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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is a professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of ‘Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History’
The US appears poised to launch a major military attack on Iran. The last round of talks between the two countries was an opportunity for Iran to avert war but Tehran offered little to Washington. That is not because Iran’s rulers are too obdurate and caught up in their old ways of thinking. Rather they are putting little stock in diplomacy and increasingly see war as inevitable. They see talks more as a trap than a solution and seem to view an unavoidable war as more cathartic than a weak deal. They are focused on how to manage it — and even use it to their advantage.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei deeply distrusts the US president. It was Donald Trump who abandoned the 2015 nuclear deal and imposed punitive sanctions, causing the currency crisis which Tehran blames for domestic unrest; then, last summer, he gave a green light to Israel to attack Iran amid ongoing nuclear talks, and then bombed Iran’s nuclear programme.
When protesters took to the streets last December and January, Trump encouraged them to topple the Islamic republic and promised US military support to achieve that goal. Iran’s government brutally suppressed the protests to avert regime change. After the crackdown, the US then demanded a new nuclear deal. Leaders in Tehran are therefore not convinced that Trump is serious about a deal and fear he is still looking to topple them.
The litmus test for Tehran is that talks and any subsequent deal must guarantee Iran will not be attacked; that the US will abide by the deal and lift sanctions, and that it will not insist that Iran give up the right to civilian uranium enrichment. Yet none of these compromises seem to have been on offer in the last two rounds of talks. Instead, the US is demanding that Iran surrender not only its nuclear programme but also its missiles and regional proxies.
Agreeing to these demands would make regime change more probable. In short, the US is seeking full disarmament of Iran without removing the dire circumstances the country faces: severe economic pressure and the constant threat of war. Iran’s government fears it would face either a quick collapse or a slow death — as was the fate of Saddam’s Iraq after the first Gulf war.
The aim of Iran’s diplomacy is not just to avoid a war but to change those circumstances. There is an emerging consensus in Tehran that Iran will not win anything at the negotiating table. It will instead have to accept war, prepare to manage it, and hope that conflict eventually leads to the change it is seeking — by exhausting the US to the point that it abandons the pursuit of future aggression and agrees to a more favourable nuclear deal.
The nationwide uprising and its violent suppression has opened a vast fissure between the Islamic republic and its angry citizens — and this is also part of the regime’s calculation. The US expects the people to rise up again and topple their leaders. Iran’s rulers hope for the opposite: that war will spark patriotic fervour and nationalism will prevail.
Betting on war is dangerous and Iran’s rulers may be badly misreading the situation. But a regime that has its back to the wall is most prone to taking perilous risks. For Tehran, last year’s 12-day war was not a defeat; it succeeded in bringing superior militaries to a ceasefire short of realising their full war objectives. Despite the initial shock, Iran was able to absorb Israel’s devastating blows and then retaliate. In the end, it was the US that asked for a ceasefire. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards were not in favour of stopping the war at that point because they sensed Tehran might eventually benefit if the conflict dragged on and Israel’s defences were depleted, leading to mounting casualties there.
This time Iran is preparing for a long war — a drawn-out and costly conflict that will affect US allies and interests across the region. But even if the US launches a massive strike and succeeds in impeding Iran’s ability to retaliate against US forces or Israel, Tehran may still retain the ability to use its regional proxies, and target oil facilities and energy supply routes. It could even decide to launch much of its arsenal against the US and its allies before the US is able to destroy it, thus quickly escalating the war.
Tehran may calculate that the longer the war lasts and the higher the stakes become, the US will be more likely to look for a way to end it. Negotiations then could yield a different — and more desirable — result for Iran than they will today. Many in the west will interpret this line of thinking as a catastrophic miscalculation that will end in the devastation of Iran and the Islamic republic’s downfall. But it would be a mistake if they dismiss it.