Trump’s Iran Exceptionalism

Excerpt

Before the coming of Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidates always adopted a harsh line toward the Islamic Republic. If elected, they softened their approach. Ronald Reagan established the pattern. In the baptismal moment for U.S. policy, Reagan failed to respond meaningfully to the Iranian-orchestrated attack on U.S. Marines and the embassy in Beirut in 1983. The caution of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and his senior military officers won the day against Secretary of State George Shultz, who wanted to punish Tehran directly. Two years later, a national security decision directive, penned for National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, claimed that “dynamic political evolution is taking place inside Iran.” In part, the Iran-Contra mess grew out of this hopeful analysis. At Langley, the principal Central Intelligence Agency officers in the Near East Division of the operations directorate who were advising the director, William Casey, saw the possibility of an Iranian Thermidor.

Like a communicable disease, these sentiments circulated through each subsequent administration, inevitably fed most by those who saw foreign policy as a “realist” endeavor of competing nationalist and personal interests (to wit: the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon). This mindset climaxed in Barack Obama’s presidency, where the 2015 nuclear deal was meant to normalize the Islamic Republic so that the sunset clauses in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action wouldn’t really matter since the clerical regime would evolve into something less threatening. 

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.