Iran and the bomb 2.pdf

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F O R E I G N A F FA I R S . C O M

A New Hope Abridged Edition

Iran and theBomb 2


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Special Collection

Video: Iran and the Bomb 2 vGideon Rose

Introduction 1Gideon Rose

INSIDE THE REGIME

Who Is Ali Khamenei? 4

The Worldview o Irans Supreme Leader Akbar Ganji

Why Rouhani WonAnd Why Khamenei Let Him 30The Ahmadinejad Era Comes to an Auspicious End

Suzanne Maloney

Rouhanis Gorbachev Moment 36What Makes a Genuine Reformer?

Stephen Kotkin

NEGOTIATING THE NEGOTIATIONS

Getting to Yes With Iran 42The Challenges o Coercive Diplomacy

Robert Jervis


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On the Road to Yes With Iran 55How to Read the Nuclear Deal

Robert Jervis

Talk Is Cheap 59Sanctions Might Have Brought Rouhani to theTable, But They Wont Keep Him There

Patrick Clawson

Saved by the Deal 63How Rouhani Won the Negotiations and RescuedHis Regime

Suzanne Maloney

OPTIONS FOR THE UNITED STATES

Dont Get Suckered by Iran 68Fix the Problems With the Interim Accord

Mitchell B. Reiss and Ray Takeyh

Condence Enrichment 72The Nuclear Deal With Iran Was About Trust,Not Verication

Kenneth Pollack

Still Time to Attack Iran 75The Illusion o a Comprehensive Nuclear Deal

Matthew Kroenig


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Still Not Time to Attack Iran 80Why the United States Shouldnt Play ChickenWith TehranColin H. Kahl

ISRAEL AND THE BOMB

Pushing Peace 86How Israel Can Help the United States Strike

a Deal With IranAnd Why It ShouldTrita Parsi

Bibi the Bad Cop 91Can Israel Prevent a Deal With Iran?

Elliott Abrams

Why Israel Is So Afraid 99Iran, the United States, and the Bomb

Ariel Ilan Roth


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Foreign Affairs Special Collection:Iran and the Bomb 2

ON IRANIAN POLITICSWho is Ali Khamenei? by Iranian dissidentAkbar Ganji, is a ground-breaking intellectualprole o Irans enigmatic supreme leader.

ON NEGOTIATIONS

Robert Jervis Getting to Yes With Iran setsout a strategy for effective coercive diplomacy.A follow-on article evaluates how well theObama administration has performed so far.

ON THE UNITED STATESMatthew Kroenigs Still Time to Attack Iranadvocates taking the bull by the horns andlaunching a limited U.S. military strike againstIranian nuclear targets.

ON ISRAELIn Pushing Peace, Trita Parsi takes on thosewho say that nuclear negotiations are bad forIsrael.

Editor Gideon Rose Introduces the CollectionView the video at www.foreignaffairs.com/iran-video-introduction.There is no more controversial issue on the foreign policy agenda than how todeal with Irans nuclear program, especially now that direct negotiations haveresulted in an interim accord between Iran and the P5+1. Whether diplomacyultimately succeeds or failsand what the consequences will be in either

casewill be among 2014s most gripping dramas.

Visit ForeignAffairs.com for more on these topicsand all our other great content.


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Introduction

Gideon Rose

T here is no more controversial issue on the foreign policyagenda than how to deal with Irans nuclear program. Ayear and a hal ago, we published Iran and the Bomb, con-

taining highlights from three decades o our coverage on the topic.Since then, the issue has remained on the worlds front burner,with the direct negotiations begun last fall marking a new era odiplomatic progress. Supporters o the interim accord betweenIran and the P5+1 countries (China, France, Germany, Russia, theUnited Kingdom, and the United States) consider the agreement alandmark event paving the way for an end to one o the worlds

most enduring and volatile conicts. Many critics take the oppositeview, seeing it as a modern-day Munich paving the way for aneventual nuclear Iran. Whether the negotiations will succeed orfail, and what the consequences will be in either case, will be among2014s most gripping dramas.

As usual, Foreign Affairs has been at the center o public debateover these events, and with the negotiations coming to a head, wehave decided to publish an update to our earlier collection, pullingtogether a broad range o pieces from the last year that illuminateIrans turn toward negotiations, the pros and cons o the interimagreement, and the geopolitical and psychological intricacies o thecrucial U.S.-Iranian-Israeli triangle. Once again, the authors in-clude world-renowned experts from several disciplines and profes-sional backgrounds, and once again their arguments span everysignicant position on the political spectrum. Now, as before,therefore, the collection offers an excellent overview o the current

GIDEON ROSE is Editor of Foreign Affairs .

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Gideon Rose

situation and all the material required for readers to develop theirown opinions about how to proceed.

The rst section o the book contains articles examining the in-ner workings o the Iranian regime. Who Is Ali Khamenei? bythe Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji, is a groundbreaking intellectualprole o Irans enigmatic supreme leader, the single most impor-tant decision-maker in the entire affair. Suzanne Maloneys WhyRouhani WonAnd Why Khamenei Let Him stresses just howmuch o a hand Khamenei had in the election o the reformer Has-san Rouhani as president last June, and what that means for thechances o real change in the Islamic Republic. And in RouhanisGorbachev Moment, Stephen Kotkin explores how one will beable to tell whether Rouhani is a genuine reformer or not.

The second section looks at the recent negotiations and interimaccord. Robert Jervis Getting to Yes With Iran sets out a strat-egy for effective coercive diplomacy, and his follow-on article, Onthe Road to Yes With Iran, evaluates how well the Obama admin-istration has performed on that front so far. In Talk Is Cheap,Patrick Clawson warns that getting Iran to come to the negotiatingtable was easy, but that maintaining its interest in talks will bemuch harder. Finally, in Saved by the Deal, Suzanne Maloneyurges patience on the grounds that nuclear diplomacy has alreadystarted to empower Irans moderates and, should it continue, will

intensify the pressure on them to deliver to the Iranian people.The third section sets out alternative policy options for theUnited States. In Dont Get Suckered by Iran, Mitchell B. Reissand Ray Takeyh call on the United States to try to x the interimagreements shortfalls, including its promise to eventually treatIrans nuclear program in the same manner as that o any othernon-nuclear weapon state party to the NPT. In Condence En-

richment, Kenneth Pollack explains why the interim agreement isa deal worth taking. Matthew Kroenigs Still Time to Attack Iranadvocates taking the bull by the horns and launching a limited U.S.military strike against Iranian nuclear targets. Colin Kahl responds


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Introduction

that it is Still Not Time to Attack Iran, since a military strikewould cause more problems than it would solve.

The fourth and last section o the book widens the discussion,bringing in voices from Israel. In Pushing Peace, Trita Parsi takeson those who say that nuclear negotiations are bad for Israel. El-liott Abrams assumes the opposite stance in Bibi the Bad Cop,explaining what Israel could try to do to thwart talks. And inWhy Israel Is So Afraid, Ariel Ilan Roth writes that Washing-tons diplomatic engagement with Tehran may, ironically, make

Jerusalem more likely to attack now, because it fears that later

could be too late.In my introduction to our earlier collection, I noted that the

challenge in Iran policy (as is so often the case) lay not in pickingan ideal course but in choosing among lesser evils. That remainstrue today: Practically nobody thinks that the interim agreementrepresents a wonderful, durable solution to the problem o Iransnuclear le. The real question is whether it can serve as a useful

platform for further negotiations, a condence-building measurethat allows the parties to test one anothers sincerity and ability todeliver more substantive results down the road. Jaw- jaw, Churchillfamously said, is better than war-warbut whether this currentround o jaw- jaw will prove a substitute for war-war, or merely aprelude to it, remains an open question.

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Who Is Ali Khamenei?The Worldview o IransSupreme Leader

Akbar Ganji

I n June, Hassan Rouhani was elected president o the IslamicRepublic o Iran. Rouhani ran as a reform candidate, and manyhave interpreted his victory as a harbinger o a possible liberal-ization or rationalization o Iranian domestic and foreign policy.But the dominant gure in Iranian politics is not the president butrather the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Iranianconstitution endows the supreme leader with tremendous author-ity over all major state institutions, and Khamenei, who has heldthe post since 1989, has found many other ways to further increasehis inuence. Formally or not, the executive, legislative, and judi-cial branches o the government all operate under his absolute sov-ereignty; Khamenei is Irans head o state, commander in chief, andtop ideologue. His views are what will ultimately shape Iranianpolicy, and so it is worth exploring them in detail.

Khamenei was born in the northeastern Iranian city o Mashhadin 1939. His father was a religious scholar o modest means, andKhamenei, the second o eight children, followed his fathers pathto seminary. (Two o his brothers are also clerics.) He studied inQom from 1958 to 1964, and while there, he joined the religiousopposition movement o Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1962.

