’s hostility toward the United States and its longtime regional policies remained unchanged.

Among the important lessons of the 2015 nuclear deal is that two policies often thought of as opposites—coercion and engagement—are in fact complementary. In private conversation Obama’s senior aides note he was eager to seriously negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran from the very beginning of his presidency, but it was not until Tehran was faced with a global economic embargo that it began to seriously engage. In the aftermath of the nuclear deal, the Obama administration only employed one aspect of this formula—engagement—to try to compel Iran to reconsider its longtime regional policies. In contrast to the enormous costs Tehran endured for its nuclear intransigence, it has paid little penalty for being the chief accomplice to a Syrian regime responsible for one of the greatest humanitarian crises in modern history.

While the Trump administration seeks to counter Iran’s regional policies, its strategy is missing two essential ingredients: multilateralism and U.S. engagement. Nearly all Iranian economic trade is with countries other than the United States. For pressure to work it is essential that Washington closely coordinate with Iran’s largest economic and strategic partners, namely China, Russia, Europe, India, and South Korea. Trump’s derisiveness toward U.S. allies and denunciations of a nuclear deal most of the world deems necessary for global stability will make it difficult to compel these countries to forsake their own commercial and strategic interests with Iran to please Washington.

The most successful playbook from which Donald Trump can borrow remains the one America used in several decades of containing, countering, and ultimately defeating the Soviet Union. George Kennan, the original author of that policy, advised in his seminal long-telegram from Moscow that “the main element of any United States policy … must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment … designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”

