In a special edition of the Pivotal States Series, which examines alternative U.S. foreign policy approaches to the world’s key nations, American Statecraft Program Director Christopher S. Chivvis was joined by Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, and Karim Sadjadpour, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to discuss the United States’ relationship with Iran.
This Q & A was adapted from a transcript of the event and has been edited and condensed for clarity. For past episodes from our series, click here.
Christopher S. Chivvis: The U.S.-Iran relationship has been difficult for decades, with periods of confrontation and hostility and periods of relative détente. What are some of the key moments in the past ten to twenty years that for you really define the strategic relationship between the United States and Iran?
Suzanne Maloney: We’ve just marked the forty-fifth anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and that was the turning point that transformed Iran from a close and important partner of the United States into a determined adversary strategically and ideologically.
In the past twenty years, the two most critical junctures were the 2003 American invasion of Iraq and the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The first was the point at which the U.S.-Iran relationship transformed into a very-much-ongoing regional gray-zone war, which began in Iraq and in many ways has expanded beyond that. The 2015 nuclear deal was a moment of great anticipation about a possible accommodation on one of the key aspects of the Iranian threat and a potential turning point around a better relationship. But the decision by the Trump administration to leave the deal in 2018 put us right back on the pathway to a much more contentious relationship.
Karim Sadjadpour: There’s probably no country in the world in which there’s a greater gap, looking at it from the vantage point of the United States, between U.S. national security and our level of expertise to deal with [Iran]. And that’s by virtue of the fact that there haven’t been any U.S.-Iran relations for the past forty-five years.
There are a lot of U.S. officials who’ve visited [or served in] China or Russia. You don’t have any American officials who have served in Iran since essentially 1979. Iran has had two leaders since then: Ayatollah Khomeini, who ruled from ’79 to ’89, and then Ayatollah Khamenei, who is arguably the longest-serving autocrat in the world.
There have been essentially three strategic pillars to his worldview. Number one is to evict America from the Middle East. Number two is to replace Israel with Palestine. Number three is to help defeat the U.S.-led world order. And I think what’s happened over the past two decades is in many ways by virtue of our missteps: they feel like they’ve advanced each of those goals.
Christopher S. Chivvis: How would you characterize America’s interests in Iran?
Karim Sadjadpour: Look at the places that Iran is dominating these days. It’s essentially failed or failing states: Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Gaza, the Palestinian Territories. You could expand that in some ways to Venezuela. I know many Venezuelans who would argue that, absent Iranian support, the Maduro government might have fallen. Iran thrives in an atmosphere of instability, chaos. We contributed to that atmosphere with the Iraq war.
We shouldn’t define our interests in opposition to what Iran wants, but I would argue that that’s how Iran tends to define its interest post-1979. . . .I don’t conflate the Islamic Republic’s conduct and the Iranian national interests. I think these are two separate things.
Let me give you an anecdote. I was at a dinner party twenty years ago in DC at the home of Christopher Hitchens, the late British writer, and the actor Sean Penn was there. He was very interested in Iran, and he said, “Why don’t we just make peace with Iran?” I was saying, “It’s not only up to us. They have a say in the matter.” We discussed how this is a regime whose identity has been premised on hostility toward the U.S., which serves as both an ideological purpose and a strategic purpose.
He had just come from Havana. He was very close to Fidel Castro, and he said, “Fidel always jokes that if America were to remove the embargo against Cuba, he’d do something provocative the next day to get it reinstated, because he understands that his power is best preserved in isolation, and if you crack open Cuba, it’s more difficult for him to retain his power.” I think that very much applies to the Islamic Republic. They’re not just ideological for the sake of being ideological. It’s an important component for regime preservation and security.
Christopher S. Chivvis: What’s the policy implication of that?
Suzanne Maloney: It’s challenging to find the right formula, and we have been struggling since the revolution itself. In the days after American diplomats and other personnel were taken hostage, the Carter White House pulled together a crisis team to think about how to influence Iranian behavior. The recommendation was some combination of pressure and diplomacy. We’ve used some version of that formula consistently for the past forty-five years.
Iran is often a partisan issue—one of those countries that is very easy to demonize. We talk an awful lot about Iran when we’re in a campaign year, yet the policies of both Republican and Democratic administrations have effectively followed that same formula.
Christopher S. Chivvis: We are in a period of escalation and confrontation with Iran since October 7. Biden says he wants to avoid further escalation. Iranians have said they want to avoid further escalation. Is it possible, and what will it take?
Karim Sadjadpour: I don’t think the Iranians want to avoid further escalation. They don’t want conflict on their own soil, but they’re happy with conflict on others’ soil. They’ve thrived in those environments.
I appreciate the dilemma that the Biden administration has, because I would say there’s bipartisan opposition to America being entangled in more conflicts in the Middle East. The challenge is that when you’re constantly signaling to an adversary, “We don’t want to escalate. We don’t want to fight,” that inadvertently can embolden them. They will say, “We can continue to push and poke and probe to test their resolve.” So I think that’s a genuine dilemma. These are very difficult policy choices.
Christopher S. Chivvis: What’s a realistic near-term objective for U.S. policy with Iran?
Suzanne Maloney: I think we have multiple objectives. We’ve been talking a lot about the regional picture, but we still have Iran continuing to expand its nuclear activities and reducing its cooperation with the [International Atomic Energy Agency] and concerns about where that program is going. But I think the main objective at this point is to develop some degree of capacity to constrain Iran on multiple fronts—to constrain its regional activities, its ability to repress its people, and its ability to continue to move slowly but steadily toward nuclear weapons capability.