AKBAR GANJI is an Iranian journalist and dissident. He was imprisoned inTehran from 2000 to 2006, and his writings are currently banned in Iran. Thisarticle was translated from the Farsi by Evan Siegel.


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Who Is Ali Khamenei?

September/October 2013 5

He played an important role in the 1979 Iranian Revolution andwent on to become Irans president, from 1981 to 1989, and thenKhomeinis successor as supreme leader.

Khamenei has always been in contact with the world o Iranianintellectuals, and the basic outlines o his thinking were laid downin his youth and young adulthood, during the 1950s and 1960s. Iranwas then a monarchy and an ally o the United States; according tothe Iranian opposition at the time, the shah was nothing but anAmerican puppet. Unlike many other Islamists, Khamenei hadcontact with the most important secular opposition intellectuals

and absorbed their prerevolutionary discourse. But he was also aseminary student, whose chie focus was learning sharia, Islamiclaw. He became acquainted with the theoreticians o the MuslimBrotherhood and was inuenced by the works o Sayyid Qutb,some o which Khamenei himsel translated into Persian.

As a young man, Khamenei saw a tension between the West andthe Third World, and these views hardened during his dealings

with the United States after the Iranian Revolution. He concludedthat Washington was determined to overthrow the Islamic Repub-lic and that all other issues raised by U.S. officials were nothingmore than smoke screens. Even today, he believes that the U.S.government is bent on regime change in Iran, whether throughinternal collapse, democratic revolution, economic pressure, ormilitary invasion.

Khamenei has always been critical o liberal democracy andthinks that capitalism and the West are in inevitable long- term de-cline. Moreover, he sees Washington as inherently Islamophobic.Nevertheless, he is not reexively anti-Western or anti- American.He does not believe that the United States and the West are re-sponsible for all o the Islamic worlds problems, that they must bedestroyed, or that the Koran and sharia are by themselves sufficientto address the needs o the modern world. He considers scienceand progress to be Western civilizations truth, and he wants theIranian people to learn this truth. He is not a crazy, irrational, orreckless zealot searching for opportunities for aggression. But his


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Akbar Ganji

deep-rooted views and intransigence are bound to make any nego-tiations with the West difficult and protracted, and any serious im-provement in the relationship between Iran and the United Stateswill have to be part o a major comprehensive deal involving sig-nicant concessions on both sides.

A PORTRAIT OF THE SUPREME LEADER AS A YOUNG MAN

To understand Khameneis worldview, it helps to start by lookingat the history o U.S. intervention in Iran. In 1953, the Eisenhoweradministration helped engineer a coup against the democraticallyelected government o Mohammad Mosaddeq, and Washingtonwas the chie supporter o Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavis au-thoritarian regime, until its overthrow in 1979. This helped shapethe discourse o all o the regimes opponents; opposition to theshah went hand in hand with opposition to the United States, sincethe shah was considered Washingtons gendarme.

Khamenei was 40 when the revolution occurred; before then, hehad been a seminary student and cleric, but one engaged with thebroader world as well as his narrow religious circles. As he said ina meeting with ulama (Muslim scholars) and young clergymen inMay 2012, I participated in intellectual circles before the revolu-tion and had close relations with political groups. I got to knowthem all, and got into discussions and debates with many o them.He was a man o music, poetry, and novels as well as religious law.No other present- day marja (senior ayatollah) or prominent faqih (Islamic jurist) has such a cosmopolitan past.

Khameneis widespread relationships with secular intellectualsin Iran radicalized his views about the United States, since thesecircles became increasingly anti-American after the 1953 coup andthe U.S. backing o the shah and his subsequent repression o dis-sidents. As Khameneis friend Mehdi Akhavan Sales, a poet, put itin one o his verses, I will not forget: that we were a ame, andthey doused us with water. Khamenei has spoken about the U.S.role in the 1953 coup several times, and the memory continues to


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resonate with him today. As he said just last year in a meeting withuniversity students in Tehran,

It is interesting to realize that America overthrew his governmenteven though Mosaddeq had shown no animosity toward them. Hehad stood up to the British and trusted the Americans. He had hopedthat the Americans would help him; he had friendly relations withthem, he expressed an interest in them, perhaps he [even] expressedhumility toward them. And [still] the Americans [overthrew] such agovernment. It was not as i the government in power in Tehran hadbeen anti-American. No, it had been friendly toward them. But the

interests o Arrogance [a term Khamenei often uses to symbolize theUnited States] required that the Americans ally with the British.They gathered money and brought it here and did their job. Then,when they brought their coup into fruition and had returned the shah,who had ed, they had the run o the country.

Khamenei had strong ties to Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati,the two most inuential intellectuals o the prerevolutionary pe-riod. They were important contributors to the theory o Westoxi-cation. But anti-imperialism seems to have been the strand osecular intellectual thought that shaped Khamenei the most.

In prerevolutionary Iranian opposition intellectual circles,Western culture and civilization were not only disparaged as amodel but considered to be in crisis and decline. The Third Worldwas its rising alternative; as the Iranian writer Daryush Ashuri, acontemporary o Khamenei, put it, The Third World is composedo the poor and colonized nations, which are at the same time revo-lutionary. Iran was ostensibly independent, but colonialism wasseen as taking a new form there, with native ruling political elitesserving as agents o imperialism and working to secure its inter-ests. The Western world, led by the United States, moreover, wasthought to be laying the groundwork for its political and eco-nomic expansion by destroying indigenous cultures. Under suchcircumstances, it was easy to see Islam as not simply a religionbut also a cultural and ideological weapon in the struggle againstimperialism.


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As a young man, Khamenei loved novels. He read such Iranianwriters as Muhammad Ali Jamalzadah, Sadeq Chubak, and SadeqHedayat but came to feel that they paled before classic Westernwriters from France, Russia, and the United Kingdom. He haspraised Leo Tolstoy and Mikhail Sholokhov and likes Honor deBalzac and Michel Zvaco, but he considers Victor Hugo su-preme. As he told some officials o Irans state-run television net-work in 2004,

In my opinion, Victor Hugos Les Misrables is the best novel that has

been written in history. I have not read all the novels written through-out history, no doubt, but I have read many that relate to the eventso various centuries. I have read some very old novels. For example,say, Ive readThe Divine Comedy. I have read Amir Arsalan. I have alsoread A Thousand and One Nights. . . . [But] Les Misrables is a miraclein the world o novel writing. . . . I have said over and over again, goread Les Misrables once. This Les Misrables is a book o sociology, abook o history, a book o criticism, a divine book, a book o love and

feeling.Khamenei felt that novels gave him insight into the deeper re-

alities o life in the West. Read the novels o some authors withleftist tendencies, such as Howard Fast, he advised an audience owriters and artists in 1996. Read the famous book The Grapes of Wrath, written by John Steinbeck, . . . and see what it says about thesituation o the left and how the capitalists o the so-called centero democracy treated them. He is also a fan o Uncle Toms Cabin,which he recommended in March 2002 to high-level state manag-ers for the light it sheds on U.S. history: Isnt this the governmentthat massacred the original native inhabitants o the land o Amer-ica? That wiped out the American Indians? Wasnt it this system andits agents who seized millions o Africans from their houses and car-ried them off into slavery and kidnapped their young sons anddaughters to become slaves and inicted on them for long years themost severe tragedies? Today, one o the most tragic works o art isUncle Toms Cabin. . . . This book still lives after almost 200 years.


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THE BUDDING ISLAMIST

Yet i Khamenei frequented prerevolutionary secular intellectualcircles and was a student o Western culture more generally, he wasrst and foremost a seminarian, devoted to pursuing social changein accordance with the teachings o religion. And in this regard,it was Qutb, the Egyptian intellectual, activist, and chie theore-tician o the Muslim Brotherhood, who stole Khameneis heart asa young man.

Qutb, who was executed by Egyptian President Gamal AbdelNassers regime in 1966, propagated the idea o an Islamic state. As

he wrote in The Battle Between Islam and Capitalism,I you want Islam to be an agent o salvation, you must rule and mustunderstand that this religion has not come for one to sit in houses oworship; it hasnt come to make a nest in hearts. Rather, it has cometo govern and run life in a proper fashion; it has come to build a pro-gressive and complete society. . . . I we want Islam to answer social,ethnic, and other problems and solve our problems and show a way tocure them, we must think about government and its formation andbring our decisions to implementation. . . . Islam without govern-ment and a Muslim nation without Islam are meaningless.

The pillars o Qutbs idea o Islamic government were justice,equality, and the redistribution o wealth. True Islam, he wrotein Social Justice in Islam, is a liberation movement that frees thehearts o individuals and then o human societies from fear o thebonds o the powerful.

Qutbs ideas would go on to become the template for the mod-ern Sala movement, eventually inuencing radical Islamists such asOsama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. They were also very ap-pealing for Iranian seminary students. Khamenei read them, was at-tracted to Qutbs personality and to some o his ideas, and went sofar as to translate some o the masters works into Persian himself.As Khamenei wrote in the introduction to his 1967 translation oQutbs The Future of This Religion, This lofty and great author hastried in the course o the chapters o this book . . . to rst intro-duce the essence o the faith as it is and then, after showing that


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it is a program for living . . . [conrm] with his eloquent wordsand his particular world outlook that ultimately world govern-ment shall be in the hands o our school and the future belongsto Islam.

Qutb revived the classic Muslim concepts o the House o Islamand the House o War but gave them a new meaning: There isonly one House o Islam, and that is precisely the one in which anIslamic state has been founded, and Gods sharia rules, and the di-vine punishments are applied, and in which Muslims support eachother. Aside from this, everything is the House o War, and therelationship o the Muslim with it is either war or peace based on atreaty with it.

Qutb also offered Khamenei a perspective on the United Statesas something o a licentious society, ideas Qutb had picked up dur-ing his sojourn there in the late 1940s. Qutb came to feel thatAmericans were prepared to accept Islam, but not in its true, non-subservient incarnation:

These days, the Americans have come to think about Islam once more.They need Islam to ght against communism in the Middle East andthe Islamic countries o Asia and Africa. . . . O course, the Islam thatAmerica and the Western imperialists and their allies in the MiddleEast want is not the same Islam that ghts imperialism and strugglesagainst absolutism; rather, it is that Islam that struggles against theCommunists. Thus, they do not want the Islam that rules and de-

nitely do not want an Islamic government, since when Islam rules, itsets up another ummah [Islamic community] and teaches the nationsthat it is obligatory to become strong, and that rejecting imperialismis a necessity, and that the Communists, too, are like the imperialistpests, and that both are enemies and aggressive.

AFTER THE REVOLUTION

In the early days o the Iranian Revolution, after Washington an-

nounced that it was letting the ailing shah into the United States formedical treatment, a group o radical Iranian students seized theU.S. embassy in Tehran and held its occupants hostage, creating a


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new crisis in U.S.-Iranian relations. Not all the members o thenew ruling elite had known about the plan or agreed with it. Ac-cording to former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsan-

jani, neither he nor Khamenei supported the move:

Ayatollah Khamenei and I were in Mecca when we heard news o theseizure o the American embassy over the radio at night, when wewere on the roo o our domicile preparing to sleep. We were shocked,since we had no expectation o such an event. It was not our politics.Even early into the revolutions victory, when political groups shoutedvery extreme anti-American slogans, the officials helped Americans

who were in Iran return to their country uninjured, and many o themeven carried their property with them. Once, when an armed groupattacked the American embassy and occupied it, a representative cameon behal o the provisional government and settled the problem.Thus, it is clear that neither the revolutionary council nor the provi-sional government was inclined to take such measures.

But after Khomeini came out in support o the embassy take-over, the other rulers o the Islamic Republic followed his lead. AsKhamenei put it in April 1999,

I, along with Mr. Hashemi and another individual, met with Imam[Khomeini] after traveling from Tehran to Qom to ask, What are wenally going to do with these spies? Should they remain, or shouldwe not keep them, particularly since there was an amazing tumult inthe provisional government over what we were to do with them?When we came into the imams presence and our friends explainedthe situation and said what the [foreign] radio stations were saying,what America was saying, what government officials were saying, hethought and then answered in the form o a question: Are you afraido America? We said, No. He said, Then keep them.

During his tenure as supreme leader, Khamenei has always de-fended the seizure. Revolutionary regimes often maintain their re-lationships with former colonial powers and suffer as a result, he

argues. In the Iranian case, the embassy takeover helped make thatimpossible: The matter o the den o spies [the revolutionariesterm for the U.S. embassy] cut the last possible thread connecting


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the revolution and America, he noted in a speech in 1993. Theembassy takeover, he said, was a great and valuable service per-formed for our revolution.

Khomeini appointed Khamenei as a member o the Council othe Islamic Revolution, and before becoming president o the re-public in 1981, he served as deputy defense minister, acting chair othe Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Khomeinis represen-tative in the Supreme Defense Council. His work on security is-sues brought him face-to-face with Washingtons cold realpolitik.In August 1980, Saddam Hussein launched a military attack onIran, trying to take advantage o the new regimes disarray. Stillstinging from the fall o the shah and the ongoing hostage crisis,the United States refused to criticize Iraqs actions, rst protectingIraq from censure at the United Nations and then actually support-ing the Iraqi war effort against Iran. By the late 1980s, the U.S.military was increasingly engaging Iran directly, including attack-ing Iranian oil rigs in the Persian Gul in 1987 and shooting downan Iranian passenger plane in 1988.

In 1987, Khamenei took his only trip to date to the United States,in order to participate as Irans president in a session o the UNGeneral Assembly. In his speech, he addressed the relationship be-tween Iran and the United States:

The history o our nation is in a black, bitter, and bloody chapter,mixed with varieties o hostility and spite from the American regime.[That regime] is culpable in 25 years o support o the Pahlavi dicta-torship, with all the crimes it committed against our people. The loot-ing o this nations wealth with the shahs help, the intense confronta-tion with the revolution during the last months o the shahs regime,its encouragement in crushing the demonstrations o millions o peo-ple, its sabotage o the revolution through various means in the rstyears o its victory, the American embassy in Tehrans provocativecontacts with counterrevolutionary elements, the aid to coup plottersand terrorist and counterrevolutionary elements outside the country,the blockading o Iranian cash and property and refusal to transfergoods whose payment had long been received or assets that the shah


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had taken from the national wealth and deposited in his own namein American banks, the striving to enforce an economic embargoand the creation o a united Western front against our nation, the

open and effective support o Iraq in its war against us, and, nally,an irrational, thuggish invasion o the Persian Gul that seriouslythreatened the regions security and tranquilityall this is only parto our nations indictment against the regime in the United Stateso America.

In a public speech the following year, he related an experiencehed had while staying in New York: A high-ranking official o aEuropean country came to meet me and said, You should nallysolve your problem with America! They thought that [with my]having come to New York and being in America, they might be ableto warm their bread in this oven. I said, Impossible. The issue othe UN is another story. I have come to the UN to speak with thepeople o the world, and this has nothing to do with America. Theissue o America is another story.

FROM KHOMEINI TO KHAMENEI

Since becoming supreme leader in 1989, Khamenei has sharpenedhis views o U.S. policy. His position now is clear and simple:Western governments, led by Washington, wish to overthrow theIslamic Republic and destroy the Islamic revolution, just as theydid to the Soviet Union.

At a meeting with Iranian government officials in 2000, he putit this way: An all-encompassing American plan has been arrangedto collapse the Islamic Republican system, and all its aspects havebeen weighed. This plan is reconstructed from the collapse o theSoviet Union. . . . They have, in their own imaginings, revived theplan for the collapse o the Soviets in accordance with the condi-tions in Iran. Khamenei noted that there had been domestic fac-tors responsible for the Soviet Unions collapse, including poverty,repression, corruption, and ethnic and nationalist tensions. But theAmericans capitalized on these, he argued, to push the Soviet stateto collapsepartly by manipulating the media and staging a


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cultural invasion, and partly by using political and economicpressure. However, such efforts would not work in Iran, he argued,because the Islamic Republic was not like the Soviet Unionnotleast because, unlike communism, Islam was not a newly adoptedideology imposed by a ruling party after winning a civil war. Iran,moreover, had a long history o unied statehood. Its constituentelements had not been yoked together through imperialist expan-sion and wars o conquest over recent centuries, as was the casewith the Russian empire that the Soviet system inherited. He alsonoted that the Islamic Republic was the product o a popular revo-lution and enjoyed considerable religious legitimacy.

Khamenei thinks several measures can ensure that the IslamicRepublic does not meet the Soviet Unions fate. First, potentialpolitical insurgentsthe local Iranian versions o Boris Yeltsinmust be identied and checked. Second, sensible reforms must beannounced clearly, so they cannot be misunderstood or perverted.Reform measures must, as he has described, be led by a powerfuland restraining center so that they dont get out o control. Third,the media must not be allowed to undermine the government. Andfourth, interference by outside powers, such as the United Statesand Israel, must be kept at bay.

Khamenei also thinks that the United States, the West moregenerally, and Israel want to use elections to various Iranian offices(city councils, the legislature, the judiciary, the Assembly o Ex-perts) to create, through their internal allies, a situation o dualsovereignty. The aim is, according to Khamenei, to create a splitbetween the supreme leader and elected officials o the govern-ment. Just as the British, who once had absolute rulers, eventuallyturned the position o their monarch into a merely ceremonial of-ce, so Irans enemies, Khamenei believes, want to turn the abso-lute rule o the faqih, or guardianship o the jurist, into a mean-

ingless shell. Irans chie reformist strategist, Saeed Hajjarian,used the concept o dual sovereignty as an analytic tool to de-scribe the changing balance o power in Iran following the victory


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o Mohammad Khatami in the May 1997 presidential election. Inresponse, Khamenei loyalists tried to assassinate Hajjarian inMarch 1999. He survived, but he has been paralyzed ever since.Khamenei mentioned the concept o dual sovereignty as a subver-sive idea in a public speech in 2004, as the Khatami administrationlimped through its nal year in office: You have heard the slogandual sovereignty! A number o irrational people have even re-peated these words within the country. . . . Dual sovereignty is notdesirable but damaging and a deadly poison! This is what [Iransenemies] want.

After Irans presidential election in June 2009, hundreds othousands o people poured out into the streets o Tehran and heldpeaceful demonstrations against the manipulated outcome. As thedemonstrations spread, Khamenei, in a Friday prayer speech, com-pared the protests to the color revolutions, particularly the one inGeorgia, which he claimed the Americans and the British hadlaunched. Khamenei emphasized that during the previous weeks,the speeches o American and European statesmen had becomeharsher, and that after the Tehran protests, they set aside theirmasks and showed their true features.

In a public speech in June 2011, Khamenei called the protests,which came to be known as the Green Movement, a continuationo the regime-change policy o United States and its allies and con-trasted it with a true revolution, such as the one that led to thefounding o the Islamic Republic: A revolution that cannot defenditsel in an age o sedition, against various political or military coupattempts and other such acts, is not alive. This revolution is alive,for it defends itsel and indeed prevails and wins. This is certain, asyou saw happen [following the protests] in 2009.

A frequent Khamenei theme is the constant presence o foreignthreats to the Islamic Republic and the regimes ability to with-

stand them. The United States and the Western bloc, he argues,want to overthrow the system in Iran and have launched a varietyo attempts to do so, including Iraqs military invasion in 1980, the


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manipulation o ethnic tensions, and economic sanctions. As heput it in another public speech in August 2010,

They want to bring the revolution down. One o the important meansthey have employed has been these economic sanctions. They say that[the sanctions] are not targeting the Iranian people, but they are ly-ing! The sanctions are meant to cripple the Iranian nation. They aredesigned to exhaust the Iranian people and make them say, We areunder the pressure o the sanctions because o the [policies of] theIslamic Republican state. They want to sever the ties betweenthe people and the Islamic Republican system. This is the true aimo the sanctions. They are exerting economic pressure by means osanctions.

He repeatedly claims that the stated rationales for U.S. policiesare meant to mask more sinister motives. As he put it in yet an-other public speech in August 2011, Although the excuse for thesanctions is the issue o nuclear energy, they are lying. . . . Perhapsyou recall that the rst sanctions against this country were enacted

at a time when the nuclear issue absolutely did not exist. . . . Thus,the enemys goal is to hurl the Islamic Republic to the ground.Khamenei bases such arguments partly on what he sees as two

failed attempts by Iran to compromise with the United States. Therst was during Khatamis term as president, when the governmentsuspended its uranium enrichment for two years as a trust- buildingmeasure. Khamenei believes the Western governments were notinterested in trust building, only in making the pause in enrich-ment permanent. The two- year suspension resulted in no achieve-ments for Irannot the lifting o sanctions, nor the release ofrozen Iranian assets in the United States, nor any other reward. Ina speech in January 2008, Khamenei noted,

Today, to whomever comes to us and says, Sir, suspend temporarily,we say, We have already had a temporary suspension, for two years! Wehad a two-year temporary suspension. How did it benet us? . . . We, forour part, imagined that it was temporary and imagined that it was volun-tary. Then, when we talked o resuming work, they started this mediafrenzy and tumult in political circles, saying, Woe! Iran wants to end


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the suspension! The suspension became a sacred issue that Iran hadabsolutely no right to approach. . . . Finally, they said, This tempo-rary suspension isnt enough; you must completely pack the whole

atomic project in. This was a setback for us. [The Khatami govern-ment] accepted the retreat. But this retreat had a positive effect for us.We learned a lesson from that experience. World public opinionlearned from the experience, too. . . . I said i this process o addingnew demands is to go on, I will intervene. And I did. I said . . . weshould go on the offensive [and resume enrichment].

Khamenei then went on to remind his audience that despite

Khatamis willingness to compromise, his kind words for Ameri-cans, his cooperation in toppling the Taliban and in the subsequentBonn negotiations to install a pro-American government in Af-ghanistan, U.S. President George W. Bush had still included Iranin his axis o evil.

The second experience he draws on is Libyas 2003 decision togive up its nuclear ambitions, which nevertheless did not prevent

Muammar al-Qaddas violent removal through NATO militaryinvolvement. In Libya, Khamenei said in his annual Iranian NewYear speech in March 2011, although Qadda had shown an anti-Western tendency during his rst years in power, in later years, heperformed a great service to the West. . . . This gentleman gath-ered up his nuclear program, . . . gave it to the Westerners, andsaid, Take it away! . . . [Yet he was overthrown.] Khamenei sus-

pects that even i all o Irans nuclear facilities were closed down, oropened up to inspections and monitoring, Western governmentswould simply pocket the concessions and raise other issuessuchas terrorism, human rights, or Israelas excuses for maintainingtheir pressure and pursuing regime change. To Khamenei, when itcomes to nuclear weapons, the Iraqi and Libyan cases teach thesame lesson. Saddam and Qadda opened their facilities up to in-

spections by the West, ended up having no nuclear weapons, andwere eventually attacked, deposed, and killed. Major compromisesby Iran on the nuclear front without signicant concessions by the


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West, he believes, could end up leading to similar consequences forthe Iranian regime.

SANCTITIES

Another important issue for Khamenei is what he sees as actionsthat amount to insults to Islam. After the announcement o a pos-sible burning o the Koran by a pastor in Florida in 2010, he askedin one o his public speeches, What and who is behind the sceneso these evil deeds? He went on to say that a careful study o thisevil occurrence, which came along with criminal deeds in Afghani-stan, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, and Pakistan, leaves no doubt thatthe planning and the operational command o these acts are in thehands o the system o hegemony and Zionist planning centers,which enjoy the greatest inuence over the American governmentand its security and military agencies, as well as the British andsome European governments. Similarly, after the release o thelm Innocence of Muslims in 2012, he published a statement citingthe American and Israeli governments as prime suspects for thiscrime. He said that i they had not supported the previous linksin this rotten chainthat is, Salman Rushdie, the Danish cartoon-ist, the American Koran-burning pastorand did not order dozenso anti-Islamic lms from the cliques linked with Zionist capital-ists, things would not have reached the point o this great and un-forgivable crime.

At the same time, he tries hard to avoid casting this issue as aconict between Islam and Christianity. The goal o these infuri-ating measures [Koran burnings], he argued in a public speech inSeptember 2010, is to bring the confrontation with Islam andMuslims into the mainstream o Christian societies and to giveit a religious coloration and zeal. But we must all realize, hesaid, that this has nothing to do with churches or Christianity,and the puppet deeds o a few idiotic and mercenary clerics mustnot be laid at the feet o Christians and their clergy. We Muslimswill never commit similar acts in regard to the sanctities o other


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religions. The struggle between Muslims and Christians on a gen-eral level is what the enemies and plotters o these insane displayswant, and the Koran instructs us to take the opposite position.

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Khamenei does not deny the astonishing progress o the West overthe past century. As he said in a public speech in June 2004, InAmerica, you see the pinnacle o the rise o materialist civilizationfrom the perspective o science, wealth, military power, and politi-cal and diplomatic efforts. America is a country that has legendarywealth and military power and extraordinary political mobility.He accepts Western science and technology and laments the factthat despotic regimes in Iran and elsewhere in the developingworld are responsible for these countries underdevelopment.Khamenei admires certain aspects o Western societies. Meetingwith youth and cultural affairs workers in the Caspian city o Rashtin 2001, for example, he noted that one good quality in Europeanpeople is their willingness to take risks. This is the chie source otheir successes. . . . Another o their good qualities is perseveranceand keeping at hard work. . . . The greatest and most talentedWestern inventors and scholars are those who for long years live ahard life sitting in a garret and discover something. When onereads their biographies, one sees what a hard life they lived. . . .These are the good parts o Western culture.

Western culture, he noted in a discussion with Iranian youthsin February 1999, on the occasion o the anniversary o the revolu-tion, is a combination o beautiful and ugly things. No one can saythat Western culture is completely ugly. No, like any other culture,it surely has beautiful manifestations. . . . A sensible nation and agroup o sensible people will take the good and add it to their ownculture, thus enriching it, and reject the bad. He believes that Is-lamic civilization is superior, however, because Western civilizationis overly materialistic. The West looks at only one dimension, onefeaturethe material feature, he said during a recent meeting


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with youths devoted to the topic o socioeconomic development.He added that the Western outlook considers progress rst andforemost, composed o progress in wealth, science, military affairs,and technology. . . . But in Islamic logic, progress has other dimen-sions: progress in science, in justice, in public welfare, in econom-ics, in international grandeur and status, in political independence,in prayer and approaching the exalted Godin other words, it hasa spiritual aspect, a divine aspect.

Khamenei is not a fan o liberal democracy. He argues that itssupposed majoritarian legitimacy is undermined by the fact thatactual governments in the West have received the votes o only asmall fraction o the total possible electorate. He claims, moreover,that liberal democracies, such as the United States, have repeatedlyviolated their own principles by supporting despotic governmentselsewhere, and have even worked to overthrow democratic regimes(such as with the 1953 coup in Iran). He sees liberal democraticgovernments as being interested in ruling the world at large, push-ing globalization as a route toward Americanization, and attackingother countries at will (such as Afghanistan and Iraq).

The Islamic Republic has its own form o democracy, Khameneibelieves, one that is rooted in religion. The foundations o reli-gious democracy are different from those o Western democracy,he argued in June 2005 in a speech on the anniversary o Khomei-nis death. Religious democracy, which is the basis we have votedfor and which arises from the divine rights and duties o man, isnot just a contract. All humans have the right to vote and the rightto self-determination. This is what lends meaning to elections inthe Islamic Republic. [What we have here] is much more advancedand meaningful and deeply rooted than what exists today in West-ern liberal democracy.

In practice, Khamenei believes that liberal democracy yields notfreedom but domination, aggression, and imperialism, and this iswhat makes it unacceptable. We believe in democracy, he said ina meeting with members o the Basij militia in northwestern Iran


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reach their nal conclusion. But the crisis o the West has begunin earnest.

For Khamenei, world history is turning a corner, and a newage in the entire world is beginning. The Marxist, liberal, andnationalist creeds have lost their attraction, and only Islam has keptits. The Arab Springor, as he calls it, the Islamic Awakeningisa prelude to a worldwide uprising against the United States andinternational Zionism. In his view, the fact that routine materialis-tic calculations make such an outcome unlikely is unimportant, be-cause divine providence will bring it about. He sees the survival othe Islamic Republic in the face o more than three decades o in-ternational opposition as evidence o this heavenly support andcounts on it continuing in the future. Khamenei believes that thehistoric turn he anticipates will lead to the victory o spiritual anddivine values in the world. Contrary to Max Webers diagnosis thatmodern science has disenchanted the world and the realm o power,Khamenei still relies on esoteric notions and divine beings in hisapproach to politics. He is re-enchanting the world.

TALKING ABOUT TALKS

In August 1989, two months after being elected supreme leader,Khamenei announced to the United States,

No one in the Islamic Republic has ever negotiated with you, nor will

they. . . . As long as American policy is based on lies, deception, andduplicity and supports corrupt regimes, like that o Israel, and per-petuates oppression against the weak and poor nations, and as long ascrimes and transgressions o the American rulers, such as the downingo the passenger plane and the impounding o Irans property, remainin our nations memory, there is no possibility o our holding negotia-tions with the American government or establishing diplomatic rela-tions with it. We completely reject relations between them and us.

The following year, in a meeting with a group o students on theanniversary o the embassy takeover, he elaborated his thinking onthis front:


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Those who think that we must negotiate with . . . America are eithersimple-minded or frightened. . . . What would negotiations mean?Would all problems be solved i only you go and sit with America and

talk and negotiate? This is not the case. Negotiations with Americamean trading with America. Trade means you get something and yougive something. What will you give to America from the Islamic revo-lution for which you will get something? . . . Do you know what itwants? By God, America is not upset with the Iranian nation for any-thing more than its being Muslim, its standing rm with Muham-mads pure Islam. It wants you to stop being so rm. It wants you tonot be proud. Are you ready for that?

Seventeen years later, in December 2007, at a gathering o stu-dents in the central city o Yazd, he returned to the topic:

One o our fundamental policies is cutting relations with America.Yet we have never said that we will cut these relations forever. No,there is no reason to cut relations forever with any state. . . . [But]relations with America are harmful to us. First, establishing relationswill not reduce the danger posed by America. America attacked Iraq

while the countries had diplomatic relations. . . . Second, having rela-tions with the Americans is a way for them to increase their inuencewithin certain strata . . . in Iran. . . . They need a base that they donthave now. This is what they want. They want their intelligence offi-cers to be able to travel to Iran without restrictions. . . . Some peoplebrag about the harm that results from the absence o [diplomatic] re-lations. No, gentlemen! Not having relations with America is good forus. The day when relations with America will be benecial, I will be

the rst one to say that relations should be established.In August 2010, in a meeting with high-level officials o the gov-

ernment under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Khamenei of-fered his interpretation o two recent cases o negotiations withthe United States, one o which was related to problems in Iraq.This was at a time when Ahmadinejad had stated that he was readyto negotiate with the United States. Khamenei described his un-

derstanding o the U.S. negotiating style:When the Americans dont have strong arguments, when they cannotpresent an argument that is acceptable and logical, they resort to


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bullying. And since bullying has no effect on the Islamic Republic,they unilaterally declare the end o negotiations! Fine, what kind onegotiation is that? This is our experience in both cases. So, when

people like Mr. President [Ahmadinejad] say that we are ready tonegotiate, I say yes, we are ready to negotiate, but not with the UnitedStates. The reason is that America does not enter the eld honestly,like an ordinary negotiator; it enters into negotiations like a super-power. . . . Let them set aside threats, let them set aside sanctions, letthem not insist that the negotiations must end in a specic conclusion.[Then there can be negotiations.]

In February 2013, attending a security conference in Munich,U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden said that in its efforts to preventIran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the United States had im-posed the most robust sanctions in history and that Irans leaderswere punishing their own people through economic deprivationand international isolation. Biden indicated that diplomacy stillhad a chance but that direct talks would be possible only when theIranian leadership, the supreme leader, is serious.

Khamenei responded quickly and directly. In a speech to thecommanders o the Iranian air force, he said that since U.S. Presi-dent Barack Obamas election in 2008, he had announced that theIranian leadership would take an unprejudiced look at the new gov-ernments behavior and then make a decision. But what had been theresults o Obamas rst term? Washington had supported the inter-nal rebellion (the Green Movement); it had imposed cripplingsanctions that, he claimed, U.S. Secretary o State Hillary Clintonsaid were intended to foment a popular uprising against the IslamicRepublic; it had turned a blind eye to Israels assassinations oIrans nuclear scientists and perhaps even backed them; and it hadsupported the same terrorists in Syria that they had overthrown inAfghanistan in 2001. He then addressed Bidens call for talks:

Whom did you want to cripple [with sanctions]? Did you want toparalyze the Iranian people? Is there any goodwill in this? . . . I am nota diplomat. I am a revolutionary and talk in a clear and forthrightmanner. . . .


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Diplomats say something, and they mean something else. We talkin honest and clear terms. . . . Negotiations are meaningful when theother side shows its goodwill. When the other side does not show any

goodwill, when you yourselves say pressure and negotiations, thesetwo dont go together. You want to point a gun at the Iranian peopleand say, Negotiate, or Ill re. . . . You should know that the Iranianpeople will not be frightened as a result o such acts.

Khamenei claimed that the Islamic Republic was ready for di-rect negotiations with Washington but that there were several nec-essary preconditions. He wants the United States to give up what

he sees as its attempts to overthrow the Islamic Republic, enterinto negotiations in a spirit o mutual respect and equality, andabandon its simultaneous efforts to pressure Iran, such as with mil-itary threats and economic sanctions. He argues that on these mat-ters, contrary to what Biden said in Munich, the ball is in Washing-tons court, not Tehrans.

Khamenei rejects the notion that the differences between Iran

and the United States center on the nuclear program. I we wantedto make nuclear weapons, he said in a public meeting with a del-egation o ulama and martyrs families from the Iranian region oAzerbaijan this past February,

how could you prevent it? I Iran was determined to have nuclearweapons, America could not prevent it in any way. We do not want tomake nuclear weapons. Not because America is upset over this, but

because its our own belief. We believe that nuclear weapons are acrime against humanity and must not be produced and that those thatalready exist in the world must be eliminated. This is our belief. It hasnothing to do with you. I we did not have this belie and decided tomake nuclear weapons, no power could prevent us, just as they werenot able to prevent it in other placesnot in India, not in Pakistan,not in North Korea.

The key to successful negotiations, he claims, is for Washingtonto change its attitude and sense o entitlement. The Americansmust conrm their good intentions and show that they are not in-terested in bullying. I they demonstrate this, then they will see


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that the Iranian nation will respond in kind. Let them not maketrouble, let them not intervene, let them not bully, let them recog-nize the Iranian nations rights. Then they will receive a commen-surate response from Iran.

Every year, Khamenei gives his most important speech in Mash-had on the rst day o spring, the beginning o the Iranian NewYear. This years address was striking, however, for what seemed tobe a slight softening o his position on talks. For the rst time,even while expressing his lack o optimism about direct negotia-tions with the United States, he explicitly said, But I dont opposethem. And while noting that Washington seems to have no incli-nation to complete the nuclear negotiations and resolve the issue,he nevertheless said that the solution to the conict is very nearand very simple. Irans only demand, he said, was recognition oits right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, and it would bevery simple to eliminate foreigners concerns. They can imple-ment the nuclear agencys legal regulations; from the start, we, forour part, have had no opposition to implementing these supervi-sions and regulations.

What is noteworthy about the road traveled by the supremeleader during these tumultuous past three decades is the change inthe manner o his discourse. He has shifted away from absoluteideological notions o the West, world arrogance, and theUnited States as a totally homogenous other and moved towardaccepting a more nuanced conception o the West as a complexsocial realityone with not only an inherent drive to ruthless mar-ket competition, capitalist exploitation and foreign policy expan-sion but also dynamic artistic products, literature, science and tech-nology, risk taking and institutional innovations, and religious andspiritual diversity. The discourse depicting the United States as anabsolute enemy with which it would be absurd and naive even tothink about negotiating has given way to a discourse about theUnited States as a potential interlocutor with which it might bepossible to discuss acceptable terms o negotiations over such


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officials who are their ostensible targets. This is as true in Iran as itis elsewhere, and it means that outside powers, and the UnitedStates in particular, are currently responsible for widespread un-employment, soaring ination, and a massive increase in poverty.Under these circumstances, more and more middle-class familieswill join the ranks o the poor, and more children o the poor willfall victim to malnutrition, disease, and violence. Problems o dailysurvival will become the publics main concern, issues o democ-racy and human rights will be marginalized, and Irans social fabricwill be destroyed from within just as happened in Iraq during the1990s. That is not something the United States should want to seefor any number o reasons.

Khamenei, for his part, must accept that in the long run, theonly way to make the Islamic Republic truly powerful and sustain-able is to legitimize his regime through the peoples free votes. TheSoviet Union had the largest army in the world and amassed thou-sands o nuclear weapons, but it eventually collapsed. Even i

Western governments forswear any intentions o regime change,Irans domestic problems will never be solved without democracy,freedom, and human rights.

I the Obama administration is serious about pursuing a solu-tion to the problems between Tehran and Washington, it would bewell advised to develop a road map that species the unresolvedissues in the Iranian nuclear le in a clear manner and sets out a

timeline for investigating, resolving, and closing the cases one byone. Step-by-step progress on the nuclear front should be linked tostep-by-step progress on lifting the sanctions. The administrationwould also be well advised to take a comprehensive approach to theregion and embed discussions o the Iranian nuclear program in abroader framework o regional security, bringing Washingtons al-lies on board and minimizing those allies desire to play the spoiler.

This would mean building a consensus around a set o rules forregional politics, guaranteeing borders and abjuring regime changeas a policy, achieving real results in ending the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, working toward the eventual removal o


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weapons o mass destruction from the region, and supporting hu-man rights across the Middle East.

This is obviously a very tall order, but there is no other way toavoid the continuation, or even escalation, o the existing conictsin the region. Confrontational policies on all sides over the lastdecade have yielded little except stalemate and misery. The elec-tion o Rouhani as president showed the desire o the Iranian peo-ple to put a decisive end to the Ahmadinejad era, and it has createdan opportunity for both Iran and the international community tomove forward toward more constructive relations. That opportu-

nity should be seized rather than ignored.


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SUZANNE MALONEY is a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle EastPolicy at the Brookings Institution.

Why Rouhani Won And Why KhameneiLet HimThe Ahmadinejad EraComes to an Auspicious End

Suzanne Maloney

Four years ago, after the dubious reelection o Iranian Presi-dent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian streets were lledwith protestors demanding to know what had happened to

their votes. This weekend, the voters nally got their answerand,once more, they lled the countrys streets. This time, though,they were celebrating as the government conrmed that HassanRouhani, the presidential candidate who had campaigned onpromises o reform and reopening to the world, had won an over-whelming victory.

The election o Rouhani, a centrist cleric who has been close toIrans apex o power since the 1979 revolution, is an improbablyauspicious end to the Ahmadinejad era. Rouhani is a blunt pragma-tist with plenty o experience maneuvering within Irans theocraticsystem. He is far too sensible to indulge in a power grab la Ah-madinejad. And, as a cleric, he assuages the fears o the IslamicRepublics religious class. He embraced reformist rhetoric duringthe campaign, but will not deviate too far from the systems


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said that he would free all those who remain under house arrest aswell. Rouhani sparred heatedly with Jalilis campaign chie and by-passed state media by releasing a compelling video that highlightedhis experience during the war with Iraq (he was on the SupremeDefense Council, was a member o the High Council for Support-ing War, and was commander o the Iran Air Defense Force, amongother roles) and on nuclear negotiations (he was Irans top nuclearnegotiator from 2003 to 2005). His aggressive campaign caughtthe attention o a disaffected Iranian population, who eventuallybegan to throng his rallies.

Rouhani also benetted from an unprecedented alliance be-tween Irans embattled reform movement and the center- right fac-tion to which Rouhani, as well as Rafsanjani, are generally under-stood to belong. The division between the two factions dates backto the earliest years o the revolution. It became more entrenchedafter the reformists gained power in 1997, when Mohammad Khat-ami, the reformist standard-bearer, was elected president in a ma-

jor upset. By joining with the center-right now, the reformists got apath out o the political desert in which they have languished sincethe end o Khatamis presidency. By joining with the reformists,Rouhani got a powerful get-out-the-vote effort and the withdrawalfrom the race o Mohammad Reza Aref, the sole approved reformistcandidate. By contrast, the conservative camp remained divided,never coalescing around a single candidate. Had it managed to do so,

it could have at least forced the election into a run-off.O course, Rouhanis most powerful advantage was the bitter

unhappiness o the Iranian people, who have witnessed the implo-sion o their currency, the return o austerity measures not seensince the Iran-Iraq War, and the erosion o their basic rights andfreedoms over the past eight years. The fact that they were willingto hope again, even after the crushing disappointment o 2009

election, underscores a remarkable commitment to peaceful changeand to democratic institutions.All this might explain the massive turnout on election day and

Rouhanis overwhelming popular victory. It does not explain, though,


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June 16, 2013 33

why Khamenei avoided the chicanery that plagued the 2009 voteand why he let the result stand.

One explanation is that the Ayatollah simply miscalculated andfound himself, once again, overtaken by events when Rouhaniscandidacy surged with little forewarning. Indeed, it is likely thatKhamenei really did expect Iranians to vote for the conservatives.After all, the conservatives have held all the cards in Iran since2005; they dominate its institutions and dictate the terms o thedebate. With the leading reformists imprisoned or in exile, no oneexpected that the forces o change could be revived so powerfully.When his expectations proved off base last Friday, Khamenei couldhave simply opted not to risk a repeat o 2009.

There is another possibility, however, and one that better ex-plains Khameneis strangely permissive attitude toward Rouhanisedgy campaign and toward the extraordinary debate that took placebetween the eight remaining presidential candidates on state tele-vision only a week before the election. In that discussion, an ex-

change about general foreign policy issues morphed unexpectedlyinto a mutiny on the nuclear issue. One candidate, Ali Akbar Ve-layati, a scion o the regimes conservative base, attacked Jalili forfailing to strike a nuclear deal and for permitting U.S.- backed sanc-tions on Iran to increase.

The amazingly candid discussion that followed Velayatis chargebetrayed the Iranian establishments awareness o the regimes in-

creasing vulnerability. It could only be understood as an interventionone initiated by the regimes most stalwart supporters and intendedto rescue the system by acknowledging its precarious straits and ap-pealing for pragmatism (rather than Jalilis dogmatism). The discus-sion was also an acknowledgement that the sanctions-induced miser-ies o the Iranian public can no longer be soothed with nuclearpageantry or even appeals to religious nationalism.

It is therefore possible to imagine that Khameneis unexpectedmunicence, including his last-minute appeal for every Iranianeventhose who dont support the Islamic Republicto vote, was planned.In this case, those who see Rouhanis election as a replay o the


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shocking political upset that Khatami pulled off in 1997 are offbase. Instead, Rouhanis election is an echo o Khameneis suddenshift in 1988 and 1989, when he charged Rafsanjani, a pragmatist,with ending the war with Iraq, and then helped Rafsanjani win thepresidency so that he could spearhead the post-war reconstructionprogram. Now, as then, Khamenei is not bent on innite sacrice.Perhaps allowing Rouhanis victory is his way o empowering aconciliator to repair Irans frayed relations with the world and ndsome resolution to the nuclear dispute that enables the country torevive oil exports and resume normal trade.

That does not mean, o course, that Rouhani has an easy roadahead. He must wrangle the support o the hard-liners and lock inat least continued tacit backing from Khamenei. In doing so, hewill have to overcome a decade o resentment. During his stintleading nuclear talks, Rouhani made the sole serious concessionthat the Islamic Republic has ever offered on its nuclear ambitions:a multi-year suspension o its enrichment activities that was ended

just before Ahmadinejad took office.The move won Rouhani the unending fury o the hard-liners,

including Khamenei, who approved the deal but has publicly in-veighed against Rouhanis nuclear diplomacy as recently as lastsummer. Today, however, many Iranians including, apparently,many within the establishmentnd his ability to craft a viabledeal with the world on the nuclear issue appealing. His election

thus suggests that a historic shift in Irans approach to the worldand to the nuclear standoff could be in the offing. Still, to overcomeold antipathies among the conservatives and to advance his agendafor change within Irans Machiavellian political culture, Rouhaniwill need the clear and unwavering support o Khamenei, some-thing that the Supreme Leader has only accorded to one presidentduring his 25-year tenure: Ahmadinejad, in his rst term.

For Washington, meanwhile, the election offered stark conr-mation that its strategy is working, at least to a point. The outcomeconrmed that political will for a nuclear deal exists within the Is-lamic Republic. Even with a more moderate president at the helm,


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Why Rouhani Won And Why Khamenei Let Him

June 16, 2013 35

however, the nuclear issue will not be readily resolved, and Iransdivided political sphere is as difficult as ever. To overcome thedeep-seated (and not entirely unjustied) paranoia o its ulti-mate decision-maker, the United States will need to be patient. Itwill need to understand, for example, that Rouhani will need todemonstrate to Iranians that he can produce tangible rewards fordiplomatic overtures. That means that Washington should be pre-pared to offer signicant sanctions relie in exchange for any con-cessions on the nuclear issue. Washington will also have to under-stand that Rouhani may face real constraints in seeking to solve the

nuclear dispute without exacerbating the mistrust o the hard-liners. And all the while, the Obama administration will have toproceed cautiously, since appearing too effusive will diminish Rou-hanis domestic standing.

In other words, the path out o isolation and economic crisis isperilous, but Irans new president, who has sometimes been dubbedthe sheikh o diplomacy, may just be the right man at the right

moment to walk it.


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STEPHEN KOTKIN is a professor of history and international affairs atPrinceton University.

Rouhanis GorbachevMoment What Makes a Genuine Reformer?

Stephen Kotkin

C ould Iranian President Hassan Rouhani be another MikhailGorbacheva real reformer who opens his countrys po-litical system and creates the space for dtente with theUnited States and Europe?

Historical analogies are always fraught, o course, and leaders

who are championed as reformers almost always leave disillusion-ment in their wakes. In addition, the jury is still out on whether anuclear deal between the United States and Iran, which wouldopen the door for a relaxation o painful sanctions, is even a goodideathe specics o the agreement matter greatly.

But whichever side one comes down on, it is worth consideringwhere the Islamic Republic might be headed. In that regard, there

are a few areas to watch.NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE

Gorbachev was unique, a true believer in Soviet renewal who sat atthe very top o a profoundly centralized political system.

Rouhani is nothing like him. In fact, Rouhani came to power pre-cisely because o Tehrans deep fragmentation, particularly within itsright-wing establishment. The fracturing created an opening thatRouhani burst through in a surprise electoral victory in June 2013.


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regional successes improved its security or its citizens well-being. One could even argue that Irans support for mischie (andworse) has only heightened the regimes vulnerability just likethe domestic failures o political Islamism.

Like the Soviet Union, Iran lives in a tough geopolitical neigh-borhood, one that has only been getting tougher. Statelets con-cocted by French and British colonial officials, the bankruptcy opan-Arab nationalism, the recent struggles to the death betweenhopelessly corrupt authoritarians and the opposition (which is alsooften authoritarian), some violent de facto partitionsthese havecreated a regional tangle that inicts immense suffering and thatno outside power can readily unknot.

Simply put, U.S. policy in the Middle East is in shambles becausethe Middle East is in shambles. Irans Middle East policy is in sham-bles too. Persistently playing the role o spoiler in ones own neigh-borhood brings few long-term rewardsand that is even before therecent round o international sanctions (a stunning achievement

made possible by the fact that China and Russia, as much as theychafe at U.S. power, dislike any kind o revisionism other thantheir own). Thanks to Irans behavior, its neighborhood has becomestill more treacherous, and the pain is multiplied by the countrysinternational isolation, high ination, and collapsing currency.

At this point, Iran has little to lose but its own chains i it re-forms and cooperates with the West. O course, that is no guaran-

tee that it will. Just because something is necessary does not meanthat it is politically feasible. In fact, Irans political establishment isfar from ready for a drastic turnabout in relations with the GreatSatan. The structures that facilitated the U.S.- Iranian alliance dur-ing the Cold War are long gonethe genuine Soviet menace, thestrongman regime installed by a U.S.-sponsored coup, even theintense dependency on foreign oil. At the same time, the U.S. alli-

ance with Israel, Irans sworn enemy, has only deepened. Any mini-dtente with the United States, which is vital for Irans domesticdevelopment, is going to require far-reaching domestic changes.

And herein lies Rouhanis Gorbachev moment.


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CONDITIONALITY

Gorbachev was able to push through deep reform for three reasons.First, everything he did was in the name o renewing the system.Second, he was a master political tactician, at least within the con-text o the Soviet Communist system, and had promoted haplessconservatives to key positions at the head o the central Commu-nist Party secretariat, the Soviet military, and the KGB. Third,U.S. President Ronald Reagan not only put major pressure on theSoviets but, when the concessions came, showed the foresightand had the credibilityto pocket them and afford Gorbachev a lot

o running room domestically.It is hard to imagine Rouhani meeting all three o these condi-

tions. Were he to introduce major domestic reforms, including anend to clerical disqualication o electoral candidates and to Basijand Revolutionary Guard control over large swaths o the econ-omy, he would certainly claim that they are in the name o renew-ing the system. And he did show some Gorbachev-esque skill

when he seized on a political moment, won elections, andpromptly hinted at the possibility for nuclear negotiations. Fur-ther, he is already working overtime to further divide and con-quer the hard-liners. But it is less certain that he will nd a deftnegotiator in Washington one able to cut a deal and keep to it,and to deepen that deal over time should Iran begin to institutemajor reforms.

And that is not all. An even greater challenge for Rouhani willbe to nd a path toward reform that does not also destabilizethe regime. Parsing the news out o Tehran, it is hard to say whatthe regimes plan is. In fact, beyond winning sanctions relie andending isolation, Rouhani might not have one. The Iranian public,media, and academic institutions, as well as the diaspora, seem tohave plenty o bold ideas. But as Gorbachev found, it is not enough

to be bold. There has to be a tenable end statea safer and betterplaceinto which the system can settle. I there isnt, Rouhanicould indeed turn out to be Gorbachev: a man who is not able toreform his polity without unintentionally liquidating it.


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Stephen Kotkin

1989 AND 2013

The nal question, then, is how observers can judge whether anyapparent reforms are for real. This was one o the great problemswith deciphering Gorbachev too. Analysts could not tell what wasgoing on because Gorbachev effectively claimed to be both under-taking radical change and not undertaking radical change at all. Hewas democratizing the Communist Party, revitalizing the Sovietswith elections, energizing central planning with some decentraliza-tion and market mechanisms, and pursuing peace abroad. Skepticshad an easy time dismissing these initiatives, which sounded very

Communist, very Soviet.Gorbachev did not come out and say, I am going to end the

Communist Party monopoly, because that was never his intention.It was only a consequence o allowing alternative civic associationsto form, relaxing censorship, and introducing competitive elec-tions. He never said, I am going to destroy economic planning. Itwas only a consequence o introducing legal market mechanisms.

To believe that Gorbachev was a genuine reformer, one also had tobelieve two other things. First, that he did not understand the dy-namics o Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 namely,that reform, as his predecessor Leonid Brezhnev had concluded,was tantamount to self-annihilation. And second, that Gorbachevwas as good a tactician as he seemedthat he could outmaneuverthe establishment opposition and pre- empt the kinds o crack-

downs that had ended Communist reforms in Eastern Europe andhad been Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchevs downfall.

In other words, to grasp in real time the immense impact o whatGorbachev was doing, one had to understand that the underlyingthreat to reform derived not from conservative opposition but fromthe systems unreformability, and one had to surmise that Gorbachevheld the opposite (erroneous) view that successful reform was pos-

sible, but conservative opposition would try to snuff it out.I Rouhani launches a program o far-reaching economic andpolitical reformsa big ifthe vast majority o analysts will bedismissive. His program could well resemble window-dressing:


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ROBERT JERVIS is Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politicsat Columbia University and a member of the Saltzman Institute of War andPeace Studies.

Getting to Yes With IranThe Challenges oCoercive Diplomacy

Robert Jervis

I t might be wise for the United States to resign itsel to Iransdevelopment o nuclear weapons and to focus on deterring theIslamic Republic from ever using them. But U.S. leaders haveexplicitly rejected that course o action. Make no mistake: anuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained, U.S.President Barack Obama told the UN General Assembly last Sep-tember. And thats why the United States will do what we must toprevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. U.S. officials havealso made it clear that they consider direct military action to pre-vent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon an extremely unattract-

ive option, one to be implemented only as a regrettable last resort.In practice, then, that leaves only two tools for dealing withIrans advancing nuclear program: threats and promises, the meld-ing o which the political scientist Alexander George labeled coer-cive diplomacy. To succeed in halting Irans progress toward abomb, the United States will have to combine the two, not simplyalternate between them. It must make credible promises and cred-

ible threats simultaneouslyan exceedingly difficult trick to pull


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Getting to Yes With Iran

January/February 2013 43

off. And in this particular case, the difficulty is compounded by anumber o other factors: the long history o intense mutual mis-trust between the two countries; the U.S. alliance with Irans arch-enemy, Israel; and the opacity o Iranian decision-making.

The odds o overcoming all these obstacles are long. I Wash-ington truly wants to avoid both deterrence and military action,therefore, it will need to up its game and take an unusually smartand bold approach to negotiations.

WHY COERCIVE DIPLOMACY IS HARD

The United States recent record o coercive diplomacy is not en-couraging. A combination o sanctions, inspections, and threats ledIraqi President Saddam Hussein to freeze his weapons o mass de-struction program after the Gul War, but it did not coerce himinto accepting a long-term agreement. The reasons, as researchershave learned since Saddams ouster, had to do with his motives andperceptions. The Iraqi leader not only sought regional dominance

and the destruction o Israel but also worried about appearing weakto Iran, saw his survival in the wake o the Gul War as a victory,and was so suspicious o the United States that a real rapproche-ment was never within reach. All this rendered ineffective thethreats issued by the George W. Bush administration during therun-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion o Iraq and would likely havemade promises o a reasonable settlement ineffective as well.

The Iraq case, moreover, is less an exception than the norm.Coercive diplomacy has worked on a few occasions, such as in 2003,when the Libyan leader Muammar al-Qadda chose to stop devel-oping weapons o mass destruction partly as a result o pressureand reassurances from the United States. More often than not,however, in recent decades the United States has failed at coercivediplomacy even though it has had overwhelming power and has

made it clear that it will use force i necessary. A succession o rela-tively weak adversaries, including Panama (1989), Iraq (1990 and2003), Serbia (1998), and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan (2001), didnot respond to American attempts at pressure, leading Washington


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Robert Jervis

to fall back repeatedly on direct military action. Coercive diplo-macy did convince the military junta that ruled Haiti to step downin 1994, but only once it was clear that U.S. warplanes were alreadyin the air. And today, Iran is hardly alone in its deance: despiteissuing many threats and promises, the United States has been un-able to persuade North Korea to relinquish its nuclear arsenal oreven refrain from sharing its nuclear expertise with other countries(as it apparently did with Syria).

The threats and promises the United States has used with Iranare not inherently incompatible: Washington has said it will punishTehran for proceeding with its nuclear program but is willing tocut a deal with it should the program be halted. Logically, thesecomponents could reinforce each other, as the former pushes andthe latter pulls Iran toward an agreement. But the dreary history ocoercive diplomacy shows that all too often, threats and promisesundercut, rather than complement, each other.

Threats can prove particularly troublesome, since i they fail,

they can drive the threatening party onto a path it may not actuallywant to follow. U.S. President John F. Kennedy learned this lessonduring the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy was mostly, but notcompletely, joking when he said, on learning that the Soviet Unionhad stationed warheads in Cuba, Last month I said we werent go-ing to [allow it]. Last month I should have said we dont care.More important, ramping up threats can undermine the chances

that promises will be taken seriously. Inicting increasing pain andmaking explicit threats to continue to do so can also raise questionsabout whether the party inicting the pain really wants a deal andraise the domestic costs to the suffering government o makingconcessions.

When the United States suggests that it is willing to bomb Irani it does not negotiate away its weapons program, it implies that

the Americans believe that the costs o military action are tolerable.Although this increases the credibility o the threat, it could also leadIran to conclude that the United States sees the costs o bombing aslow enough to make military action more attractive than any


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Getting to Yes With Iran

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outcome short o a complete Iranian surrender. Moreover, becauseIrans nuclear program is at least in part driven by the Islamic Repub-lics desire to be able to protect itsel against attack, this U.S. threatis likely to heighten the perceived danger and so increase Irans de-termination not to be swayed from its current course.

This does not mean that pressure is always counterproductive.According to U.S. intelligence agencies, the Iranians halted theirdevelopment o nuclear weapons in 2003, presumably in responseto the menace created by the U.S. invasion o Iraq. It appears thatwhat a U.S. diplomat once said o North Korea also applies to Irantoday: The North Koreans do not respond to pressure. But with-out pressure they do not respond.

WHY THIS CASE IS EVEN HARDER

Even i pressure can work, and despite the fact that threats do notneed to be completely credible in order to be effective, Washingtonfaces daunting obstacles in trying to establish the credibility o itsthreat to strike Iran. What is most obvious, bombing would be verycostly for the Americans (which is one o the reasons why it has notyet been done). As Tehran surely understands, Washington knowsthat the likely results include at least a small war in the region,deepening hostility to the United States around the world, in-creased domestic support for the Iranian regime, legitimation o

the Iranian nuclear weapons program, and the need to strike againi Iran reconstitutes it. Given such high costs, Tehran might con-clude that Washingtons threat to bomb is just a bluff, and one it iswilling to call.

Ironically, the success o economic sanctions could further di-minish the credibility o the U.S. threat o a military strike. Iranianleaders might judge that their U.S. counterparts will continue to

stick with sanctions in the hopes that the pain will ultimately yield achange in Iranian policy, or they might think that U.S. officials willhold off on the unpopular and unilateral military option to avoiddisrupting the relatively popular and multilateral sanctions regime.


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Robert Jervis

The credibility o Washingtons threat to bomb is also affectedby the perceptions and intentions o Irans rulers. Iranian leadersmight fall into the trap o basing their predictions about U.S. pol-icy on their own expectations, which might differ from the Ameri-cans. Those Iranians with relatively benign intentions toward theUnited States might expect that it would be fairly easy for theAmericans to live with a nuclear-armed Iran, assume their U.S.counterparts will think similarly, and thus think a preventive U.S.military strike is unlikely. More aggressive Iranian leaders, on theother hand, might take the U.S. threat to bomb more seriously,since they themselves see Irans acquisition o a bomb to be signi-cant and assume their American counterparts will, too. These Ira-nian hawks might thus see U.S. preventive military action asplausible and expect it, moreover, to be aimed at broader goals,such as regime change, rather than simply setting back the Iraniannuclear program.

The history o U.S. policy toward Iran over the past decade will

also complicate the credibility o American threats. On the onehand, the United States has imposed unilateral sanctions and skill-fully mustered support from the Europeans for severe internationalsanctions. Many Western observers were surprised by this, and theIranian leadership probably was, too. On the other hand, the UnitedStates has not bombed Iran despite continuing Iranian deance oUN resolutions and U.S. policies. Iran also cannot have failed to

notice that the United States did not attack North Korea as it de-veloped its nuclear weapons, even after having repeatedly issuedstrong threats that it would do so. Moreover, Washington has beentrying to coerce Iran into giving up its nuclear program for agesnow, to little avail, making it hard to instill a sense o urgency in itscurrent efforts.

O course, threatening to bomb Irans nuclear facilities is not the

only form o pressure the United States can exert. Washington canmaintain the current punishing sanctions regime indenitely oreven strengthen it. It could conduct additional covert actions, espe-cially cyberattacks, to slow down the Iranian n

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