Trump’s Iran Achievement

Among Donald Trump’s proudest achievements as president was his withdrawal of the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), his predecessor’s nuclear agreement with Iran. The boldest action of his presidency was his decision to kill Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force — the expeditionary, special-operations, terrorist branch of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — at the Baghdad airport. President Trump wanted to leave Iraq, and yet he assumed the risks of retaliation and greater U.S. commitment to kill a general who had probably orchestrated the deaths of more Americans than any man since Osama bin Laden.

Nonetheless, using Trump’s own standard for success, his administration’s Iran policy — increase economic pressure until Tehran agrees to a better deal — has failed. It was destined to: No “good” agreement is possible with a revolutionary Islamic state. Any conceivable new accord — or “follow-on” agreement — will be like the JCPOA. It will end with Tehran extorting the United States out of billions of dollars of sanctions relief, which will fortify the theocracy and its imperialism, while the regime’s acquisition of atomic arms will be modestly delayed. There is a reason why the Obama administration declined to include a ballistic-missile-control regime in the nuclear accord: The Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and the IRGC would never have agreed to it. Ditto any verification system wherein Western inspectors could actually perform in-person visits, let alone spot inspections, at IRGC bases where nuclear or ballistic-missile research is known or suspected. The development of long-range, nuclear-capable ballistic missiles — a priority for the IRGC for more than two decades — guarantees the means for the Iranian nomenklatura to check, intimidate, and terrorize its opponents in the region and beyond. It is simply not something Iran would have given up.

Trump’s Iran policy has been selective and uneven, showing a preference for economic coercion over containment. Containment is a patient regime-change strategy. Unwavering pressure and pushback would intensify the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy crisis, which has often led to massive protests, and make it more likely to break the system. Trump surely has had no moral qualms about doing this; he was, however, unwilling to assume the commitments that containment unavoidably entails (i.e., crafting an international and domestic consensus behind displacing the regime). Instead, he advanced an Arab Sunni alliance against Shia Iran — a strategy that collapsed in September 2019, when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates failed to respond to the clerical regime’s attacks against their own oil tankers and processing plants despite having overwhelming air superiority. Trump didn’t pull air and naval units from the Gulf, and he temporarily increased ground forces in the region, leaving the mullahs capable of harassing Gulf Arabs but not convulsing the oil-rich southern Middle East.

Tehran has now accumulated around 5,000 pounds of low-enriched uranium, an amount way beyond the limitation of the JCPOA and about one-fifth of what the state had before the nuclear agreement. The clerical regime actually hasn’t been racing to build a big stockpile. (They could have done so given the ease of reconnecting centrifuges.) Trump has watched this growth with some anxiety. Reportedly, he recently considered military strikes against nuclear sites but was dissuaded from ordering them by his advisers. Odds are that Iran hasn’t vigorously enriched uranium since the United States withdrew from the nuclear accord, in part because Tehran is scared of Trump.

Despite uncontested Iranian expansion and increasing uranium enrichment, the president’s achievements in Iran are real and likely to last. His most consequential, likely irreversible, and certainly unintended success was the enfeebling of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and his circle of “pragmatic technocrats.” For years Rouhani, a founding father of the theocratic police state, had advanced the proposition that the Islamic Republic could use Western funds and commerce to propel the country past its own problems. The cleric had wanted to import an Islamic variation of the Chinese model — an economically more robust dictatorship based on state capitalism.

In 2013, Khamenei accepted Rouhani’s pitch. Iran could have it all on Obama’s terms: a stronger economy (sanctions relief and commercial relations that would make it effectively impossible for the United States to punish Iran economically again), a more powerful military, an unmolested sphere of influence, more domestic stability, and an improved nuclear program with numerous, more-advanced centrifuges whose operation the international community couldn’t obstruct — in exchange for a limited delay on industrializing its nuclear infrastructure. In important ways, the nuclear deal actually eased the clerical regime’s pathway to the bomb.

Rouhani is likely the last cleric who can save the theocracy from itself and get the West to finance the effort. Joe Biden probably will offer billions of dollars to the mullahs before Rouhani leaves office this summer, in an effort to seduce Khamenei back into the nuclear accord. Time is short, however, and the supreme leader knows clearly the precariousness of any “deals” with Washington. The Islamic Republic doesn’t have a deep bench of relatively sophisticated, cosmopolitan talent. It’s possible that Ali Larijani, a former speaker of the parliament and former secretary general of the Supreme National Security Council who is contemplating a run for the presidency, can match Rouhani’s skill set at home and abroad. But it’s a stretch. Larijani has seemed friendly to the autarkist views of the supreme leader; he and his brothers, all ardent Islamists with limited politesse, have a harder time making nice with Westerners. And Larijani currently appears to have cooler relations with the supreme leader, who has approval over who runs for, and who wins, the presidency. There was a moment for the JCPOA after Rouhani was elected in 2013 — but Trump trashed the agreement, leaving less clever and less worldly men to fulfill the regime’s ambitions.

These men will have to deal with another accomplishment of Trump’s: He has helped to fray the bonds between the clerical regime and the poor. What the eruption and brutal suppression of the pro-democracy Green Movement did in 2009 to the college-educated Iranian middle class in Tehran, the nationwide protests of 2017 and especially 2019 (the latter of which was put down with unparalleled severity) have done more recently to the provincial lower classes, once assumed to be the theocracy’s bedrock. American sanctions have accentuated the long list of grievances the demonstrators have against the regime. It remains striking how few have criticized Trump for his measures that have undoubtedly aggravated their poverty. Pro-American sentiment among the protesters was common.

The cash that Biden may soon throw at Tehran could alleviate domestic pressures. But internal politics and regional developments aren’t playing to Tehran’s advantage. Israel has pummeled the Revolutionary Guards and their proxies in Syria; the mullahs have clearly shown they don’t have the guts to escalate against the Jewish state. In Iraq, anti-Iranian sentiment has been steadily building among the Shia; the death of Soleimani and his Iraqi lieutenant Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis seriously weakened Tehran’s standing in the country, leaving pro-Iranian forces and the clerical regime still scrambling to find effective replacements. And Lebanon is such a mess, it’s not clear that even Hezbollah, Iran’s favorite Arab offshoot, can exploit it.

Though Trump couldn’t abandon the idea of arms control as a paramount concern, he certainly let go of the timidity and guilt that has defined so much U.S. foreign policy toward Tehran since the Islamic Revolution. And his actions may still save us from massive nuclear extortion at the hands of men who grow happy as U.S. power retrenches. The “compensatory” financial demands of Khamenei and the mullahs may even make Team Biden blanch. Tehran may also be in no mood to further restrict its centrifuge progress, which per the JCPOA is just years away from the open construction of advanced machines. If Trump’s actions eventually do save us from throwing billions at the most anti-American, terrorism-fond, aggressive, and sanguinary regime in the Middle East, he will have shown himself to be the most consequential and effective president in handling the Islamic Republic since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini downed Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the forthcoming book The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty. Follow Reuel on Twitter @ReuelMGerecht. FDD is a nonpartisan think tank focused on foreign policy and national security issues.