And it’s difficult to do all those three things under the circumstances that we have today—not just the horrific war in Gaza, but also that we no longer have the consensus of the great powers on Iran’s status as a pariah, or at least an outlier from the norms and rules of the international system.
Christopher S. Chivvis: The ayatollah is eighty-four years old and has not designated a successor. What are the different types of Iran that might emerge from an uneven transition of power?
Suzanne Maloney: We have to be prepared for almost anything to emerge. Iran has survived an awful lot over the course of the past forty-five years, and so it’s not inevitable that the regime is going to change in the next few, even with an elderly leader. But it will be the first big moment of political uncertainty in at least a decade or more for Iran when the current supreme leader dies.
Iran went through the succession process once before, in 1989. That was arguably a moment of tremendous transition both within Iran and around the world. And it wasn’t entirely clear for the first couple of years that the regime would come out stronger than it had been before, but it did. And we have to be prepared for that as one potential outcome, despite not having an obvious successor other than the very inept and inhumane current president of Iran. We could see an Iran that moves to a position in which the Islamic Republic is set up for another couple of decades.
There’s also a lot of expectation that there are those within the military who might have less loyalty to the specific institution of the supreme leader and might be willing to transition to something that provides more economic opportunities. That might not be a particularly more appealing regime from the United States’ point of view.
I do continue to believe that there is a future for a democratic Iran that is more viable and more realistic than one might presume. Despite the fact that Iran’s elections are stage-managed and rigged in every way, Iranians are incredibly politically literate. They have had experience with at least the concept of competitive elections. There is a hunger and an appetite for accountability at the governmental level that is not always present elsewhere in the region.
Christopher S. Chivvis: How should we be thinking about Iran’s intentions when it comes to their nuclear weapons?
Suzanne Maloney: The presumption has always been that Iran would be loath to go public with its nuclear ambitions, in the sense of testing or leaving the Nonproliferation Treaty, without a provocation. But there is also the question of how a country that has as much capability acquiring materials on the black market as Iran has and has invested in this program heavily still hasn’t quite reached the threshold. So there is some degree of restraint that I think has been applied.
Karim Sadjadpour: I agree with that. I’ve long thought that Iran’s goal is the Japan model: to be a turn away, but not to actually turn that screw like North Korea, Pakistan, or India.
I would add two additional reasons why it would make sense for Khamenei to continue to take this very deliberate approach.
Number one is that what’s advanced Iran’s regional power is not its nuclear program. It’s been the missiles, drones, and rockets, which are increasingly precise. I remember a senior Gulf official said to me, “We’re not worried that Iran is going to drop a nuke on us. We’re worried about these weapons that they’re using on a daily basis.”
In some ways the nuclear program has been a red herring because Iran has done all this other stuff that has really advanced its regional power, but none of our sanctions and economic penalties are tied to those [efforts].
Christopher S. Chivvis: And they’re exporting that technology, too—and not just to Russia.
Karim Sadjadpour: That’s right.
Number two: if you’re putting yourself in the shoes of Ayatollah Khamenei, [I would be reluctant] to cross that threshold, [because] who’s going to control that football once you get a bomb? It’s going to be the military. And if you want to keep power for yourself and you want to continue to be at the top of the power pyramid in Iran, that’s a real risk for him. There’s a real danger that [a nuclear weapon] cedes power internally to the forces that are going to be in charge of [it], which would be the military. And when you’re age eighty-four, you don’t have a strategic doctrine. I don’t think you reinvent that strategic doctrine.
Christopher S. Chivvis: How should we be thinking about the future of U.S. policy toward Iran?
Suzanne Maloney: I don’t think that there’s a lot of bandwidth or diplomatic fertile ground for doing anything this year on Iran. For the Biden administration, the entire premise of the de-escalation agreement with the Iranians was that it would buy time to potentially get to that second term, when the president might have a little bit more leeway to pursue something more ambitious diplomatically.
The challenge with that is that the Iranians have never reciprocated. There may have been some meetings with the UN ambassador, but even since the decision by the United States to walk away from the nuclear deal, the Iranians won’t engage directly with us diplomatically. We’ve experienced that before, but it makes it very difficult even for a president who’s determined to try to get to some kind of a different relationship with the Iranians to do much of anything, because if you’re having to go through interlocutors, it’s much more time-consuming.
Karim Sadjadpour: [When he was president], Trump tried on twelve occasions to meet with [former Iranian president Hassan] Rouhani. He essentially wanted the same kind of summit he had with Kim Jong Un in Singapore.
And if I had to make a prediction, I think [Trump’s]instincts are that he wants to do a deal. He wants to reduce U.S. presence in the Middle East. And as long as this supreme leader is around, there’s no way they’re going to do a deal with the American president who assassinated Qassem Soleimani. So [Trump] will start off with engagement. It won’t be reciprocated, and then I think it’ll be forced to go into something much more aggressive. And what I’ve thought about Trump is that he’s capable of trying to build hotels in Iran, and he’s capable of dropping bombs on Iran.
My hope would be that we think a little more creatively about the prospect of advancing political change in Iran, because as long as this current set of actors is in power in Iran, we’re simply going to continue to respond to these symptoms of Iran’s ideology, both in the nuclear and regional context.
View the whole event in the player below, or watch it on YouTube.
Previously in Pivotal States: