The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat

In his colorful blow-by-blow account of the meeting between Donilon and Kayani (which shocked Kayani when it appeared in print—he declined a follow-up meeting with senior White House officials), David Sanger of the New York Times muses that all Kayani did in the five-and-a-half-hour meeting was to blow the “refined smoke of his Dunhills” into the faces of his American interlocutors.²⁸ But that was perhaps because the general was flummoxed by the fact that the Kerry mission had come to naught. And he could have been thinking as well, “If you are leaving Afghanistan, then I may need the Haqqani network even more. And you are forgetting that you need my roads to get out.”

In the months that followed, Washington’s pressure-only policy threw relations into a downward spiral that put us at great risk. America quickly learned that Pakistan could be even less cooperative, and to our surprise, we could not live with that. A policy of worsening relations to improve them—getting more out of Pakistan by giving less—was a nonstarter. Pakistan did not reward coercion with cooperation. On the contrary, Islamabad started shutting down supply routes, cut back intelligence cooperation, and finally in March 2012 demanded a “reset” in relations with Washington, beginning with a shutdown of the U.S. drone program (although that did not happen). The headaches this meant for our effort in landlocked Afghanistan were obvious. If Pakistan cooperated less, then the president’s claims of success to date and his hope to wind up the war by 2014 would both be in jeopardy. When Obama declared that the situation in Afghanistan had improved enough for American troops to start heading home, he was assuming that Pakistan would continue the level of cooperation it had given America during his first two years in office. Otherwise, violence might spike and put U.S. troop-withdrawal plans in doubt.

The nadir of relations was finally reached with the Salala incident. On November 26, 2011, U.S. forces were serving as backup to the Afghan army in hot pursuit of Taliban fighters near the Pakistani border posts in Salala on the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier. At some point in the firefight Pakistani soldiers joined in and started shooting at American and Afghan troops. American helicopters and fighter jets responded, pounding the Pakistani posts and killing twenty-four Pakistani soldiers.

An American investigation revealed that Pakistani soldiers knowingly shot at American troops. Pakistan claimed that American troops had not followed proper procedure and had failed to notify them that Afghan ground troops with U.S. fire support were in the area. Thus when suspected Taliban forces in the area started taking fire from Afghan and NATO forces, Pakistani soldiers responded thinking the Taliban or Afghan soldiers were shooting at them. At that point, American firepower punished them mercilessly for hours—Pakistanis claim that even after American commanders learned they were shooting at Pakistanis, they did not stop.

The use of firepower sent a powerful signal that U.S.-led NATO forces operating on the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier could be a direct military threat to Pakistan. The Pakistanis took the episode to mean, in effect, “This is how it’s going be from now on. We will come at you backing Afghan forces.”

It was the last straw. The Pakistani public was incensed, and the onesided firefight once again left the Pakistan military feeling humiliated by what looked like another American violation of their sovereignty. Pakistan demanded a formal apology. None was forthcoming. The attitude in the Pentagon was that the Pakistanis got what they deserved for supporting Taliban fighters, and they had better be prepared for more of the same. For his part, Obama worried that offering an apology would give his Republican opponents an excuse to accuse him of “apologizing for America” and to a country that the administration itself had painted as hostile to American interests. The White House made a decision: no apology. To make that crystal clear one senior official told Pakistan’s ambassador, “We will never apologize; it will never happen. Get over it.” Still, to cool tempers America had to suspend drone strikes for a good two months. The unfortunate bottom line was that a show of force along the Durand Line had led to less rather than more terrorist fighting, and Washington was worried that the lull in drone strikes was giving al-Qaeda dangerous room to regroup.²⁹ So shortly after New Year’s 2012, a bevy of worried American officials got on the phone with their Pakistani counterparts. The calls were menacing and the message was simple: “The United States reserved the right to attack anyone who it determined posed a direct threat to U.S. national security anywhere in the world.”³⁰ This was the administration’s counterterrorism “red line” and it meant that America was done with the drone cease-fire and wanted Pakistan to permit new attacks. In the past, Pakistanis would have grumbled but acceded to American requests. This time they refused to back down. The drones resumed flying over Pakistan and shooting missiles at targets, but Pakistan now was openly opposed to the program and getting closer to enforcing their objection.

I remember meeting high-ranking members of the administration right after those calls. Everyone asked, as if it had been a topic of discussion in the Situation Room, “What is our leverage with Pakistan?” I did not need to think hard to answer that one. “None,” I responded. We had worked hard at not having much leverage. We had cut back our aid and all but ended the programs that were meant to build bilateral ties, and we had taken off the table the promise of a long-term strategic relationship. We had assumed that threats and pressure would do what aid and diplomacy had achieved in the past. America’s strategy with Pakistan was not “three cups of tea,” but “three bangs on the table.” The Pakistani view was that you cannot threaten to take away a relationship that is not there—and threats of military action against Pakistan were just not credible, not when we were barely keeping our head above water in Afghanistan and, what’s more, had declared loud and clear that we were on our way out.

In return, I asked those who wondered about our leverage, “What do you think is Pakistan’s leverage on us?” Several levers came to my mind: We relied on Pakistan to supply our troops in Afghanistan with everything from fuel to drinking water; we needed Pakistan’s cooperation to gather the intelligence necessary to make drone strikes effective; and above all we needed Pakistan to make our Afghanistan strategy work. Given these dependencies, we had done ourselves a disservice by taking an ax to the relationship. Bullying wasn’t going to pay.

With no apology forthcoming the situation got tenser. Pakistan closed its border to trucks carrying supplies for American troops in Afghanistan, threatened to openly break with America on intelligence cooperation, and shunned international conferences on the future of Afghanistan. The relationship was in tatters.

With the Pakistan border closed, the U.S. military was paying an additional $100 million a month to supply its troops in Afghanistan (by May 2012 the total cost was close to $700 million). Without Pakistani roads, the U.S. military would not be able to get its heavy equipment out of Afghanistan on time or on budget once the time came to leave. If Pakistan remained off-limits, the United States would have to rethink its entire exit strategy from Afghanistan. Another arrow in Pakistan’s quiver was that it could also close its airspace to U.S. planes flying between the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan. The next escalation in this conflict would put the United States, not Pakistan, in the pincer.

Clinton all along thought we should say “Sorry” and move on. Now, as months had passed, Clinton told the White House that enough was enough; she was taking charge. She gave a simple direction to her top deputy at the State Department, Tom Nides: “I want you to fix this.” Nides flew to Islamabad to negotiate with General Kayani a tepid U.S. apology in exchange for Pakistan opening the border—and hence preventing the relationship from going over the cliff.

The White House acquiesced to Clinton salvaging the relationship. Not only had their Pakistan policy failed, but Obama also realized that Putin was the main beneficiary of Pakistan’s spat with Washington. The alternatives to Pakistan’s supply routes were Central Asian and Russian land and air routes, which gave Putin leverage. Obama decided he preferred apologizing to Pakistan to depending on Putin. It was a critical realization for the White House that the real menace to America comes not from states like Pakistan but powers like Russia. But the relationship is not out of the woods yet. Pakistan is still intent on protecting its ties to the Haqqani network and the Taliban—looking past America to protecting its position in the future Afghanistan. The relationship may still give way to more confrontation.

Seldom has the loss of one statesman proved as consequential as the death of Richard Holbrooke. Without his wisdom and experience, America’s Pakistan policy went off the rails and there will be long-run costs. What happens to Pakistan will always matter to America for several reasons, not least among them the presence of nuclear weapons. We should want more and not less influence in Pakistan, and Pakistan’s stability is not the only factor. There is also the matter of China.

When the Obama administration came to power, there was a genuine sense that Pakistan was on the edge of national collapse. That is much less the case today. But as our relations with the country soured, the business community and affluent middle classes started to write off America. The anger at American hubris became much easier to afford as burgeoning trade with China started to make up for reduced business with America. Fewer American businesses deal with Pakistan, but hotels in Islamabad or Lahore are filled with Chinese businessmen carrying on a brisk trade in commodities, manufacturing, and even software services.

The Chinese option buffers Pakistan from U.S. pressure, but in the long run it will also chart a different future for Pakistan. Beijing is unhappy over America’s strategic partnership with India, and especially dislikes the jewel in that partnership’s crown: the civilian nuclear deal struck by George W. Bush that will upgrade India’s nuclear capabilities. There is even more consternation in Beijing at the idea of a U.S.-Indian effort to contain and countervail China’s growing influence in Asia and the Indian Ocean region.

In this great-power rivalry, Pakistan is a strategic asset to China—a thorn in India’s side, a useful balancer that occupies many of India’s military and diplomatic resources and distracts India from focusing on China. By effectively conceding Pakistan to China, we have set ourselves back in the far more important rivalry with Beijing.

And Pakistan is not out of the woods. American pressure of late has in particular targeted the Pakistani military. We have always drawn a distinction between the civilian government and the military in Pakistan. There have been times when civilian politicians irked us and we saw our salvation in the military. It used to be that we relied on the military to get things done and keep the place going. We faulted the generals’ authoritarian tendencies, but it had become the custom in Washington to pinch our nostrils with one hand and bless the soldiers’ political meddling with the other. Otherwise Pakistan would surely sink under rising tides of corruption, misrule, and violent conflict. We did not like the military’s rattling of sabers at India, but thought that the men in khaki alone could safeguard the country’s nuclear arsenal, keep jihadis at bay, and help the West against the threat of extremism. The Pakistani military created problems and seemed to be the only solution to them at the same time. It was nice work if you could get it.

Humiliating and weakening a military that is choking democracy is not a bad thing. That is the only way to change the balance of power in favor of civilians and give democracy a chance. But Pakistan is not Spain or Argentina. The combination of ethnic tensions, extremist revolt, a sagging economy, and political gridlock with a war next door and no real institutional alternatives means that weakening Pakistan’s military could mean opening the door to the unknown. It is possible to envisage the gradual growth of democracy as the military’s control over politics fades—Turkey has seen a process of this sort unfold over the past two decades. But that delicate transition needs stability, time, and positive U.S. involvement. None of these are at hand in Pakistan. Whatever its shortcomings, the military remains the one functioning institution in Pakistan—the skeleton that keeps its state upright. One may well ask whether in the haste to get “deliverables” on short-run “asks” Washington was now jumping from the frying pan into the fire, jeopardizing Pakistan to America’s own detriment. America’s pressure strategy is just as likely to produce the Pakistan of our worst nightmares as it is to bend the country’s will to our counterterrorism demands. A Pakistan that bends is likely to be a weaker and more vulnerable state, a larger, more dangerous South Asian Yemen.

Much eludes America in its singular focus on drones and the Taliban. Pakistan is a democracy with a vibrant civil society, a rambunctious free press, an independent judiciary, and a sizable middle class and private sector that are eroding the military’s grip on power, deepening democracy, and pushing for economic ties with India. But to get to a better place Pakistan needs stability and support—which, again, are not on the American agenda right now.

There is also much to worry about in Pakistan. The country suffers from severe electricity shortages. It is now common for large urban centers like Lahore to go without electricity for as long as sixteen hours. Factories shut down, workers are sent home, and in sweltering summer heat tempers flare in the form of protests, riots, and street clashes. What is happening with electricity today will happen with water tomorrow. The hopelessly outdated irrigation system leaks water to no end, and rapid population growth is straining the water supply—which is bound to dwindle as the glaciers melt away.

Urban violence involving criminal gangs and ethnic mafias is on the rise—Karachi’s constant gun battles, assassinations, and street violence bring to mind drug turf battles in Colombia and Mexico, but mixed with ethnic clashes of the sort seen once in Bosnia or Northern Ireland.

Entire populations want out. The Baluch are engaged in a war of liberation, and a bevy of other ethnic groups want recognition, special treatment, and, when possible, their own provinces. The military has kept separatism in check, but for how long and at what price?

The gap between the rich and poor is widening, not just in terms of wealth but also education, health, and access to social services. Pakistan’s massive middle class is as large as 30 million people—a midsized country in its own right—surrounded by five times as many poor slum dwellers and peasants. There is not enough economic growth to improve the lives of those at the bottom rung of the ladder, and even many in the middle class may lose their footing and slide down into economic trouble.

Some think economic pressure of this sort could produce a “Pakistan Spring.” But Pakistan had its spring in 2008 when its lawyers, media, students, and civil society joined hands to send General Musharraf packing. If there is another big nationwide protest movement, it is likely to be anti-drone and anti-American—the Pakistani equivalent of the Arab demand for dignity seems to be directed at Washington.

From the 1950s, when Pakistan had been counted as an important part of the so-called Northern Tier—allies upon whom America could rely to contain Soviet influence in West Asia—the U.S. and Pakistani militaries enjoyed close ties. The Pentagon thought of Pakistan’s military as an important asset in a troubled region. The Afghan war against the invading Russians brought the two militaries even closer together. After that war, the State Department thought of putting Pakistan on its list of state terror sponsors and of sanctioning it for A. Q. Khan’s nuclear program. But the Pentagon intervened, arranging for Pakistani troops to lend a hand with UN peacekeeping in Somalia, where Pakistan’s Frontier Force Regiment lost twenty-four men in a battle against local clan militias in June 1993 and helped rescue U.S. troops in the Black Hawk Down incident in Mogadishu that October. State Department plans to spank Islamabad were shelved. During Musharraf’s presidency, it was again the Pentagon that lobbied the president hard to view Pakistan in the best light, as a staunch ally in the war on terror.

In the past two years, that pillar of U.S.-Pakistan relations has come crashing down. The Pakistani military has started to view America not as an ally but as a threat. In March 2012, America put a bounty on the head of the Punjabi terrorist Hafiz Saeed, who masterminded the Mumbai attacks that killed 164 people over four days in late November 2008. It was high time that America pressured Pakistan to stop supporting anti-Indian terrorists, but America chose to do this long after the attack on Mumbai and as another signal of getting tough with Pakistan. In Islamabad, this was seen as a significant expansion of America’s war on terror into Pakistan proper. The United States and Pakistan had their disagreements, but Pakistan’s military had never before seen America as a country to be on guard against. Did the U.S. military now think a war with Pakistan might be in the offing? Pakistan was not ruling it out.

Nothing symbolized this dismal turn of events better than Admiral Mullen’s testimony. Mullen had been friendly with General Kayani. Their personal rapport had symbolized the close historical ties between the Pentagon and the GHQ (Pakistan’s military headquarters in Rawalpindi). The personal friendship was over, and so were the strategic ties between the two militaries.

In time we will ask, “Who lost Pakistan?” We will also have to ask why. Holbrooke understood that Pakistan would change its foreign policy only if something more than America’s immediate counterterrorism needs bound us together. But after the U.S.-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue finally got going, Holbrooke passed away and, following the first crisis of 2011, Washington quickly froze the talks. Holbrooke’s successor, Marc Grossman, told an incredulous Pakistani press that America was looking for a “transactional relationship.” We have no common interests, he told his Pakistani counterparts, just common objectives. The Pakistanis read that as code for “American objectives, which Pakistan is expected to fulfill.”

Pakistan was always going to be a hard case, a difficult problem. My point is that we made it harder than it had to be. We failed when it came to strategic vision and imagination, and we failed in our commitment to diplomacy. We further destabilized the world’s so-called most dangerous place—in effect compounding our own headaches. We have less influence in Pakistan in 2012 after a year of confrontation than we had in 2011 after two years of friendship. We acted as if we could walk away from Pakistan—which of course we cannot and will not do, and they knew it all along. Ours was not just an empty bluff, it was worse than that—it was folly we believed in and crafted our policy on, and all Pakistan had to do was wait for reality to set in.

We could have managed Pakistan better. We did not have to break the relationship and put Pakistan’s stability at risk. That course of action has not gotten us any further than the more prudent course of greater engagement—in fact, it’s gotten us a lot less. We have not realized our immediate security goals there and have put our long-run strategic interests in jeopardy. Pakistan is a failure of American policy, a failure of the sort that comes from the president handing foreign policy over to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies.

Looking back at how President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration decided to “Americanize” the Vietnam War by using air power against the North Vietnamese, Johnson’s national security adviser McGeorge Bundy reflected on what had surprised him most about that war. “The endurance of the enemy,” he concluded. His belief in the persuasive power of coercion had blinded him to the possibility that the North Vietnamese could withstand the full brunt of American military power. This failure of imagination, widespread throughout Johnson’s team, was singularly responsible for the calamity that followed.¹ The road to foreign policy disasters is paved with false assumptions that, when repeated enough in America’s closed-circuit foreign policy discussions, can take on the quality of self-evident truths.

His worst mistakes, thought Bundy long after the last U.S. helicopter had left Saigon, were never asking what the North Vietnamese would absolutely refuse to give up and failing “to examine what could be done to make the best of a bad business while not escalating.”² War in the end had not been the best option, and not exploring other possibilities had proved America’s undoing.

Decades after Vietnam, the George W. Bush administration repeated these mistakes in Iraq. There, too, a set of false assumptions, intelligence blunders, and overblown claims about Iraq’s nuclear and chemical-weapons capabilities led us into a futile and costly war. In Iraq, we discovered that we could create giants out of straw men and become prisoners of scary images we drew ourselves. This sort of bogeyman foreign policy has not served us well—we will still be counting the cost of the Iraq war long into the future.

McGeorge Bundy’s ruminations were popular reading at the White House in early 2009. Everyone, President Obama included, seemed to be studying this cautionary tale in order to avert a similar disaster in Afghanistan.³ But Bundy’s warning was just as relevant to the fog of another conflict, the one with the other American bugbear, Iran. That was apparently lost on the administration.

America’s approach to Iran’s nuclear challenge over the past decade has reprised too much of what led up to our two recent ill-fated wars. Exaggerated descriptions of the threat, false assumptions, and overly narrow reasoning have been resounding through the foreign policy punditry’s echo chamber.

It is taken for granted that Iran’s nuclear program is a national and global security concern—especially in light of that country’s fairly advanced missile-delivery system—and an existential threat to Israel, an unacceptable strategic game changer that will destabilize the Middle East by eventually placing nuclear material in the hands of terrorists or leading to a regional nuclear arms race and more broadly endangering world peace by fueling nuclear proliferation. In short, Iranian nukes are a red line that must not be crossed. America will “not countenance” Iran getting nuclear weapons, said President Obama as he insisted that an American policy of pressure and coercion would ensure that that would not be the case.⁴ Bending Iran’s will thus became a key test of U.S. power and effectiveness, in American minds as well as those of friends and foes alike. This approach came with a large downside risk, however, for it committed America to a path of increasing pressure, backed by military threats, to realize what was from the outset an improbable goal.

Those who thought that perhaps the Iranian nuclear threat was not all it was made out to be, or who assumed that Iran could be talked out of its nuclear program, were viewed as no different from the “doves” of 1965, those who “labored under the weakened argument predicated on the ‘fancifully hopeful’ expectation that there existed a negotiated diplomatic settlement that could end the war in Vietnam and achieve a grand compromise with communist power.”⁵ As one veteran diplomat told me, “all this chest-beating on Iran” feels like Vietnam. “There is only one line of argument; anyone suggesting something different is dismissed as a ‘wimp.’ ”

But unlike Johnson, Obama was not looking for war. In fact, he assumed that the Iran problem could be managed without resort to military action. When war talk rose in Washington in the spring of 2012, Obama pushed back, challenging his Republican critics and making the case to the American people that the nation did not need war at this time. That was a bold and deft maneuver.⁶

Yet Obama’s own assumptions about resolving the crisis, which favored all manner of pressure short of war, were flawed from the outset. His administration succumbed to exaggerated Israeli and Arab fears of Iran and exaggerated promises of Arab support for American action against Iran. He did not pursue rigorous diplomacy and chose to rely on pressure alone, and so inevitably led America back to where it had been in 1965—on the slippery slope to war. The only alternative left would be to accept a nuclear Iran and adopt a strategy of containment to deal with it—which Obama promised he would not do. Over the course of his presidency, Obama’s position on Iran steadily moved to the right, its assumptions and strategy hardly distinguishable from those of the Bush White House. By 2012, Obama was compelled to run from a huge boulder he himself had started rolling downhill—trying to rescue American foreign policy from the path to confrontation upon which he had set it.

The United States and Iran have been at loggerheads since an Islamic revolution toppled the pro-American Pahlavi monarchy in 1979. Many contentious issues and a plethora of clashes and recriminations have divided the onetime allies, but the plain truth is that anti-Americanism is embedded in the ideological fabric of the Islamic Republic. Iran is the last bastion of a sort of anti-imperialist Third Worldism that was once ubiquitous outside the West; its dictatorship sees power and glory in resistance, sheathing old-line anti-West nationalism in a thin veneer of Islamic extremism.

For much of the past three decades, America has largely ignored Iran. A hostile stalemate has reigned, with both sides happy to eschew formal ties and meaningful relations. Despite Iran’s truculent stance—menacing its neighbors and posturing against the international order—Washington has contemplated neither engagement nor military action. Washington has contained Iran when necessary, otherwise leaving it to stew in its own resentments as U.S. policy makers wait for the day when the rash Shia theocracy, burdened by a raft of internal inconsistencies, crumbles in the face of popular discontent.

But Iran has always been hard to ignore. Its geostrategic location, vast oil and gas reserves, and significant influence on public opinion in the Muslim world, and especially the Shia part of it, all conspire against America being able to act as though the Islamic Republic does not exist. And if that were not enough, Iran has been a menace to its neighbors and a disrupter (along with its Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian allies) of Middle Eastern stability. Iran has continuously dabbled in terrorism. Its elite military intelligence unit, the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Brigade, enjoys an almost mythic reputation as the dark force behind all manner of rebellions and extremist attacks across the region. In Iraq, it waged a brazen campaign of violence against American forces, a veritable war, in General Petraeus’s estimation.⁷ Tehran has also—much to Washington’s as well as its Arab neighbors’ quiet annoyance—encouraged Palestinians to continue pushing back against Israel and refusing to make peace. Beyond encouragement, Iran has given radical Palestinian factions substantial material support.

Iran’s rulers seem bent on maintaining their regime’s revolutionary vigor. To that end, they are wedded to anti-Americanism. In a region where angst about the long historical decline of the once-glorious Muslim civilization cuts deep, defiance of the West and vows to reverse the writ of history have a certain appeal. And herein lies the big difference between Iran and its economically successful and diplomatically astute Muslim neighbor, Turkey. Turkey looks to a robust GDP to satiate its longing for international influence, Iran to anti-Westernism backed by nuclear capability. The ruling Turkish party grew out of a similar yearning to make political Islam ascendant but now sees power and glory in joining, and doing well in, the world order and the global economy.

Iran has decided to make its mark in a region that sets great store by muscular shows of power through a strategy of defying America and challenging Israel. For generations now, toughness against Israel has been the mark of power in the Middle East. There is deep sympathy for Palestinians across the Muslim world, but its relative intensity from country to country tells of a different dynamic at play: The Palestinian drama has become something of a gladiator game for reigning and aspiring regional players, one in which Iran has done exceedingly well. But with Islamism (seasoned with anti-Americanism) washing over the Arab world, the returns on anti-Israeli posturing will likely diminish.

It seems as if Iran will not or cannot get past the 1979 revolution. It is determined to keep alive the reign of rigid ideology the world thought had died when jubilant Germans tore down the Berlin Wall. Iran basks in the image of the outsider challenging the status quo, the inconvenient spoiler that keeps the region on the edge. In the parlance of international relations “realism,” Iran is the epitome of an “insurgent” regional power arranged against the “status quo” forces in its vicinity.

In 2003, when America was getting ready to topple an Arab nationalist dictatorship in Iraq, there were those who thought that the battle for liberal values in the region would be won only when the theocracy in Iran was laid low as well. After all, it was in Iran that Islamic fundamentalism first rose to challenge the West; that challenge would end only when the Islamic Republic ended too. The disastrous Iraq war tempered enthusiasm for carrying the fight to Iran. But Iran’s leaders fully understand that their country is a trough in the otherwise ever-flattening world of growing democratic expectations, global trade, and liberal international institutions. Iran’s leaders know in their bones that their system of government and view of the world are anomalies in a global order that reflects the American imagination far more than it does their own. The world cannot, in the long run, tolerate troughs. A confrontation is inevitable. As Henry Kissinger put it, Iran will have to decide “whether it is a nation or a cause.”⁸

But Iran refuses to decide. One reason Iran covets nuclear capability is that it will allow it to retain this in-between position. A nuclear shield will mean neither war nor peace. America will never go to war with a nuclear Iran to remove this last remnant of yesteryear’s ideological defiance and disruptive revolutionary activism. In turn, Iran will not have to make peace with America, compromise on its ideology, and come in from the cold to avert war or isolation.

In the last decade U.S.-Iran relations have gone from a high point of cooperation on the war in Afghanistan to today’s low point of incessant talk of incipient war. In late 2001, Iranian diplomats and even some in the Revolutionary Guards made the case for cooperating with the United States in toppling the Taliban and bringing a new political order to Afghanistan. Supreme Leader Khamenei conceded, and Iran offered air bases, search-and-rescue missions for downed American pilots, help in tracking and killing al-Qaeda leaders, and assistance in building ties with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.⁹ As we have seen, Iran was also an important reason for the success of the Bonn Conference that was convened in 2001 to decide Afghanistan’s future. When the dickering over who would get what ministry in the new Afghan government hit a dead end, it was Iran’s ambassador to the UN, Javad Zarif, who saved the day, persuading Yunus Qanuni, the head of the Afghan delegation, to compromise.¹⁰

Still, even then Khamenei told his diplomats and military commanders that they should approach cooperation with the United States with eyes wide open. A stable Afghanistan no longer under Taliban rule would be good for Iran, but they should not see cooperation with the United States as a stepping-stone to better relations. “America will not embrace a cooperative Iran with open arms,” he warned them. “America is also not ready to talk to Iran about regional security issues because that would mean recognizing Iran’s role in the region. In short, America is not ready to accept and live with the Iranian revolution.”¹¹ Khamenei should have added that the Iranian revolution was not ready or willing to live with American influence in the Middle East either. Iran’s continued support for terrorism and constant challenging of U.S.-backed policies across the region could not be read any other way.

So the close cooperation in toppling the Taliban and putting Karzai in its place proved to be of no great consequence. Shortly thereafter, the Bush administration let it be known what it really thought of Iran by including it in its exclusive “Axis of Evil.” And just in case there was a misunderstanding and the Axis of Evil designation was not Washington’s final word, in 2003 Iran offered comprehensive negotiations on all outstanding issues between the two countries, only to be decisively rejected. Iran even put in writing that it was prepared to discuss an end to its support for radical Palestinian groups, having Hezbollah lay down its weapons, signing on to Saudi Arabia’s 2002 plan for a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab states, cooperating in fighting al-Qaeda and building a new state in Iraq, and finally, signing the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Iran may have hoped that the momentum Bonn had created for improved relations would continue, or perhaps Iran was frightened by America’s determination to bring about regime change through force of arms in neighboring Iraq. Either way, Tehran seemed to be doing something that it had never done before—reach out to America with the offer of a breakthrough in relations.

The Supreme Leader gave his blessing to this ambitious offer, but with a caveat. Khamenei told Iran’s reformist president Mohammad Khatami, “I am not going to object to your plan, but mark my words: America will not agree to this offer. They will see it as a sign of our weakness.”¹² He was right. The Bush administration saw no value in the offer, never replied to it, and admonished the Swiss government for even bringing it to Washington.

Administration hawks calculated that Iran was weak and vulnerable. Why throw it a lifeline by talking to it? But they misjudged the situation. As Iraq turned into a quagmire, the balance of power shifted; Iran grew stronger and, rebuffed by America, took its offer off the table.

Iraq did not turn out as America had expected. Quick victory proved to be a mirage, and America found itself facing an insurgency and escalating violence bordering on full-fledged civil war. And Iran had a hand in that, supporting radical Shia factions who resorted to violence to end the American presence in Iraq. Meanwhile, Washington’s expectation that regime change in Iraq would undo clerical rule in Iran proved untrue. With its economic and political influence spreading in Baghdad and across the Iraqi south, Iran actually looked to be the winner in the Iraq war.¹³ That provided another opening for talks.

Senior Iraqi Shia leader Abdul Aziz Hakim, who had close ties with Khamenei, made common cause with influential Iranian conservative leader Ali Larijani for the purpose of getting Tehran to talk to the United States about Iraq. Khamenei agreed, and the Iranians approached Iraq’s president Jalal Talabani to carry a message to the Americans in Baghdad. He came back from a trip to Iran with the news that Tehran “was ready for an understanding with America from Afghanistan to Lebanon. They are ready for discussions in order to reach results that please both sides.”¹⁴ But the talks never happened. By one account, the United States scuttled the meeting shortly before it was supposed to take place because Iran was sending Larijani and Revolutionary Guard commander Yahya Rahim-Safavi—the United States was then angry over Iran’s deadly support for Shia militias, but also Washington did not want to deal with Iran seriously and at the highest level. In the end, American and Iranian ambassadors met in Baghdad but never got beyond reading aloud charge sheets in which each side lamented the other’s bad behavior.

Iran has since become a growing headache for American policy makers. At issue is Iran’s ever-expanding nuclear program, which first came into public view in 2003. Washington might have turned down two offers to negotiate a grand bargain, but it would certainly like to see an end to the nuclear program. Iran, however, sees no value in giving up the program without resolving all outstanding issues between the two countries. As former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaie has put it, “Either talks resolve all outstanding issues between the U.S. and Iran or there is no point in talking at all.” Iranian leaders have come to believe that what the United States wants is not just an end to their nuclear program, but an end to their regime. There is plenty of truth in that.

With mutual suspicion so high, it should not be surprising that Iran’s nuclear program has unfolded like a game of cat and mouse. As Muhammad Javad Larijani, a senior adviser to Khamenei, put it, “America will never let Iran into the nuclear club through the front door, so we will have to jump over the wall.”¹⁵ And that is pretty much what Iran has been doing: confounding diplomats and inspectors while building its program inside hidden sites, spread around the country and fortified to withstand military strikes.

Iran has all along claimed that it does not want nuclear weapons. Khamenei is on record saying in 1995 that “from an intellectual, ideological and fiqhi (religious law) perspective, the Islamic Republic of Iran considers the possession of nuclear weapons as a big sin and it believes that stockpiling such weapons is futile, harmful and dangerous.”¹⁶

Iran says that its nuclear program is intended for peaceful purposes. It wants nuclear power, the regime insists, in order to address its growing electricity needs. That is why the Shah first invested in a civilian Iranian nuclear program in the 1970s—he wanted Iran to be the world’s fifth-largest economy by the turn of the millennium. It was he who created nuclear research facilities in Iran’s universities, built the Tehran Research Reactor, and started the construction of Iran’s only nuclear power plant in the southern city of Bushehr on the Persian Gulf. He also ordered another two dozen reactors from Canada and France and sent dozens of students to study nuclear physics at places like MIT in the United States or Imperial College in England. Many of these foreign-trained students now run Iran’s nuclear program.

Iran’s rulers have similarly told their populace that by mastering nuclear technology, Iran can leap to the head of the development pack. The atom, they claim, can do for Iran what software has done for India. Ali Larijani told a 2007 gathering I attended in Dubai that the key technologies for emerging economies are 1) nanotechnology, 2) biotechnology, and 3) nuclear technology. Iran, he went on, has settled on number three to win its future. By denying Iran nuclear technology, argue the country’s leaders, the West wants to keep Iran backward and subservient.¹⁷ Going nuclear is a matter of claiming equal rights to progress—an issue of what Iranians routinely call “international technology democracy.”

There is an overlay of Third Worldist rhetoric in the way Iranian leaders talk about their nuclear program and the U.S. opposition to it. An Indian diplomat told me, “there is a spirit of Bandung [the Indonesian city where the non-aligned movement of Third World countries was born in 1955] at play in Iran’s conversation … they tell us ‘today it is us, tomorrow it will be you.’ ”

This line of argument plays well on the street in Iran, but there are also clear strategic reasons why Iran wants nuclear technology and perhaps the potential to build a nuclear arsenal. The Shah thought Iran would need nuclear know-how—just short of an arsenal—in order to emerge as a great power and assert hegemony over its neighborhood. Iran’s rulers today may rail against the Shah, but they have bought into his ambitions lock, stock, and barrel. The theocracy’s current vision of grandeur, of a nuclear Persia reigning unimpeded from the Volga to the Tigris, with the Persian Gulf as an Iranian lake, is, ironically, the Shah’s vision.¹⁸ Nuclear capability then, as now, was a passport into the global elite. The main difference between the Shah and the ayatollahs who toppled him is that the Shah was a lot better at the game of pushing toward this ambition. He skillfully used the Cold War to persuade the West to recognize Iran’s strategically supreme position in the Persian Gulf, and to give him all the nuclear technology and expertise he could buy with Iran’s considerable oil wealth.

Iran’s desire for a nuclear deterrent today has much to do with how it sees its security needs in the region. In Iran’s immediate neighborhood the main strategic threat comes from the U.S. military presence, which is far stronger than Iran’s and prevents it from asserting its hegemonic ambitions. Tehran wants the United States out of the Persian Gulf so that Iranian power can run unimpeded and make the Persian Gulf states (which currently rely on American military power) fall into line.

A senior German journalist told me that at the end of a 1974 interview with the Shah, he mentioned to the monarch that he was headed for Abu Dhabi. “When the plane gets to the other side of the Persian Gulf,” the Shah told him, “I want you to look out the window. You will see clear black circles visible in the golden desert sand. A thin black line juts out of each circle, connecting it to the next circle further inland. The chain stretches for miles. These are the remnants of the ancient Iranian irrigation system [qanat]. For as far as those circles and lines go is Iranian territory.”

The Shah did not intend to literally invade Abu Dhabi the way Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 (although Iran did take over three strategic islands in the Persian Gulf from the UAE in 1974). But he did mean that Iran sees the Persian Gulf as its natural zone of influence stretching back millennia. That fundamental nationalist attitude is embedded in the Islamic Republic’s view of the region. The clerical regime does not speak the language of imperial Persian glories, but it believes in them nevertheless. Iran thinks of the Persian Gulf as its “near abroad,” and in the same way that Russia, China, and India (which for decades blamed America for enabling Pakistan to resist Indian hegemony) resent America’s shielding of their smaller neighbors, Iran sees the U.S. presence in the Persian Gulf as hindering its great-power ambitions. It is for this reason that Iran peppers its statements on resolving the nuclear crisis with demands for talks about “regional security”; it is code for Iran’s role in the Persian Gulf.

Nuclear capability combined with the U.S. departure from the Persian Gulf will enable Iran to realize foreign policy ambitions going back at least to 1971, when Britain’s departure from the Gulf first allowed Iran to imagine the area as its zone of influence.

Iran also has broader ambitions to spread its influence over the whole Middle East. Before the Islamic revolution, Iran saw the Arab world as hostile territory. There may have been alliances of convenience with Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia, but Iranians were outsiders to a fiercely nationalist Arab world. The Shah saw no point in trying to gain regional leadership.

But Khomeini thought Iranians could lead Arabs if it was in the name of Islam. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has spent blood and ample treasure to make its influence felt all the way to the shores of the Mediterranean. Yet Iran’s Shia faith separates it from the dominant Sunni creed that reigns supreme in the Arab world, where Shias are an often despised and even hated minority. The more Iran pushed for Islamic unity, the more the Arabs resisted by mobilizing Sunni sectarianism.¹⁹

Iran had to settle for influence over pockets of Shiism in the Arab world, in Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Where the Shias could wield power—via Hezbollah in Lebanon, in conjunction with the Alawites (who stand close to Shiism and Iran) in Syria, and within the government of post-Saddam Iraq—Iran could realize its goal.

Iran achieved its greatest success with Sunnis by harping on the “secular” Islamic cause: Israel and the Palestinians. Khomeini’s strategy had always been that Iran had to be more Arab than the Arabs, and that meant straining every nerve to stand tall against Israel. Iran could and should lead the Arabs against Israel, thought Khomeini and his successors, for success there would win Arab hearts and minds and convince Arabs of the value of Iranian leadership. The strategy was at its most successful when Iran’s Holocaust-denying President Ahmadinejad attained rock-star status on the Arab street with his rhetorical attacks on Israel. He lost no opportunity to call for the Jewish state’s demise and back the forces of Arab rejectionism.

But Arab favor proved fickle. When a rebellion against Syria’s Assad regime erupted into a thinly disguised sectarian knife fight in 2011, the Arab world stopped lauding Iran for opposing Israel and took up denouncing the Persian Shia outsiders for foisting a minority Alawite regime on Syria’s mostly Sunni populace.

Part of the problem feeding this regional wavering toward Iran is that its political ambitions lack economic legs. Iran does not have the checkbook power of Qatar or Saudi Arabia, or the commercial muscle of Turkey. Islamic unity and anti-Israeli posturing go only so far. They cannot build the kind of interdependencies that bind countries and amount to real and long-running influence. The catch is that the more Iran tries to win influence in the Arab world, especially by baiting Israel, the more it invites international isolation and thereby undermines its economy.

Nuclear capability is in many ways a solution to these problems. It pushes back against American intervention and reinforces Iranian claims to be fighting the real battle against Israel. Nuclear capability, Tehran calculates, will cow the Arabs and compensate for Iran’s economic weakness.

The Islamic Republic first dusted off the Shah’s nuclear program when it was worried that Saddam Hussein was going to resume his war against Iran, possibly with chemical weapons. The West would not stand in his way; only a credible deterrence could dissuade Saddam from carrying out such savagery.²⁰ Saddam is gone, but the strategic threat facing Iran remains. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2011 Iran spent $8 billion (2 percent of GDP) on military purchases. In the same year, Saudi Arabia spent more than six times that sum ($43 billion, or 11.2 percent of GDP); the United Arab Emirates spent almost twice as much ($15.7 billion, or 7.3 percent of GDP), and Israel spent 1.5 times as much ($13 billion, or 6.3 percent of GDP). Nor is the disparity merely one of dollar amounts; Iran’s regional rivals have weaponry that is technically superior and more advanced.

International sanctions—which began right after the 1979 revolution—have cost the Iranian military access to the latest technology. Iran’s air force, for instance, is hopelessly outdated. It relies heavily on old F-14 Tomcats (the plane made famous by the 1986 Tom Cruise movie Top Gun) and F-4 Phantoms that the Shah bought from the United States decades ago. Iran will not be able to close the yawning technology gap anytime soon. And the lesson of the two Gulf wars is clear: Middle Eastern militaries are no match for what the United States and other Western militaries can bring to a fight.

Nuclear capability is a convenient shortcut—the poor man’s path to strategic parity. Iran has learned the lesson of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had many more tanks and soldiers on its side of Europe, but that mattered little. America’s nuclear arsenal created a balance of power that kept the Red Army out of Western Europe.

The nuclear program is also at the heart of the Iranian regime’s survival strategy. The atom seems as if it can make any dictatorship untouchable (though it did not save the Soviet Union), and that notion has clearly been swirling around in the minds of Iran’s rulers as they have pressed ahead with the nuclear program despite international objections over the past decade.²¹ It was common wisdom in Iran in 2003 that the big difference between North Korea and Iraq was that Kim Jong-il had nuclear arms and Saddam did not. And let us not forget that it was after the failed Bay of Pigs attempt at regime change that Fidel Castro invited the Soviet Union to station nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. Nor was American handling of India and Pakistan when those two countries went nuclear much of a discouragement. After decades of objecting to Indian nuclear weapons, the Bush administration reversed course and signed a civilian nuclear deal with India, proving that with time all will be forgotten and that once-illicit nuclear programs could become accepted and legitimate. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons have given the West an enormous stake in that troubled country’s stability. Western governments may lament Pakistan’s bad behavior, but they keep pouring billions into the bottomless pit of its economy as insurance against a collapse into mayhem and extremism. Iran draws from these cases the lesson that “forgiveness is much easier to obtain than permission.” Make nuclear Persia a fait accompli, and the world will accommodate the new reality.

Iranians have always been ambiguous about precisely what “going nuclear” will mean. The official line is that Iran wants only the nuclear know-how needed to satisfy domestic energy needs—a curious claim from a country sitting atop such a large chunk of the world’s oil and natural gas reserves. Many among the country’s leaders, however, want the Japan option—which was also what the Shah was after. This means developing the knowledge and infrastructure needed to make nuclear weapons, but stopping “one turn of the screw short.” A smaller but growing segment of the ruling elite wants an actual nuclear arsenal. The harsher Western sanctions become, the more compelling becomes this last group’s argument. The seventy-three-year-old Khamenei, however, has not been willing to go along with it. In 2012, as domestic pressure to build the bomb continued to intensify, he repeated his 1995 fatwa declaring nuclear weapons a “great sin.”²²

Efforts to put a stop to Iran’s nuclear program began shortly after it first caught the attention of the West in 2003 with the discovery of a uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz in central Iran. The United States, France, Germany, and Britain joined forces to demand that Iran abandon enrichment altogether and sign the Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which gives the nuclear watchdog agency, the IAEA, considerably greater ability to monitor a nuclear program.

The hardest and most exacting part of a nuclear program to master is uranium enrichment. Low enrichment levels will suffice to fuel nuclear power plants, but a bomb needs highly enriched uranium. Very little time and knowledge separate mastering enrichment from building a bomb. Iran claimed that its right to enrichment is protected under the NPT, and that it was merely trying to produce fuel for medical centers and experimental reactors. Those outdated reactors need 20 percent enriched fuel (more modern reactors can make do with lower enrichment levels), and once you get to the 20 percent threshold (the real hurdle in mastering enrichment) it’s a breezy dash to 90 percent or more (bomb-grade enrichment). One idea was that the United States should sell Iran newer research reactors that would take away Iran’s argument for 20 percent enrichment.²³ Before that could be agreed, however, Iran decided it wanted to produce fuel for nuclear power plants too. The United States and its European allies bristled at the idea, and tensions grew as Iran expanded its enrichment capacity.

From the outset, Washington declared a nuclear Iran to be unacceptable. Iran would use its nuclear capability to annihilate Israel, and short of that could provide a nuclear shield from behind which Hezbollah and Hamas could escalate their attacks on Israel. Similarly, a nuclear Iran would pose a newly alarming threat to its Arab neighbors, bullying them on regional issues or oil prices. Iran’s nuclear capability could also breathe new life into Islamic fundamentalism, energizing an ideology that Washington hopes will end up in the trash bin of history. Finally, Iran’s nuclear arsenal could spark proliferation throughout one of the world’s most volatile regions—not a comforting prospect for the West or Israel, which would surely find itself the target at which many of the weapons would be pointed.

The immediate strategic threat to Israel would be less Iranian nuclear missiles than the boost that Hezbollah, Hamas, and other “asymmetric” foes of Israel would gain from being able to hide behind Iran’s nuclear skirts. The record of Hezbollah’s actions in Lebanon or Hamas’s in Israel (not to mention Iraqi Shia so-called special groups responsible for violence in Iraq and radical Shia outfits in Pakistan or the Persian Gulf) makes this a serious threat. Some have even argued that instead of threatening war with Iran, America should have focused on knocking out the Assad regime in Syria. Without its Syrian outpost, Iran’s asymmetric capabilities would collapse (because Iran would not be able to support Hezbollah as effectively without using Syrian territory) and leave any possible Persian nukes with nothing to shield.²⁴

With so many arguments arrayed against Iran going nuclear, Washington made preventing Iran from doing so a top foreign policy objective. And to underscore its determination, it threatened Iran with military action. “All options are on the table” became the phrase meant to signal that America was ready to use air strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites.²⁵

But first America looked to the Europeans to negotiate an end to Iran’s nuclear program. And to make Iran go along, economic sanctions would be key. This policy of imposing sanctions while keeping open the prospect of talks (dubbed the “dual-track” policy) was the brainchild of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Undersecretary Nicholas Burns. It had its origins in Washington’s desire to patch things up with European governments still stewing over the Iraq war. Washington knew that the Europeans would ignore or even oppose its efforts on Iran unless they were kept on board and, indeed, in the forefront.

Yet Washington remained wary of talks and worried that without some form of pressure on Tehran they would go nowhere. In practice, Washington embraced European-led talks, but it remained focused on coercion, lobbying to include Russia and China, whose support at the UN would be critical if serious sanctions were ever to become a reality.

The dual-track approach gave Bush a punitive course of action short of war that could also placate other stakeholders in the dispute, such as Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Israel. They all wanted reassurance that the United States would not accept Iran going nuclear and would take tough action to stop that outcome. Sanctions were also conveniently both low-risk and low-cost. They could bite hard without sparking a shooting war. And Iran would bear all the pain, with America not needing to spend money or risk a single soldier’s life.

The problem with sanctions is that they are just too convenient. They are what you do when you cannot or will not do anything else. They offer a good feeling that a crisis is being handled, but in reality they are blunt instruments with a questionable track record.²⁶ When they work, they hurt the economy and state institutions of the country they target—along with its civilian populace—but do they reshape the bad policy behaviors that cause them to be applied in the first place? Sanctions impoverished Iraq and cost the lives of vulnerable Iraqis (including tens of thousands of children), but Saddam Hussein stayed in power and remained a hazard. Indeed, it could be argued that sanctions boomeranged on the United States because the Iraq that U.S. forces conquered and were then responsible for putting back on its feet had been left such a basket case.

Sanctions are not likely to work in the case of Iran either. The reasons Iran craves nuclear status run too deep for it to be swayed by economic pressure. And indeed, there is reason to worry that U.S. pressure is only convincing Iran it needs nuclear deterrence in order to protect itself from that very pressure. When Bush was president, Iran’s rulers were certain that regime change was the U.S. goal and reasoned that an Islamic Republic shorn of its nuclear program would be that much more vulnerable.

Iranians are not easy to negotiate with. This is a nation whose complex psyche is reflected in its art. Think of the dazzlingly detailed miniature paintings or the spectacularly ornate Persian carpets they have produced for centuries, and you can grasp that Iranians are patient and fantastically complicated. The Western expectation of quick, straightforward deal making has met with frustration when it comes to Iran. I remember a conversation in 2006 with Jack Straw, who was then Britain’s foreign secretary, about his time talking to Iran. He said,

People think North Koreans are difficult to negotiate with. Let me tell you, your countrymen [Iranians] are the most difficult people to negotiate with. Imagine buying a car. You negotiate for a whole month over the price and terms of the deal. You reach an agreement and go to pick up the car. You see it has no tires. “But the tires were not part of the discussion,” the seller says. “We negotiated over the car.” You have to start all over again, now wondering whether you have to worry about the metal rim, screws, or any other unknown part of the car. That should give you a sense of what talking to Iran looks like.

Diplomacy with Iran was always going to be long and hard. Iranians are hard bargainers, tenacious and unlikely to budge unless they are under pressure. Diplomacy with Iran will be like doing business with the North Vietnamese at the end of the Vietnam War—they too were dogged, difficult, and appeared likely to bend only under pressure. And yet in the end there was a road to a deal with the North Vietnamese—it just needed American persistence and a clearheaded strategy for managing the process.

The problem with the dual-track policy with Iran was that in practice it relied on a single track: economic pressure.²⁷ It failed because it deviated from the goal of using coercion to bring Iran to the negotiating table. The United States started to look to pressure to do the job on its own.²⁸ The Bush administration was never interested in diplomacy. It left it to Germany, France, and Britain to sit down with Iran for talks—but Washington would hold a veto over the outcome. Nor was Washington interested in resolving all outstanding issues, improving relations, and resolving the nuclear problem in that context. The Bush administration wanted Iran to surrender. The United States said that it would talk to Iran only if Iran first gave up its nuclear program—we would accept Iran running a civilian nuclear program provided all enrichment activities took place outside Iran. In other words, diplomacy will follow only after its intended result has already been achieved.

Initially there was hope that Europe could persuade Iran to change course. A visit to Tehran by three European foreign ministers in 2004 led to a two-month suspension of nuclear enrichment, which President Chirac thought was “exemplary of how problems can be resolved by European diplomacy.”²⁹ But those early positive steps led nowhere.³⁰ Washington stuck to its position that Iran would have to abandon its nuclear program in its entirety—no enrichment activity whatsoever—before any further discussions could happen.

Inside Iran, hard-liners argued that the temporary suspension had been misconstrued as weakness and had only emboldened the United States to pressure Iran into total surrender. This view fit a prevalent narrative in Tehran that the West views any Iranian concession as weakness and therefore grows more aggressive.³¹ Iran’s rulers thought sanctions were intended to weaken Iran militarily and change the regime. The best response was to get tough and even belligerent—which escalated violence in Iraq. As Khamenei told his advisers, “The West is like a dog, if you back away it will lunge at you, but if you charge, then it will back away.”³² Little wonder, then, that more sanctions only made Iran more recalcitrant.

Iran’s rulers thought that hard-charging Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would make the West back off when he took over the presidency from the more pliable reformist Mohammad Khatami in 2005. But Ahmadinejad’s menacing rhetoric and shows of defiance only hardened U.S. attitudes in turn. What Khamenei did not know was that American policy makers also thought they would get a reaction from Tehran only if they were menacing to the point of threatening Khamenei’s grip on power. “He moves only if you hold a gun to his head,” a senior administration official told me.

Washington responded to Ahmadinejad’s defiance by tightening the economic noose. Iran and the United States found themselves in an uneasy standoff, with American pressure only inviting greater Iranian obduracy.

Ironically, no Iranian leader more badly wanted a deal with the United States than did Ahmadinejad, and yet none failed more miserably in wooing America to the table. Ahmadinejad was following his own dual-track policy. He hoped his vitriol, denying the Holocaust, taunting Israel, and rallying resistance to America would make him too important to ignore—the adversary that America had to talk to. But his plan backfired. He made himself a pariah, the leader whom everyone was determined to ignore. Ahmadinejad broke the taboo against communicating directly with an American president, writing first to Bush, then to Obama to congratulate him on winning the 2008 election. Neither one responded. Above all, Ahmadinejad supported deal making over the nuclear issue, first in Geneva with the United States and its European allies in 2009, and then with Brazil and Turkey in 2010. Those deals failed to take hold and he got no credit for trying to get them through.

The Bush administration blamed the failure of its dual-track approach on Russia and China, which stood in the way of UN sanctions against Iran. But in reality the problem was that pressure was not tied to real diplomacy. Pressure had become an end in itself.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama promised to break this logjam, to engage Iran in earnest—a new approach based on mutual respect that could produce a diplomatic breakthrough. Iran would be a symbolic corrective to Bush’s approach to addressing international crises, which was heavy on pressure and light on diplomacy. At first glance, it may look as if Obama did just that, or at least tried to. But look closer and it becomes hard to conclude that Obama’s approach was much of a departure from Bush’s. In fact, it was Bush’s policy in a “new and improved” version. Obama tweaked the dual-track approach. He tried his hand at diplomacy, but only to get to the sanctions track faster, and to make sanctions more effective. Engagement was a cover for a coercive campaign of sabotage, economic pressure, and cyberwarfare. It was Bush’s policy with more teeth.

The most obvious indicators of continuity were the people Obama chose to run his Iran policy. Dennis Ross, a veteran diplomat who had the final say at the White House on all things related to Iran until December 2011, was a firm advocate of the dual-track policy. Iran interpreted his appointment to that job as an ominous sign that Obama was not serious about diplomacy. And Iranians were not the only ones who took notice. A senior adviser to Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan asked me why Obama had chosen him. Before I could answer he said, “We are disappointed. You judge a man [Obama] by his advisers.”

Another clear signal was Obama’s decision to keep Stuart Levy, Bush’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, at the Treasury Department. Levy had led a highly effective campaign to rally financial institutions across the globe to stop doing business with Iran.³³ This additional layer of sanctions augmented economic pressure on Iran. Levy continued to tighten the noose even as Obama was getting ready to reach out to Iran. As my Turkish friend put it: same people, same policy.

Where Bush had failed—and where Obama succeeded—was in the task of securing international support for sanctions. To that end Obama said that the United States was ready to talk to Iran (Bush had sent the Europeans to do the talking and then report back), and he sweetened the pot by adding that suspension of enrichment was no longer a precondition, but instead a desired outcome. But in practice it was the same old policy of pressure, pressure, and more pressure.

Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf emirates were unhappy with Obama’s approach. They feared that Iran would use talks to weaken Western resolve while nuclear work went forward—“talk and enrich,” so to speak. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted Obama to stick to the zero-enrichment precondition, set a strict deadline allowing at most a few months for diplomacy to work, and adopt stiff sanctions (even before talks got under way).

Saudi Arabia and the UAE, meanwhile, leaned heavily on Obama. The first time Obama went to Saudi Arabia, in early June 2009, he expected to speak with King Abdullah about the Arab-Israeli issue, but instead had to listen to an hour-long monologue on Iran. The Saudi ruler famously advised America to “cut off the snake’s head” with military strikes. Top UAE officials, according to one surprised European foreign minister I spoke to, went even further by suggesting that tactical nuclear weapons might be used to penetrate the Fordo site hidden deep inside a mountain outside the city of Qom. “The region would be set back,” they reportedly said, “but in the long run it would be better for everybody.” They clearly did not want the United States to talk to Iran. That would run the risk of a breakthrough that would have shifted the strategic balance in the region decisively in Iran’s favor. That was why Arab leader after Arab leader warned Washington not to trust anything the Iranians might say. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak told former senator George Mitchell that he was not opposed to the United States talking to Iran so long as “you do not believe a word they say.”³⁴

America’s Arab allies would rather see a U.S.-Iran war than a U.S.-Iran rapprochement. The Persian Gulf states in particular are afraid of the latter. They also dislike the scenario of regime change in Tehran (too much uncertainty) and prefer a permanent U.S. commitment to defend them. As Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it after hearing another earful on Iran from King Abdullah, the Saudis were eager to “fight Iran to the last American.”³⁵ So they kept doing their best to nudge America toward war.

Whatever the Arabs’ discomfiture, however, Obama was determined to explore the possibility of an opening with Iran. Two months after his inauguration came the New Year, Nowrouz, a pre-Islamic Persian celebration that marks the start of spring and is considered an especially auspicious time for friendly visits, house cleaning, and new beginnings generally. Obama took to YouTube on March 20, 2009, with a prepared message in which he warmly and positively addressed himself directly to the Iranian people. More important still, he wrote two letters directly to Khamenei (while opting not to answer Ahmadinejad’s letter congratulating him on becoming president). Khamenei’s reply was hardly what Obama had hoped for; it listed Iranian grievances and lambasted American policies, not just toward Iran but toward the entire Muslim world. The significance, however, lay not in what Khamenei said but in his answering at all.

Whatever positive momentum might have come from this soon dissipated when Iranian politics took an unexpected turn later that same spring. Washington was hoping that the 2009 presidential race in Iran would produce a fresh face untainted by Holocaust denial or calls for Israel to be wiped off the map. This would be a figure whom an American president might engage without paying a huge cost at home (Obama’s fear of a domestic backlash had been a major reason why he ignored Ahmadinejad’s letter). But the elections produced a June surprise. When Ahmadinejad was announced as the landslide winner, millions of Iranians poured into the streets to protest, asking, “Where is my vote?” The regime was caught off guard. For a time, it looked as if the theocracy might actually fall.³⁶ But then, just as quickly, the tide turned. Sensing the immediacy of mortal danger, the regime lashed out at the protesters with massive brutality that checked their momentum and ensured its survival.

When the dust settled, everything had changed. Gone was any pretense that the ruling elite could claim popular support and legitimacy. Gone also was Ahmadinejad’s cocky attitude. The emperor had no clothes; Iran’s rulers were now every bit as vulnerable as any Third World dictator. In the rulers’ eyes, engagement with the United States now seemed even more suspect. Better not to engage at all than to risk having any more weakness revealed under the pressure of dealings with Washington.

Washington understood that the moment for diplomacy had gone up in smoke amid the tumult on the streets of Tehran. “They are now going to get themselves into a hard place,” remarked State’s man on Iran policy, Dennis Ross, as we watched the violent crackdown on television. “It will be very difficult dealing with them.”

It was also difficult for Obama to engage a government that was busy brutalizing its young people, whose brave and technologically savvy calls for freedom had captured hearts and minds around the world and shown that it was possible to imagine a better, post-Islamist future for the Middle East. Critics both right and left goaded the administration to help the Green Movement topple the Iranian theocracy. But Obama, in what would become his signature reaction to the Arab Spring, was cautious. Moreover, the U.S. government had been surprised by events. By the time Washington got its head around what was going on, the Islamic Republic had weathered the worst of the protests. Getting into a tussle with Iran’s rulers over a protest movement that was losing steam would be pointless. Nuclear talks remained the main thing, and the Islamic Republic, like it or not, remained the interlocutor. Any additional sanctions that might be applied, moreover, should be held as cards for use in nuclear talks. America’s priority was Iran’s nuclear program, not democracy.

In October 2009, officials of the shaken but still-standing Islamic Republic finally sat down with American and European diplomats in Geneva to discuss the nuclear issue. There was hope that the much-anticipated meeting would produce a breakthrough around a new concept: “the swap.” The idea had first been floated as a confidence-building measure. Iran was in need of nuclear fuel pads (built with uranium enriched to 20 percent) that the Tehran Research Reactor could use to produce medical isotopes.³⁷ Would Iran be willing not to further enrich its low-enriched uranium (enriched to no more than 3 to 5 percent) and instead send its stockpile to some third country in exchange for readymade fuel pads?

The White House saw the swap as a clever way of “resetting” Iran’s nuclear program while talks went on (Iran would give up its enriched uranium and would have to start over to get back to the same stockpile).³⁸ But the swap would mean that the international community would be accepting Iran’s right to enrich uranium to 3 to 5 percent, a concession to Iran.

In Geneva, the United States proposed a trade. The Iranians would ship 1.2 tons of low-enriched uranium (about 80 percent of their stockpile) to Russia for further enrichment and then to a third country (France was the likely candidate) for further processing into fuel pads. There were details to work out: Would Iran send all low-enriched uranium at once? And how long would it take to get it back as fuel pads?

But a deal would be a win-win. Iran’s ability to build a bomb would ship out along with its low-enriched uranium stockpile—thereby creating more time for negotiations over intrusive inspections and the signing of the IAEA’s Additional Protocol—yet Iran would get acknowledgment of its right to enrich as well as a nice stack of handy fuel pads. Trust would mount, and diplomacy would gain momentum.

Iranians were suspicious. They did not want France involved. French president Nicolas Sarkozy was advocating zero enrichment and was to the right of Obama on Iran. But in the end they decided to go with the deal—at least in Geneva; details to be settled later.³⁹ At one point, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, said that he had to make a call. He left the room, then came back and gave a tentative thumbs-up.⁴⁰ It is not clear if Khamenei was on board, but Ahmadinejad was clearly supportive. He wanted to be the one to open up to the United States—that would have helped his political position after the reelection debacle.

Back in Tehran, worry set in immediately that this could be a ruse to get Iran to give up its low-enriched uranium, after which the United States and Europe would renege on their part of the bargain and cost Iran a lot of uranium and enrichment time. Were they missing something? Did the United States have something up its sleeve? What if they signed on to this deal and that became the legal basis to constrain their nuclear activities beyond current NPT and IAEA mandates? And even if this was a good deal, Ahmadinejad’s rivals hardly wanted him to get credit for the breakthrough. An unholy alliance of hard-liners and reformists came out against the swap idea. They said Iran could not trust America and its European allies and should not become dependent on Russia for its enrichment needs. Iran had spent billions mastering enrichment and should not give that up. Iran said that it would agree to the deal only if the swap happened simultaneously—the offer in Geneva was that Iran would receive fuel pads two years after it handed over its stockpile.

In other words, the Iranians were too suspicious to countenance a deal and too divided to make any decisions.⁴¹ The naysayers claimed that they were defending Iran’s sovereignty, keeping its options open, and preserving its leverage. Khamenei took their side, and killed the deal by saying publicly that its backers (Ahmadinejad and Jalili) were naive and misguided.

With the collapse of the Geneva swap deal, Obama reacted to criticism from allies and Congress by shifting back to sanctions. Iran tried to revive the swap deal not long after, but Washington no longer seemed interested. It was happy to use the narrative of failed talks in Geneva to get to sanctions faster.

The Treasury Department redoubled its efforts to sanction Iran’s financial institutions as U.S. diplomacy focused further on getting the UN Security Council to pass sanctions against Iran. The White House wanted to show Iran that there was a cost to walking away from the table. Obama also wanted to stay ahead of Congress, which was preparing its own, stiffer sanctions bill, one sure to affect global trade and raise the ire of important allies.

Getting China and Russia to agree to UN sanctions was the main challenge.⁴² During the Bush years, Beijing and Moscow had always fought sanctions. One Asian foreign minister told me, “Moscow and Beijing have an understanding: on North Korea, Russia hides behind China, and on Iran, China hides behind Russia.” Both Russia and China value stability and will cooperate with the United States and push Iran to do enough to achieve that. But that should not be confused with agreement with U.S. policy or leadership. America has had to resort to threatening war and instability combined with generous payoffs in order to get Russia and China on its side.

When America talks to Russia about Iran, it is all about nuclear Iran’s threat to peace. Russia does not appear to imagine that it may itself one day be a target of Iranian nuclear weapons. In fact, Russia seems less worried about Iran than about America. Russia and Iran have some common strategic interests, foremost among them keeping America out of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Iran is Russia’s bridge into the Middle East—Moscow has far more strategic common ground with Iran than with Turkey, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia. This became clear when Russia found itself on Iran’s side during the Syrian crisis, and King Abdullah hung up the telephone in anger on Russian president Dmitri Medvedev over Moscow’s unflinching support for the Assad regime.

In the 1990s, Iran had provided Russia with badly needed foreign currency in exchange for its work on the Bushehr reactor. During the Bush years, Russia had supplied Iran with weapons and sophisticated military systems, and some in Iran even contemplated allowing Russian bases on Iranian soil as part of a strategic alliance against the West.

The Russia-Iran partnership predates the final collapse of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev was still holding on to the idea of the communist union when Moscow and Tehran agreed that they should jointly manage the vast region that lies between them from the Black Sea to the Ural Mountains. Back in the nineteenth century, Russia had taken most of this region from Iran, and for most of the next century Iran worried that the USSR would take the rest of Iran as well. But with the Soviet Union faltering and revolutionary Iran obsessed with America, Tehran saw less reason to worry about Russia and so cooperated with Moscow in steering the Caucasus and Central Asia toward independence and away from American influence.⁴³

None of this is to say that Iran and Russia lack disagreements, or that Iran has forgotten the abuse that it suffered at Russian hands.⁴⁴ Russians still challenge Iran over control of the Caspian Sea. And Russia views Iran as a rival seller in the natural gas market. In particular, Russia would like to keep Iranian gas out of Europe, which depends heavily on Russia for energy. When Russian strongman Vladimir Putin went to Tehran in 2011, he offered support against American pressure in exchange for Iran staying away from the proposed Western-backed pipelines to carry gas from east to west. Russia has encouraged Iran to sell its gas eastward, to the vast populations of a rapidly developing Asia, offering to finance a gas pipeline that would run from Iran to Pakistan for starters, but which could readily be extended to India and China.

But the most important fact for Moscow when it comes to Iran is that it is the goose that lays the golden egg. Washington is so obsessed with the Iranian threat that it forgets about Russia’s own threat to the West, and so is ready to pay almost any price to secure Russian help. Russia sees its Iran posture as a valuable commodity that it can make America pay for dearly.

When Russia got on board with UN sanctions after the Geneva talks failed, Obama was elated. His administration portrayed Russian support as a singular victory, a proof that Obama’s Iran policy was working, and a sign that Obama was better than George W. Bush at foreign policy. But in reality, this was less a victory for diplomacy than the result of a straight-up business deal—one in which the Russians took us to the cleaners. To get Russia to say yes to sanctions, Obama stopped talking about democracy and human rights in Russia (until 2012, when Russians took to the streets to protest Putin’s ham-fisted victory at the polls), abandoned any thought of expanding NATO farther eastward, washed his hands of the missile-defense shield that had been planned for Europe (Moscow hated the shield), and betrayed tiny Georgia (which Russia had attacked in the lopsided war of 2008). While Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, was telling Holbrooke, “You sold us to the Russians,” Obama was lifting sanctions against weapons sales by arms makers associated with the Russian military.⁴⁵ Even after all this, it took additional “concessions” (bribes would be a better word) from Germany, Israel, and Saudi Arabia to turn the Russians.

China was not happy with Iranian obduracy, fearing that it made war more likely.⁴⁶ Washington told Beijing that if it wanted to avoid instability it had better support economic pressure. But the real lever was Saudi oil, on which the Chinese depend more than they depend on Iranian oil. A combination of enticements in the form of long-term contracts at concessionary prices and threats of reductions in Saudi oil shipments got China to “yes” on sanctions as well.⁴⁷

The Chinese have an enormous and vastly growing thirst for oil—8 million barrels per day currently, and expected to rise to 15 million barrels by 2015. Of course China would say yes to lucrative Saudi oil contracts. But it is unlikely that it will give up on its option on Iranian oil. Iran has vast proven oil reserves and, more important, none of them are controlled by American oil companies. China could build a global company on the back of Iranian oil. Since 2009, while supporting sanctions, publicly calling on Iran to cooperate on the nuclear issue, and warming up to Saudi Arabia, China has expanded its trade with Iran and welcomed Iranian manufacturers who wish to escape the effects of sanctions by moving production to China and shipping their finished goods back to Iran. Western sanctions led by the United States have pushed Iran further into China’s bosom, and China is far from unhappy about that.

Here is the heart of the problem with our Iran policy: America got Russia and China on the hook for Iran, but at what cost? Is Iran, a country whose economy is not all that much bigger than that of Massachusetts, a larger threat to U.S. interests than China or Russia? Is Iran so severe a danger that America should subsidize China’s economic rise by pushing the Saudis with all their oil right into China’s lap (where Iran is already sitting)? Does it make sense that America spends blood and treasure to keep the Persian Gulf secure while China gets cheap oil—at our behest? Should we be worried more about Iran or a Russia armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, beating its chest with nationalist bravado, and invading small neighbors? The price for Russian cooperation from here on will likely be facilitating Russian domination over energy supplies to Europe—abandoning support for pipelines taking Azerbaijani or Turkmen gas to Europe. For much of the Cold War we worked hard to keep Western Europe from becoming dependent on Russian energy; now we seem to be encouraging it, all to pressure Iran into submission.

When the dust settles, this is what we will have accomplished: Iran will be weaker than it is now—maybe its economy will shrink to the size of Cape Cod’s—and instead of getting a single bomb in five years and a credible arsenal in perhaps twenty, they will get a bomb in ten and an arsenal in forty. But by then China and Russia will have gobbled up Central Asia, cornered Europe’s energy markets, and planted themselves smack in the middle of the Middle East. They will have emerged as global giants challenging America’s place in the world and perhaps the primacy of the U.S. dollar as the currency of international exchange. And once that happens, it will be all but impossible to reverse. We would then face global threats, threats on a scale we encountered during the Cold War, threats that dwarf whatever danger Iran can ever pose. Is it really smart to contain Iran’s threat by subsidizing China’s and Russia’s rise to the top? Before we get things backward, perhaps we should ask if we should be thinking of Iran as a player that can help contain Russia and block China’s encroachments into the Middle East.

Just when Obama was claiming that talking had had its turn and it was time to toughen sanctions, diplomacy found a new lease on life in the form of an unexpected Brazilian-Turkish initiative. Admittedly, Brazil and Turkey seemed an unlikely duo to take charge of one of the most delicate matters on the world agenda. They were not part of the P5+1 group (the permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany) that sat across the table from Iran in Geneva. That the Turks and Brazilians tried their hand at fixing a crisis that the global bigwigs could not resolve was a testament to the “rise of the rest”: middle-ranking powers with fast-growing economies and a yearning to leave their mark on global politics.⁴⁸

Turkey in particular was keen to step up as a regional problem solver and bolster its “street cred” as a local power and a bridge between east and west. Brazil had no clear stake in the Middle East, but it too thought a great power ought to be able to solve great problems, and not just in its own neighborhood. Also, Brazil once had a robust nuclear program and, thinking that it one day might want to go back to it, was not quite comfortable with the precedent the Iran crisis could set for handling future aspirants to nuclear status.⁴⁹

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, had hosted Ahmadinejad and Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gül, and premier, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu had visited Tehran on a number of occasions. Lula and Ahmadinejad were both populists, while Turkey wanted to sell Iran on a different view of Islam in the modern world—democratic, economically open, and engaged in globalization. Davutoglu told me that he spoke to Khamenei about this vision and explained how Turkey and Iran could create an arc of Muslim power and prosperity stretching from the southeastern corner of Europe to the northwestern corner of South Asia. For Turkey, this could be a new EU. Khamenei listened but did not react. A diplomatic success on the nuclear issue would give Turkey credibility and remove obstacles to Iran’s involvement in the global economy.

Both Turkey and Brazil had a vested interest in keeping UN and congressional sanctions at bay. In 2009, Brazil did $2 billion in trade with Iran, and it was hoping to increase that number significantly. Turkish companies, too, were doing brisk business in construction, food, consumer goods, tourism, telecommunications, and energy in Iran. Neither Brazil nor Turkey wanted these ties cut. A deal could make sanctions unnecessary.

Davutoglu joined forces with Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorim to revisit the swap deal with Iran. At first Washington was not happy with this meddling and tried to persuade Erdogan and Lula to drop the idea. But later Obama wrote to Erdogan supporting the Turkish and Brazilian effort as a worthy undertaking that might address the international community’s concerns. He even suggested that Iranian low-enriched uranium might stay in “escrow” in Turkey until the higher-enriched fuel pads were in Iran’s hands.⁵⁰ That showed a high degree of engagement with the Turkish-Brazilian effort and a willingness to compromise to help it succeed. This was an early example of “lead from behind” strategy, which would eventually become the hallmark of Obama foreign policy. Turkey took the letter as a green light to go full speed ahead on negotiations.

Within Iran, meanwhile, thinking about the swap idea had started to change. The reason was Ahmadinejad. From November 2009 to May 2010, he crisscrossed the country explaining the swap and why it would be good for Iran. As more Iranians heard his arguments, the high-level resistance that had killed the deal began to soften. That Iran ultimately signed a swap deal, with public support from parliament, was a victory at home for Ahmadinejad.⁵¹

Erdogan and Lula went to Tehran in May 2010 and after two days of intense negotiations got a deal. The Tehran Declaration was the first time Iran actually signed something regarding the nuclear issue.⁵² At the heart of the deal was a swap of 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium for 120 kilograms of nuclear fuel enriched to about 20 percent.

Erdogan and Lula thought they had pulled a rabbit out of a hat, but Washington dismissed the deal for handing Iran too much and getting too little in return. Although the goal of swapping 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium was in Obama’s letter, Washington now claimed that Iran had much more than that, and the swap of 1,200 kilograms would not be as effective in checking Iran’s progress toward a bomb as the sanctions then being pressed in Geneva.

The reality was that Washington never expected Brazil and Turkey to get a deal in Tehran—Obama endorsed their effort expecting that they would fail and in doing so make the case for sanctions even stronger. Now the two upstart nations were undermining the case for sanctions. Washington had invested too much in corralling international support for sanctions—especially getting Russia and China on board—to change course now. Sanctions had become the goal, not the means to getting to a diplomatic resolution. Ironically, the Tehran Declaration had happened because the sanctions threat was so serious—Turkey and Brazil feared them as bad for business. This could have been touted as a kind of bankshot win for the dual-track policy: even the threat of sanctions could have a positive real-world effect! Washington could have gone back to the negotiation table and used the threat of further sanctions to build on the Tehran Declaration and get the diplomatic track going for good.

Instead, Obama’s administration signaled that it was not really interested in a diplomatic solution; it had wanted sanctions all along. It wanted diplomacy to be tried but then fail; it was not ready or willing to deal with success. The White House thought that sanctions were politically safer. Following up on the Brazil-Turkey opening would be risky and would require the investment of political capital—Israel, Europe, the U.S. Congress, and the Arab states could all be expected to raise complaints. Sanctions were easier. And they would play better at home.

Israel had never supported diplomacy and saw Brazilian and Turkish intervention as a dangerous distraction. One senior Turkish official told me that Israel’s attack on a Turkish flotilla carrying aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in May 2010 in violation of an Israeli naval blockade was a deliberate shot across Turkey’s bow, a warning to Ankara not to meddle in the Iran affair. Turkey got the message, but the attack inflamed Turkish public opinion and soured Turkish-Israeli relations.

France too downplayed the Brazil-Turkey deal, arguing that the vote for sanctions at the UN should go forward. The Europeans in general were not happy with being upstaged by Brazil and Turkey. The two had accomplished far more in a few months than the European powers had in six years. They were only too happy to kill the deal.

Russia and China were also upset. The two had been rewarded handsomely for agreeing to sanctions and were unwilling to give all that up just because Brazil and Turkey had made a breakthrough. Moscow and Beijing also wanted to teach Tehran a lesson: Do not try to go around us. Russia and China were benefiting from sitting between Iran and America, selling their favors to both sides and profiting from the impasse. They were in no mood to see Brazil and Turkey kill their cash cow.

Russia in particular is sensitive to challenges to its great-power status. From Moscow, Turkey and Brazil’s presumption of equal status in resolving a major international crisis looked like a challenge. Russia’s vote for the sanctions resolution at the UN was also about putting Turkey and Brazil back in their place.

On the eve of the UN vote, Washington tried to persuade Turkey and Brazil to refrain from voting on the sanctions resolution in the Security Council, on which both were then sitting as elected, nonpermanent members. That was too much to ask of the two countries. If they abstained, Washington could claim that the international community was united behind the sanctions, but how could Brazil and Turkey abstain after they had shown a way around the sanctions? Obama called Erdogan and asked him to avoid voting no. When UNSCR 1929 came up for a vote on June 9, 2010, however, both Brazil and Turkey voted no. But the vote passed anyway.

American policy was now solely one of sanctions. By bringing Russia and China on board, Obama had made Bush’s policy a “success”—in the sense that it now enjoyed buy-in from Moscow and Beijing, not in the sense of it actually solving the nuclear impasse with Iran. Through the whole process, Obama had been very concerned with shielding his right flank so as not to open himself to right-wing criticism. It is not going too far to say that American foreign policy had become completely subservient to tactical domestic political considerations.

In the end, Obama’s Iran policy failed. He pushed ahead with sanctions for the same reason Lyndon Johnson kept up the bombing of North Vietnam—neither could think of anything else to do (nor wanted to assume the risk of doing it). Obama’s sanctions-heavy approach did not change Iranian behavior; instead it encouraged Iran to accelerate its race to nuclear capability. The secretary of defense, Robert Gates, said as much in a January 2010 memo to Obama: sanctions coupled with engagement (the dual-track policy) plus covert action would not work, and furthermore, “we were not going to go to war to keep Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state.”⁵³ What he was suggesting was that Obama might say no to containment now, but that is the only option his policy has left for the United States. Perhaps it is true after all that “only Nixon can go to China.” A Democratic president may be too vulnerable to public opinion on national security issues to make tough decisions.

The administration did claim success on another front. By mid-2010, clandestine initiatives to penetrate and subvert Iran’s nuclear program were up and running. A particularly nasty computer worm called Stuxnet had been delivered (some reports indicate with Israel’s help) into the intranet that supported Iran’s nuclear program. Stuxnet interfered with the mechanisms that control the highly synchronized spinning of thousands of centrifuges at extremely high speeds. That wreaked havoc in the system, and the damage to the centrifuge infrastructure significantly slowed Iran’s enrichment schedule. In May 2009, Iran had 4,290 centrifuges. In August 2010, that number had dropped to 3,772 thanks to Stuxnet.⁵⁴

Stuxnet in Iran was the equivalent of drones in Pakistan or Yemen—a new and covert way for America to deal with world problems.⁵⁵ Stuxnet was followed by a series of deadly attacks on nuclear scientists and administrators, believed to be either at the hands of the United States or Israel, or both. A massive bomb that exploded at a military base housing part of Iran’s missile program was assumed to be part of the same campaign. Iran also believed that Israel was fomenting ethnic trouble in Iran—working with Azerbaijan to stir up Azeri nationalism in the northwest and backing Jundullah, a vicious extremist group in Iran’s Baluchistan province that was spearheading a secessionist campaign of terror there.⁵⁶

These brazen attacks, some argued, were pressuring Iran’s rulers and slowing the nuclear program. That some of them were happening openly in Iranian cities was a powerful signal of American and Israeli determination and its ability to stop Iran’s nuclear program. In Israel, a lively debate erupted as to whether sabotage was obviating the need for open war.⁵⁷ A former head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, broke with Prime Minister Netanyahu, arguing the case for covert war (later he was joined by several other military and intelligence chiefs). On the other side, former premier Ehud Barak thought that sabotage could do only so much and that Iran would soon devise ways to guard against further damage.⁵⁸ Still, Russian and Chinese backing for UN sanctions (complemented by harsher financial restrictions Stuart Levy’s team had put in place), combined with intriguing cloak-and-dagger operations against Iran’s nuclear program, made for a good narrative going into an election year: the Iran problem was under control, Iran was under pressure and weakening, Obama had succeeded where Bush had failed.

In truth, Obama’s version of the dual-track policy was also not successful.⁵⁹ It was not even “dual.” It relied instead on one track, and that was pressure.⁶⁰ Its gains were short-lived and illusory. The United States had forgotten that the object of pressure was to jump-start diplomacy, which meant that doors had to be kept open even as the squeeze was applied.⁶¹ Not surprisingly, when Iran next met with the United States and its allies, in January 2011 in Istanbul, the talks quickly failed. Sanctions and sabotage remained the “dual-track” approach of choice.

This led Iran to step up its own dual-track policy of applying pressure to get America to negotiate in earnest. The difference was that Iran would periodically put options on the table, opening doors to diplomacy that the United States could walk through. The Tehran Declaration was one such door; another was Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov’s “step-by-step” plan. Lavrov informed his American counterparts of his plan during a visit to Washington in July 2011. He suggested that both Iran and the United States should agree to a road map according to which Iran would address every IAEA concern, but one at a time, and would receive a corresponding benefit (in the form of a particular sanction being lifted) for doing so. The plan called for a freeze on further sanctions while the process was working.⁶² Iran accepted the plan but the United States did not.⁶³

With his reelection year approaching, Obama did not want to try anything new. Plus, there was the fear that step-by-step could stall. As sanctions were lifted, Iran might feel less compelled to provide further concessions. Such a piecemeal process might go only so far and then collapse under the weight of its own success.

Obama wanted to stay with the sanctions-only policy for now, but the happy narrative of successful pressuring and sabotage was just one headline away from crashing. The crash came on October 11, 2011, when Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller made public a foiled, allegedly Iranian-backed, assassination attempt against Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir. The sensational plot involved Mexican drug cartels, DEA informants, and the audacious idea of blowing up a popular Washington restaurant (Café Milano in Georgetown) frequented by the ambassador. To many the plot looked too amateurish to be the work of the dreaded Iranian intelligence services.⁶⁴ But it mattered little what skeptics thought. The administration believed the plot was real, and if real, the plot of course undercut the administration’s claim to have Iran under control. It was clear that far from being cowed, Iran was mounting its own pressure tactics to bend America’s will.

Then in November came a sensational new IAEA report that raised alarm about the military aims of Iran’s nuclear program. Skeptics argued that the report revealed little that was not known previously, but the Obama administration saw the report as a game changer and told the public of the grave danger that Iran’s nuclear program posed. The bugbear grew.

Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Congress all concluded that the administration’s dual-track policy had failed. Israel (publicly) and the Persian Gulf states (privately) renewed their talk of the need for military action. Congress made its own Iran policy by passing stiff new sanctions, most notably targeting the country’s oil income by sanctioning its central bank. The Europeans followed suit by announcing that they would stop buying Iranian oil. Caught off guard, the administration tried to get back out in front by endorsing the new sanctions, escalating its own rhetoric, and announcing unilateral sanctions such as making it difficult for oil tankers carrying Iranian oil to get necessary insurance to do business—which led Iran to sell more of its oil through Iraq and Dubai.

Up to this point, sanctions had been harsh but mainly affected Iran’s trade (restricting what Iran could import). Now they were going after Iran’s income (limiting how much oil Iran could sell).⁶⁵ With the United States and Europe pushing other oil producers to step up production, and those producers building new pumping infrastructure and signing long-term contracts with Iran’s former customers, Iran would find it hard to get back into the game even if it bowed to international pressure on its nuclear program.

But tightening the screws did not show a way out of the crisis. Sanctions had hurt Iran’s economy, and the new tougher sanctions cut to the bone. Both inflation and unemployment spiked, and shortages ravaged the economy. The government postponed an estimated $60 billion in infrastructure projects. Yet Iran still had ways to keep its head above water.

Iran had large gold reserves and since 2008 had been taking a larger share of its oil revenue in currencies other than the dollar. Iran keeps these currencies in their countries of origin and uses them to finance its international trade locally. That is costly, but it allows oil- and trade-related transactions to dodge financial restrictions. When Dubai turned the screws on Iranian financial institutions in 2011, Iran shifted its financial transactions to China, Pakistan, and Turkey. Dubai banks no longer support personal Iranian accounts and dig deep into activities of Iranian companies before clearing their transactions. Chinese, Pakistani, and Turkish banks do none of this. A dozen Pakistani banks keep open credit lines that allow Iranian merchants to buy goods in Pakistan and ship them across the border for sale in Iran.

Nor was the oil embargo’s impact as worrying to Iran as was commonly assumed. The global supply of oil is fairly tightly matched to demand. So if Europe, for instance, cuts off purchases of Iranian oil, Iran will still be able to find buyers in other parts of the world, at least for a while. And if Iran is cut out of the already tight oil markets altogether, that will impact oil prices and the prospects for global economic recovery.

By early 2012, China, Japan, South Korea, Sri Lanka, India, and Turkey had all cut some of their oil purchases from Iran but continued to buy Iranian oil. The Iranian analyst Bijan Khajehpour estimated that selling about 1.75 million barrels per day to these countries combined—along with sales of natural gas to Turkey—could earn Iran sums well in excess of what it needs to pay for its imports. Thirst for oil in all these countries is expected to grow as their economies continue to boom. Iran also sells oil through Iraq and Dubai—literally sending oil on trucks and boats to those destinations, which then reship it as local oil.

Iran is unhappy with the way in which it has to sell its oil but remains confident that global markets will continue to provide room for it. In the longer run, the surge in energy demand in China and India alone, Iran thinks, will make Iranian oil indispensable. What worries Iran is that due to its inability to secure investment and new technology to upgrade its oil industry its production capacity will not grow—and will likely decline—and so it will not be able to take full advantage of growing world demand.

The sudden tightening of sanctions, then, did not break Iran’s economy, but they did severely affect the daily lives of Iranians. So it was not a surprise that Iran reacted angrily to this sudden turn of events. It decided that Obama was adding pressure on Iran to placate his domestic critics because he still saw sanctions as a cheap, low-risk way to look tough on Iran. If Iran did nothing, it could only expect more pressure and perhaps even open conflict. It was better to deter the United States now and disabuse Washington of the belief that it could forever hide behind sanctions. Iran threatened confrontation, closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil supply flows, carrying out terrorist attacks, and stopping the sale of oil to European countries well ahead of when the EU planned to stop buying Iranian oil—that would catch Europe (then in the thick of frantic efforts to save the euro) off guard and cause an energy crisis and higher oil prices. It now looked as if sanctions were no longer a substitute for war but could be a cause of it.

Lifting these crippling sanctions—and preventing more being added onto them—now became Iran’s goal. To get rid of sanctions, Khamenei calculated that it would be necessary to act tough in front of the West—to meet threat with threat and pressure with pressure—and to attain nuclear capability faster (because then Iran would have more leverage to negotiate sanction removal). Iran knew from Iraq’s experience that once sanctions are imposed, they tend to stay in place. Even if Iran conceded on the nuclear issue, the U.S. Congress would ask for concessions on terrorism, and then on other issues before sanctions were ever lifted. This is what worried Khamenei—“that the U.S. would not be satisfied until Iran gives up its religious beliefs, values, identity, independence.”⁶⁶ The Europeans would not reverse their oil embargo either, not unless every European country voted to do so, which would be unlikely. And the tens of billions of dollars’ worth of arms sold to Saudi Arabia and the UAE to bolster their defenses against Iran would not vanish from those countries’ arsenals if and when Iran gave up its nuclear program.

By this reasoning Iran would get nothing for cooperating on the nuclear issue and would have a stronger bargaining position if it got past the point of no return. In yet another ironic twist, rather than halt Iran’s nuclear program, the new sanctions actually gave Iran ample incentive to forge ahead with it.

Iranian leaders also understood that giving up on the program at a time when sanctions were weakening the state and robbing it of the means to buy political support at home would doom the regime. Look at Libya, they would say. Gaddafi gave up his nuclear program, and then when his people rose up he had no way to keep the United States and NATO from intervening to topple him. Back in 2004 when Gaddafi gave up his nuclear program in exchange for normalizing relations with the West, Khamenei had told his National Security Council that the Libyan leader was “an idiot” and that this was the end of him. With memories of the 2009 Green Movement still fresh, Iran’s rulers felt they could expect a Libya scenario only if they relinquished their nuclear program and then their unhappy and hungry masses rose up in protest.

The Iranian state relies on an extensive patronage system to rule. The sanctions have raised doubts about the viability of patronage politics—there is not enough money to dole out to buy off the population. If support for the regime softens and dissident factions peel off, the door could open not only to compromise on the nuclear issue but to a transition to a more open regime. That would be a best-case scenario for the West.

The downside was steeper. Countries that have built nuclear weapons have all had to make a decision to do so. Iran has so far decided to gain nuclear capability, but by most intelligence accounts has not made the decision to build a bomb. Could pressure, meant to keep it from such a decision, instead backfire and end up driving it to that very end?

Obama still hoped that there was life in the dual-track policy. He hoped that punishing economic pressure would persuade Iran’s leaders that to survive they had to stop and not take that last fatal step across the red line that would trip a war with America. To give the status quo a chance, he moved the red line back to Iran attaining a nuclear weapon. Since 2009, Washington had indicated that it was willing to tolerate some enrichment activity in Iran, but it had never formally rolled back its red line from enrichment to weaponization—Obama did just that.⁶⁷ But in doing so he also painted American foreign policy into a corner. If you draw a clear red line then you have to defend it or risk looking weak.

That provided an opening for the American Right, backed by Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, to force Obama’s back to the wall on Iran. The policy was a failure, Iran was closer to a bomb, and short of war there was no other way to stop it. That compelled Obama to put Iran policy at the forefront of his foreign policy agenda and to further increase pressure on Iran.

Publicly the president pushed back against war. He told a gathering of the pro-Israel group AIPAC that he would not countenance containment of a nuclear Iran—containment was not an option—and if it became clear that Iran was about to build nuclear weapons America would go to war to prevent that. But for now, the president was confident that pressure (and he was adding much more of it with his policy under criticism at home) combined with talks (which he now aggressively pursued with Iran) would work.

Khamenei welcomed Obama’s pushback against war, and it was then that he reissued his 1995 fatwa—in effect saying that Iran will not build a bomb, so Obama does not have to go to war. Khamenei also agreed to return to talks. This looked like a victory for dual-track—although the pressure was on the United States this time. Israeli goading and the American Right were opening the door for diplomacy.

But once again Obama was not willing to walk through the door. In Istanbul America suggested that if Iran suspended 20 percent enrichment of uranium and agreed to send out of the country its stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium, and if it proved that Khamenei’s fatwa would hold, then America would discuss sanctions relief and include recognition of Iran’s right to enrichment (the key Iranian demand) in the discussion. Talks resumed in Baghdad and Moscow. In the Russian capital Iran offered to make the fatwa a UN document, but now the United States backed away from its Istanbul offer. Recognizing the right to enrichment and talk of sanctions relief were off the table. The United States was prepared to offer only aircraft spare parts (the Iranian aviation industry is in desperate need of parts for its aging aircraft) and a promise not to pursue further UN sanctions if Iran agreed to what was asked of it—that is, we would not consider relaxing or even temporarily suspending any international sanctions, nor consider a moratorium on unilateral U.S. financial sanctions. In a lower-level meeting of technical experts after the Moscow talks, Iran offered to set aside its demand for recognition of its right to enrichment (its key demand all along) and asked what it could expect in sanction relief (and Iran wanted substantial relief) if it complied with U.S. demands that it cap enrichment at 5 percent and give up its stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium. The answer, again, was aircraft spare parts. The sum total of three major rounds of diplomatic negotiations was that America would give some bits and bobs of old aircraft in exchange for Iran’s nuclear program.

Ironically, economic sanctions had done what they were supposed to do—bring Iran to the table. But now it took a deal to end the crisis, and the White House wavered. A deal would be difficult to sell at home or to Israel, whereas sanctions played well domestically. As one senior State Department official put it to me, “any deal that is acceptable to Iran is unacceptable to Israel, and any deal acceptable to Israel is unacceptable to Iran. It is hopeless, no point in trying.”

For the second time (the first was the Turkey-Brazil deal) the administration came to the edge of a diplomatic breakthrough and then walked away. Obama hoped that the status quo would hold until a new regime took over in Tehran. In effect, the United States now sought to resolve the nuclear issue not by taking away Iran’s nuclear program, but, as a number of administration officials told me, by changing the regime that would oversee it. It was something like the peaceful coexistence we had with the Soviet Union; we lived with them until they were gone. Iran would go nuclear, but hopefully it would not matter to the United States and Israel when it did.

This long view is based on the assumption that sanctions have made Iran weak and vulnerable. By fall of 2012 there was plenty of evidence to support that impression. The Iranian economy was contracting, and dissent was on the rise. It took baton-wielding riot police and plenty of tear gas to break up street demonstrations when the rial collapsed in early October to a mere fifth of its value in 2011. That narrative certainly suits the administration—they can claim their strategy has been a success. Sanctions have weakened Iran, but that does not mean that Iran sees itself as weak or America’s hand as particularly strong. Washington may believe that Iraq and Afghanistan have nothing to do with Iran, but Iran sees the unraveling of American military efforts there—not to mention growing instability across the Middle East—as a vulnerability for America and a boon for itself. It makes our military threat hollow and exposes us to many strategic vulnerabilities.

Washington also concluded that Iran was the big loser in the Arab Spring. America saw the crisis in Syria for the most part as a strategic loss for Iran (which it was). But that closed the door to talking to Iran on Syria, which could have led to an early resolution of the crisis. Failing to do so put regional stability at risk.

And, again, the view from Tehran is very different. Democracy in the Arab world proved fleeting, and at any rate it was not a bug likely to infect Iran—Iran’s spring had already come and gone in 2009. What came out of the Arab Spring would hurt America more than Iran: Islamic fundamentalism and, even worse, Salafism were on the rise, threatening regional stability and pro-Western regimes that have protected it. The Arab Spring was a cauldron of instability, and that would affect American interests more than Iranian ones—even Syria, Iran thought, could prove more calamitous to America’s allies in the region than to Iran. The value of the Arab Spring to Iran is that it will ensnare America in conflicts and distractions; Iran is not as weak as America thinks, because America is not as strong as it thinks. As one astute Middle East observer put it to me, “America is standing with its back to a tsunami. It does not see what is coming at it.”

In the short run, Iranians may see benefit in such a status quo. Khamenei’s ruling that nuclear weapons are a “great sin” still stands, and keeps Iran on the safe side of the new U.S. red line. But if the sanctions are going to lead to regime change, will Iran’s rulers abide them over the long term? Surely getting to “one turn of the screw short” on a bomb—or many bombs—will give the Islamic Republic more leverage as it strives to push back against sanctions and win itself more breathing space?

Iran’s strategy could be to build up its centrifuge cascades and its stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium while perfecting its missile technology.⁶⁸ Then it could be as little as two to four months away from a whole arsenal of nuclear weapons. That could make Iran far more dangerous and formidable than racing to build a single bomb today.

The Obama administration claims that it put aside Bush’s dream of regime change in Iran. But the unspoken goal, if not the immediate consequence, of America’s stepped-up sanctions remains regime change. Some in the Obama administration thought hard-hitting sanctions would keep Iran from building a bomb long enough for a new regime to take over. Others argued for regime change as a policy goal and the only way out of the impasse with Iran.⁶⁹ But regime change remains more a pious hope than a real prospect.

Regime change is also a strategy fraught with risk. It may have seemed realistic for the brief moment when the Green Movement had the Islamic Republic back on its heels, but as of 2011 that rebellion had been eviscerated. I remember a conversation that I had with senior White House officials on the eve of the March 2012 parliamentary elections in Iran. They were hearing intelligence assessments of potential street riots, paralysis, and a Persian Spring. None of it happened. There is plenty of dissent in Iran, but no organized opposition tied to the hopeful Green Movement.

Growing sanctions confused Iranians. Sanctions made their lives hard, but few saw them as justified. Sanctions were not put in place to punish the regime for its human rights violations or to support the cause of democracy. Instead, they were there to turn the Islamic Republic away from what is actually a fairly popular goal. The Iranian public is not opposed to its country’s nuclear program—indeed, by most accounts the public (much like Pakistanis or Indians) is more assertive than the government and would like Iran to actually have the bomb.

Isolation and sanctions are more likely to cause regime collapse than regime change. As mentioned earlier, the aggressive sanctions regime is undoing the patronage system that sustains the Iranian state. Without the money to keep the wheels greased, clerical rule could fall apart—more and more Iranians could take to the streets, with dangerous fissures opening up in the ruling ranks as elites struggle to respond. And the result may not be a halcyon transition to a friendlier regime, but a messy transition to something worse.

The collapse of the patronage system will wean Iranians from reliance on government, but as more and more are forced to fend for themselves, Iranian society could go the way of 1990s Iraq—a place where poor and radical conurbations such as Sadr City and Basra took the place of Iraq’s once-urbane city culture. Economic pressure could cause social disarray, gradually turning parts of Iran into lawless bastions of crime and terror.

Our current policy will eventually turn Iran into a failed state. An Iran sliding into the failed-state column will make the nuclear problem worse, not better, and pose a new set of security challenges to the region and the United States.

The other more immediate result of our current policy is to amplify the talk of war. Israeli prime minister Netanyahu argued that further diplomacy was a waste of time, and that Iran’s nuclear program would have to be stopped before it entered the “zone of immunity,” meaning before most of the centrifuges moved under the mountain at Fordo. Israel takes Iran’s nuclear threat seriously, but by harping on Iran’s imminent threat, Netanyahu did a good job of jamming Obama into a corner—committing America to going to war to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons. He would continue this tactic throughout the summer and fall of 2012 to get Obama to commit to a clear red line with Iran.

The administration, too, did its part by trumpeting Israel’s readiness to attack Iran. Every administration official who visited Israel came back saying Israel was ready to send its bombers on missions over Iran. The administration hoped this would scare Iranians into surrendering at the negotiations table—a good cop/bad cop diplomatic strategy. But in practice it made talk of war ubiquitous. It became commonplace for those on the inside and those reporting on the administration’s thinking to see war around the corner, and the more hawkish voices in particular went further, suggesting it would be a clinical and effective step. The worstcase scenario for what Iran going nuclear would mean—Armageddon in the Middle East—was paired with the rosiest assessment of the effectiveness of an air campaign and its aftermath. “Iranians will not react, cannot react, and if they do it will be limited” was the argument. “They will cower into their hole, and then, weakened and subdued, with the program set back years, they will be a lesser threat.”

The only ones who saw through the flimsiness of these arguments were the military. They knew war when they saw it. They knew it would not be easy or straightforward, predictable or cost free. One three-star army general told a private gathering of senior foreign policy hands, “The enemy gets to vote. You can’t predict how Iran would react. In fact, they have every incentive to react. Not doing so will damage their standing at home and in the region, and surely they will not want America to get comfortable managing Iran as it did Saddam’s Iraq. A war with Iran will be bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan combined. We should expect 15,000 American dead.” The American military had learned the same lesson McGeorge Bundy had—there were some things Iran would never give up.

Many in the center and on the Left looked at the hash of Bush and Obama’s policy and concluded it was time for the United States to accept the inevitable, that Iran would go nuclear, and that it would not in fact be Armageddon. America had dealt with such a threat before, and a combination of containment and deterrence would keep the Iranian threat at bay as it once had with threats from Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong-il.⁷⁰ Iranians are unlikely to precipitate a nuclear war from which they have little to gain and everything to lose, nor give their nuclear material to terrorists—that is a worry we have with Pakistan, after all, and it has not led us to go to war there. And as for the argument that Iran’s nuclear capability would lead to a nuclear frenzy in the region, that is a talking point with scant historical proof to back it up. After all, North Korea’s nuclear bomb did not prompt Japan and South Korea to build nuclear bombs of their own. Nor did Bangladesh and Sri Lanka go nuclear to keep up with India and Pakistan. America has plenty of experience in managing exactly the kind of threat that a nuclear Iran would pose, and a far less impressive record bringing wars in the Middle East to successful conclusions.

However, while Iran crossing the nuclear threshold may fall short of Armageddon, it is nonetheless a failure for the United States, which has consistently said that this is unacceptable. If the dual-track policy collapses into either war or containment, it will be a defeat for Obama. Obama made the dual-track policy his own, fine-tuned it and gave it many more teeth, and then moved Bush’s red line back from no enrichment to no nuclear weapon, and still that red line may be breached. On balance, the dual-track policy only gave Iran a reason to dig in deeper and clutch its nuclear ambitions tighter. The policy made Iran not less but more dangerous. It put America in the position of either contemplating war or losing face by letting Iran go nuclear. It would have been better to have seriously engaged Iran, slowed its march to nuclear capability earlier, and not risked war or a loss of face so late in the game.

The larger issue is that our policy will make Iran into a bigger threat than it is today. The result will be not to deny Iran nuclear capability but to create a North Korea smack in the middle of the Middle East. Sanctions will cause isolation, social and economic breakdown, and an increasingly hard-line regime protected by a nuclear shield. And if Iran turns into a failed state under the pressure of sanctions, a vast territory with no one in charge, a fragmented society and broken economy, it will become a monumental headache—a font of drugs and terror right in the middle of a strategically vital region.

The problem with North Korea is not that it is a nuclear state—its many conventional weapons alone and the proximity of so many of them to Seoul already make it highly dangerous—but that it is a dysfunctional and failing state, militaristic and radical, in a vital area of the world. Tightening the noose around Iran’s neck is not changing its mind on going nuclear (it may in fact be convincing it to stick with its nuclear plan), but it is strengthening the hand of the Revolutionary Guards and other hard-liners. For some time now, the Obama administration has lamented the security forces’ growing control over decision making in Tehran. But that is the consequence of saber rattling. Talk of war does not empower moderates and reformers.

Iran’s economy is too big for the Revolutionary Guards to control by themselves. But a shrinking Iranian economy can become one that the Guards can control in toto. The private sector is being hit hardest by sanctions, leaving the Guards room to expand their reach and get their hands on the burgeoning black market that sanctions have created. How ironic if sanctions turn out to bolster the wealth and power of the Revolutionary Guards.

As noted above, sanctions have already begun driving Iranian manufacturing concerns to set up shop in China. There they use Iranian credit held in yuan to run their Chinese operations with Chinese labor. The final products are then exported back to Iran through Armenia, Dubai, Pakistan, Turkey, and especially Iraq. Businessmen and their partners in ruling circles continue to make money while jobs are disappearing in a country already struggling under massive unemployment. Unemployment spiked in 2011, which was also a record year for labor strikes and protests by disgruntled government workers.

The sanctions have not hurt the ruling elites or the well-to-do, but average Iranians are suffering, and Iran’s social fabric is being torn. It is a singular failure of imagination and absence of strategic vision to pursue a policy the end result of which is to replicate the North Korean debacle in the Middle East, or to produce another Iraq.

In the coming decade, America is going to have its hands full dealing with the myriad problems that follow in the wake of the Arab Spring: wars, revolutions, failing economies, and rising Islamist extremism. The last thing we need is a radicalized, failing, and nuclear-armed Iran.

The weakening of Iran will open the Middle East to a surge of Sunni radicalism—combined with greater Chinese and Russian involvement—that will in the long run prove a far larger and knottier strategic problem for America than Iran currently poses or is ever likely to pose. Iran is clearly not an ally in our attempts to manage this tumultuous region, but it could play the role of a natural balancer to the forecast of Sunni extremism. We should not forget the value of balance-of-power politics. For this reason alone, we will likely look back at our Iran policy over the course of the past four years as a strategic blunder.

On December 12, 2011, Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, met with President Obama at the White House. It was an important meeting. Iraq was no longer in the headlines, but a lot was still riding on what happened there. During the election campaign Obama had promised to end the war that George W. Bush had started, and now, on the eve of the next presidential campaign, Obama was ready to close the book on Iraq, announcing an end to U.S. military operations there and bringing home the rest of the troops (although many would be heading to Afghanistan).

During the meeting, Maliki told Obama he had evidence that his vice president, the prominent Sunni political leader Tariq al-Hashemi, and other key members of his Iraqi National Movement (known as al-Iraqiyya) were guilty of supporting terrorism. This was a serious accusation; if true, it meant that Iraq’s fragile unity government was a farce and about to unravel. Maliki wanted to gauge Obama’s reaction, to see whether America would prevent him from attacking Hashemi and his party, a move that was sure to scuttle the semblance of sectarian peace that America had brokered in 2007. Iraq would be stepping close to the edge of the precipice right when America was leaving.

Obama was in no mood to get sucked back into Iraq’s problems. He told Maliki what he wanted to hear: the issue was an internal Iraqi affair. Maliki interpreted Obama’s insouciance as a green light to go after Hashemi without worrying about consequences from America. Once the meeting was over Maliki told his entourage, “See! The Americans don’t care.”

Three days later, on December 15, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta brought a formal end to the American military presence in Iraq at a ceremony in a fortified compound at Baghdad International Airport. That night, after the pomp was done and Panetta had flown out, Iraqi tanks surrounded the homes of Hashemi and two other Iraqiyya leaders in the government. On paper, the charge was terrorism, but in reality Maliki was exacting revenge. He was angry at Iraqiyya because it had garnered more votes and seats in the March 2010 elections than had Maliki’s coalition. Maliki also believed (though this was not part of the charge sheet) that Iraqiyya was now in the pay of Saudi Arabia, working to undo the government.

To avoid arrest, Hashemi fled to Iraq’s Kurdish region. Iraqi politics then plunged into crisis. Sunni provinces demanded greater autonomy from Baghdad. Al-Qaeda went on the offensive, killing hundreds in scores of bombing attacks in a campaign of terror that went on for months. Iraq was inching its way back to mayhem. This was not the denouement to a tragic war that Obama was looking for. The Americans’ exit was not supposed to tear open old wounds and reignite the conflict. But that is exactly what events portended.

And that is not all. Iraq’s slide into chaos, violence, and internecine conflict put its very existence as a nation in doubt. The process of disintegration that started in 2006 was poised to move to completion. America’s troop surge in 2007 managed to slow its pace and perhaps even halt it for a time, but mistake after mistake in 2010 and then a hasty exit in 2011 removed all that was holding Iraq’s demons at bay—the demons we had unleashed in 2003.

The Obama administration told Americans that our departure from Iraq showed that we were leaving behind a country strong enough to stand on its own feet. But what Iraqis and the rest of the Middle East understood was that we were leaving Iraq, like Afghanistan, to its own fate. We had broken Iraq, and for a while we cared to put it back together; now we did not care. Obama’s shrug when Maliki told him about Hashemi meant that it was no longer America’s responsibility to keep Iraq whole; we were going to let the Band-Aids holding its broken pieces together come off.

Iraq is important, and not just because it is an ancient, oil-rich country sitting in the heart of the Middle East. Post-Saddam Iraq matters because it is a signature American project whose outcome will be the measure of our reliability and the legacy of our power in the Middle East. For the better part of two decades we have tangled with Iraq, first beating back its regional ambitions, then squeezing away its power, and finally breaking it. We told the region and the world that we knew what we were doing: Iraq and the Middle East would be better off for our intervention. We would build a shining city on the hill, an example of democracy and prosperity that would help transform the whole region. Iraq would show that American power was still a force for good in the world, and would convince naysayers that we should use it more often to ensure global security and spread freedom and prosperity. What the promise of globalization had not achieved, American military muscle could: we would bulldoze the holdouts against the new world order created in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But Iraq turned out badly. American power failed the dream. As Iraq shattered into violence, placing the rest of the Middle East dangerously close to a vortex of instability and sectarian conflict, the region lost trust in American power—that we knew how to exercise it, and that when we did we could salvage some good from it. And worse yet, the region learned that we had neither the patience nor perseverance to see through what we started. The speedy American troop withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 was a confirmation of all this. Americans may celebrate that there are no more of our soldiers fighting in Iraq, but this is an end that offers no closure. It will take a lot to repair the damage the war did; the distrust sown by our withdrawal will only add to the tally.

On the campaign trail, Obama had said that Iraq was a misguided enterprise, a needless and costly war of choice that had tarnished America’s image. So it was not a surprise that the White House celebrated when the last convoy of American soldiers left Iraq for Kuwait on December 18, 2011. It was the fulfillment of a campaign promise, or, as Vice President Biden called it, “one of the great achievements of this administration.” (He went on to promise “a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”)¹ Less was more, in the administration’s thinking. The withdrawal would make achieving our goals there more likely.

When Bush left office, Iraq did look as if it was on the rebound. General David Petraeus’s COIN strategy and the surge of troops in 2007 had turned the fiasco of the war into something of a success story. When Obama came in, Iraq was enjoying relative calm. The insurgency had ended, al-Qaeda in Iraq was a thing of the past, and the fragile peace between Shias and Sunnis was holding.

But storm clouds loomed. Iraq’s government was hopelessly corrupt and ineffective. We were in part responsible for that failure by first hastily dismantling the Iraqi state and then giving Iraq a constitution that confirmed sectarian divisions while requiring an overwhelming majority before a government could form—which could be achieved by promising control of large areas of government to prospective allies to milk as they saw fit. Even then, it took Iraqi politicians six months of squabbling after the March 2010 elections to form a government. At best, in 2009 when the Obama administration took office, Iraq was going sideways, unity and peace beyond its reach.

The problem, many think, is Maliki. Since taking office in 2006 he has proven, at various times and in various ways, both ineffectual and dictatorial. He hails from the smallest of the three major Shia political parties, al-Da’awa, and has had to rely on the support of a constellation of Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish political blocs to govern.

His on-and-off relations with the firebrand Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr worry many, but by and large U.S. authorities have found ways to work with him. Once or twice he has even managed to pleasantly surprise America with bold action. No one found fault with Maliki’s leadership when he saddled up in the spring of 2008 to lead the nascent Iraqi army into Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood and then the southern city of Basra in order to flush out and defeat the so-called Mahdi Army, Sadr’s private force of Shia militiamen.

But all told, Maliki has not amounted to the kind of leader that Iraq needs.² He is a weak manager,³ and his authoritarian style has even alienated his own Shia (and Kurdish) allies.⁴ Maliki is deeply sectarian, still nursing anger born from the years of abuse that Shias suffered at the hands of the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein. When Maliki first emerged on the scene, he openly embraced Shia chauvinism and talked of revenge against Sunnis—payback for decades of mistreatment. He has favored Shias not only in civilian posts but also in the highest ranks of the military and police. Iraq needed a leader who would promote reconciliation. What it got instead is one content to stoke the fires of sectarianism.

Obama thought it futile to invest any more time and effort in this failed project. There were not going to be any more gains—the picture was not going to get any rosier. Staying in Iraq in great numbers, boosting Maliki, and keeping in place his alliance with Sunnis were not going to pay any dividends.

The U.S. military wanted to stay longer; the generals worried about Iraq backsliding into open conflict. But they had been touting the victories won by the surge and singing the praises of the new Iraqi security forces. And Obama had the war in Afghanistan to think about. Thus—in a pattern that repeated itself with respect to the latter country—he took the military’s rhetoric of success at face value and announced that the situation in Iraq was good enough to make an American withdrawal possible.

Iraq policy was handed over to the vice president; he would see to our exit. Biden knew Iraq well. He had followed developments there closely from his perch as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His prediction in 2006 (made jointly with veteran foreign policy thinker Leslie Gelb) that Iraq would not survive the combined centrifugal pull of Shia revival and Kurdish autonomy, and was bound to split up along ethnosectarian lines and that the United States should not stand in the way, had made quite a stir.⁵ Now he would be seeing to a precipitous American withdrawal, which could make that forecast come true. He was not a fan of the COIN strategy (in Iraq or Afghanistan), and inside the White House he advocated leaving Iraq sooner rather than later.⁶

In October 2008, the Bush administration had bowed to Iraqi pressure and pledged to withdraw all U.S. troops by the end of 2011. Obama used that deadline as his goalpost too, accelerating the drawdown of troops as they handed over security to Iraqi forces. The schedule depended on Iraqi politics holding together and Iraqi forces keeping the peace on the streets for a decent enough interval to give the administration plausible deniability when things fell apart after the U.S. departure. It was touch and go for a while, especially when the March 2010 elections took so long to produce a government. But much to everyone’s relief, the long months of haggling between politicians brought little sectarian violence and even less al-Qaeda activity.

Alas, the facade of stability barely masked the trouble brewing under the surface. The year 2010 proved a critical one for Iraq. The country’s political scene was still fractious, and held together only thanks to a fragile power-sharing arrangement that required close American management. But the Obama administration had no time or energy for that. Instead it anxiously eyed the exits, with its one thought to get out. It stopped protecting the political process just when talk of American withdrawal turned the heat back up under the long-simmering power struggle that pitted the Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds against one another.

The end of the drawn-out government-formation scrum in December 2010 left Maliki in the premiership. Before long, he was embarking on an ambitious power grab. Washington ignored his increasing abuse of the constitution, his illegal push for more de-Baathification, and his browbeating of the judiciary, all of which gave Maliki grounds to believe that the United States would place no impediment in the way of his plan to build a Shia authoritarian regime. Rather than develop trust in one another, the Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish factions grew further apart, jealously guarding their political fiefdoms (the presidency for the Kurds, the premiership for the Shias, and the lesser offices of vice president and parliament speaker for the Sunnis). Maliki thought that the premiership would be his forever, a permanent perch from which he could reach out to dominate the presidency and whatever offices Sunnis might hold.

The 2010 elections and their aftermath were a telling exercise in deal making. The Iraqiyya party won 24.7 percent of the popular vote and 91 of the one-chamber parliament’s 325 seats. This showing nosed out Maliki’s al-Da’awa, which won 24.2 percent and 89 seats. The results should have given Iraqiyya’s leader, ex-premier Ayad Allawi, a shot at putting together a government. But Maliki moved quickly to block Allawi. Among other things, Maliki persuaded U.S. officials that the Shia majority would reject Allawi—a nominal Shia and former Baathist who had served as interim premier in 2004 and 2005 and was now rebounding with the backing of Saudi Arabia—so decisively that any government formed by him would plunge the country back into sectarian combat.

Maliki came out on top and resumed the premiership in December 2010, backed by the United States.⁷ That the incumbent could finish second and still keep his job signaled flaws in the system. Iraqis now thought that it was America and not Iraqis who picked the prime minister. Indeed, but there was another power broker in Iraq with the same agenda: Iran.

Iranian leaders were at first divided over who should become prime minister (and confident in their right to choose). General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Brigade and the day-to-day superintendent of Iran’s political and military involvement in Iraq, was frustrated with disagreements between Iraqi Shia leaders—and blamed these for their inability to quickly form a government. Soleimani (and also Syria’s ruler Bashar al-Assad) favored another Shia politician, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, to take the job. But Maliki and his allies resisted. Muqtada al-Sadr in particular objected because Mahdi’s party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), was Sadr’s main rival. Sadr and other pro-Maliki Shia politicians lobbied Iran’s Supreme Leader. Eventually, in December 2010, Khamenei wrote a letter to all Iraqi Shia leaders exhorting them to agree on Maliki as the choice for the premiership.

Iran then leaned on Syria to stop its support for Mahdi. Iran and Syria, generally allies, had not been on the same page regarding Iraq since 2003. Iranians supported the Shia rise to power, whereas Syria had backed the insurgency in all its permutations, from al-Qaeda to the Baathist diehards. Damascus had turned on Maliki after he had called for a United Nations investigation into Syria’s role in bombings in Iraq. Syria had bankrolled Maliki’s Shia rival, Mahdi. But with Iranian pressure mounting, Syria cut a deal: in exchange for dumping Mahdi, Assad was promised a gas pipeline from Iran. Iran then asked Hezbollah to mediate between Assad and Maliki.

In the end, Iran actually implemented what also happened to be American policy. The irony was not lost on Iraqis, and the more suspicious among them thought they could discern the outlines of a sinister U.S.-Iranian conspiracy to turn Maliki into a permanent prime minister—a dictator.

While there was no conspiracy, American policy in Iraq at this point was not committed to promoting national unity (though Obama did make an effort to promote reconciliation by trying to secure the presidency for Allawi as a consolation prize),⁸ nor to continuing with institution building, but to ensuring a state strong enough to permit U.S. withdrawal. It was easier to see Iraq in terms of balancing its divisions—Biden thought of it as resembling the Balkans—than to chart a path to greater political unity. Pursuing real unity would require keeping America’s commitment to Iraq, and a leader other than Maliki.

Washington’s priority was not building Iraqi democracy but creating a security state around a strong leader, authoritarian by default. (The same would be true of Afghanistan and Yemen down the road, revealing the pragmatic or realist heart of Obama’s approach to the Middle East).⁹ It made for a disconnect between America and the Iraqi political leaders with whom Washington claimed to be working. Most Iraqi leaders were concerned with preventing the return of a dictator (when the leading candidate for the role was Maliki), and felt wary of growing Iranian influence. The Obama White House had different priorities and was perturbed by neither Maliki’s authoritarianism nor the growing Iranian influence that it facilitated.

Obama had turned Bush’s Iraq policy on its head. America went into Iraq to build democracy, but left building an authoritarian state as an exit strategy. It is obvious now that—talk about democracy in his Cairo speech notwithstanding—Obama was not really committed to democracy in the Middle East. We did not know it then, but Iraq in 2009 and 2010 was a preview of how the Obama administration would react to the Arab Spring in 2011, and a window onto his thinking about the Middle East.

The White House, not understanding Maliki’s debt to Iran, misread Maliki, thinking that having won the elections with American backing he would now serve as the Shia strongman to do Washington’s bidding—notably to provide the security cover for the United States to leave and sign on to a new Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) to replace the one that Bush had negotiated and that would expire in 2011. But anointing him prime minister did not endear America to Maliki. He still thought that U.S. authorities had conspired with Allawi and Iraqiyya to rig the voting (Hamid Karzai would claim similar feelings of U.S. persecution after the 2009 elections in Afghanistan). Maliki grew more stubborn and even less willing to compromise. He both resented the suggestion that America had picked him and saw the United States as a hurdle to further consolidation of his power.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, continued to worry about the consequences of a hasty exit. It thought that danger was still lurking in Iraq and that the country needed an American presence to maintain stability and forward momentum. There was Iranian influence to worry about, and a U.S. military footprint in the heart of Mesopotamia would be a strategic asset, giving America influence along a wide arc stretching from the Levant to the Persian Gulf.

The question was how many U.S. combat troops would be needed for this, and under what terms would they stay in Iraq. High on the White House’s list of demands was that American soldiers would enjoy immunity from local prosecution—something that the Iraqi government would have to agree to in the new SOFA.

Washington thought that Maliki would deliver on the SOFA. But he didn’t, and neither would anyone else. Why should they? Maliki was tiring of the U.S. presence, and his rivals still viewed it as something that had served him and his ambitions, not Iraqi democracy. Why strengthen Maliki by keeping America in Iraq? With America gone, Maliki might be weaker and riper for a takedown. Later, after the die was cast, Sunnis openly rued not having backed the SOFA; by then it had become clear that the U.S. departure would mean a Maliki power grab.

The White House’s gambit of choosing the SOFA over strengthening democracy proved to be a lose–lose proposition. America did not get a new agreement, and Iraq ended up with an authoritarian strongman who would push the country to the edge of a cliff.

Negotiations over that new agreement started in earnest in June 2011. Washington offered to leave behind 10,000 combat troops. Iraqis across the political spectrum thought that number showed a lack of seriousness and commitment, and even in Washington the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mullen, told the president it would “constitute high risk.”¹⁰ It confirmed what Iraqi defense minister Qadir Obeidi had heard from the administration in Washington in the spring of 2009—that the United States wanted to be pretty much completely out of Iraq by December 2011. If Washington were serious, then it would commit 25,000 or more troops to Iraq, he felt. Even if Iraqis had been impressed with the offer of 10,000 troops, it still would have left the United States capable of playing only a marginal role in protecting Iraq’s security, and with little influence in Iraqi politics. Such a low number meant the American troops would do no more than protect themselves. If you are not there, then you will not matter.

Giving American soldiers immunity from local prosecution was not popular either. Many Iraqis thought that U.S. troops, and the private security forces that locals associated with the U.S. presence, had perpetrated violence on the population with impunity, and they wanted no more of that. In addition, giving American troops immunity ran counter to Iraqi nationalist sensibilities; it was an infringement on sovereignty. The powerful Iranian-aligned politicians, too, were opposed to the American troop presence in Iraq—Tehran had objected to the original 2008 SOFA and did not want to see it renewed.

The political cost of giving Washington what it wanted was too high for Maliki and his allies, and they were already content with the United States leaving. Thus the low number of troops that the administration promised was the perfect cover: negotiations broke down in October 2011, and the administration declared that all U.S. troops would be out of Iraq by the end of the year. In effect, Washington confirmed what Iraqis suspected: America was not serious about Iraq, it was not committed to its security, and privately it was happy not to have to leave behind even the 10,000 troops that it had offered.

The administration responded to the collapse of its halfhearted negotiations by declaring victory. It had extricated the United States from Iraq, fulfilling President Obama’s campaign pledge and freeing resources to attend to Afghanistan. But it was a Pyrrhic victory, a testament to American fickleness—a break-it-and-bolt legacy that will be tough to shake. The region got the message loud and clear that America was out of the game. The claim of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, that America had been defeated in Iraq gained traction on the Arab street, and not just in anti-American corners of Damascus or South Beirut. After we packed up and left, our influence would wane, and we would not even care.¹¹

The surge had hardly made Iraq whole, and our speedy departure threatened to break it apart again. Far from Biden’s “great achievement,” Iraq could prove to be one of the Obama administration’s greater mistakes.

American troops had barely left when Iraqi politics imploded. Two days after the last U.S. convoy crossed into Kuwait, the four key Sunni provinces of Anbar, Diyala, Mosul, and Salahuddin—the Sunni heartland and a bastion of Iraqi nationalism—asked for federalism and regional autonomy.¹² This was followed by the major crisis that had been baked in the cake when Maliki left Washington thinking that he had gotten Obama’s go-ahead to hound Iraqiyya on terrorism charges. Iraqiyya threatened to leave the government and then appealed to Kurdish leaders for support to counter Maliki’s growing “dictatorship.”¹³

Relations between Maliki and the Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani were already tense. Baghdad had put its foot down—unsuccessfully—by declaring that the Kurdish region could not conclude its own oil deals with foreign firms. Kurds had bought into the concept of a united Iraq, provided it would be democratic. But with America leaving and Maliki turning his back on democracy, the Kurds felt vulnerable—it would be only a matter of time before Maliki would try to impose tight control over them. It was hardly a surprise, then, that the fleeing vice president Hashemi found the red carpet rolled out for him in the Iraqi Kurdistan region, or that the Kurds came to his aid by launching sympathetic remonstrations against Baghdad’s increasingly dictatorial ways. Barzani has since hosted Maliki’s Shia critics as well, and raised the possibility of holding a referendum in which the voters of the Kurdish region would be asked if they want to separate from Iraq—unofficial referendums on the same question have yielded 90 percent support for separation.

As a rift opened between the Sunnis and Kurds, on the one hand, and the Shia government in Baghdad on the other, Turkey entered the fray. Since 2006, Turkey had built strong ties with the Kurdish region. Moreover, and more importantly, Turkey felt compelled by its ambitions regarding regional leadership to take up the Sunni cause. It was the logical step for a majority-Sunni power eager to take the Arab world under its wing. An angry Prime Minister Erdogan summoned Maliki’s national security adviser to Ankara and dressed him down for his treatment of Iraqi Sunnis. The Turkish premier then brushed aside the Interpol warrant for Hashemi’s arrest and gave him shelter in Istanbul under the full protection of the Turkish police. In Turkey, Sunnis and Kurds had found a patron in their quest to move away from Baghdad’s control.

The fight against Maliki strengthens Iran’s hand—Maliki will seek Tehran’s support, and so will his Shia rival Sadr. Sadr has also been talking to Barzani and Iraqiyya’s leaders, lending impetus to their resistance to Maliki. America, meanwhile, is in no mood to be dragged into Iraq’s political drama. It is willing to go along with a Barzani-Sadr plan to unseat Maliki so long as it does not create a mess—which means implicitly endorsing a greater role for Iran in Iraq.

With Turkish influence growing in the Kurdish north and Iranian influence in the Shia south, Iraqi unity is fading fast. Normal politics is over for now. Coalition building between various parties intent on shoring up the center is giving way to a kind of political “warlordism.” Political bosses will divide the spoils to serve their constituencies. They have no vested interest in the state, other than to carve up its resources; they will forge tactical alliances and go to battle with competitors to maximize their share. Iraq’s political warlords will bring down the state to get rid of Maliki, but some will also sell out to Maliki if he meets their price. But even if all the stars align for Maliki to fall, it will not be a restoration of democracy or normal politics, only the gradual demise of the state—the coming apart of Iraq.

America’s quick exit now looks to have doomed Iraq’s experiment with democracy, and in an ironic twist it is America’s man in Iraq who is the aspiring dictator.

All this is happening at a dangerous time, coinciding with the destabilizing force of the Arab Spring. Iraq was meant to send a signal that democratic government was possible in a part of the world that had never seen one up close. Instead it is signaling that sectarianism is ascendant.

When Tunisians and Egyptians revolted against corruption and misrule, many expected that Iraqis, too, irrespective of sect or ethnicity, would take to the streets to demand accountability and good government. After all, they suffer more than any other Arab people from corruption and misrule. A few demonstrations similar to those in Tunis and Cairo raised hope for a proper reckoning, but in Iraq the Arab Spring did not have any wind in its sails.¹⁴ Here things were not straightforward.

Iraqis too want dignity, good government, jobs, and an end to corruption, but their politics does not yet turn on these issues. The Bush administration had assumed that once it got rid of Saddam, Iraqis would focus on bread-and-butter issues and building a democracy. But Saddam’s dictatorship had also kept in place minority rule, giving Sunni Arabs a disproportionate share of power and resources, brutally suppressing Kurds and Shias in the process. The U.S. invasion ended that imbalance. Kurds and especially Shias gained as their numbers decided distribution of power and resources. When a dictatorship that keeps in place an inequitable distribution of power among sects and ethnic groups bites the dust, the first upshot is a torturous—and in Iraq’s case, violent—rebalancing act. In Iraq, Sunni resistance to the writ of the Americans who had shattered the Sunni-run state plunged the country into a bloody sectarian war. The Sunni insurgency fought both the U.S. occupation and the Shia ascendancy it facilitated. The insurgency wanted America gone so it could restore Sunni dominance over Iraq.

When the guns fell silent in Iraq in 2008, the assumption was that the Sunnis had finally given up. The American troop surge had convinced them that Baghdad was beyond their reach and Shia control of Iraq was a done deal. America hoped that some combination of Shia magnanimity and Sunni acquiescence would guarantee peace and stability for Iraq—and give U.S. troops a ticket out of the war. But sectarian truce did not mean sectarian peace or a final consensus on the fate of Iraq. The country moved on from the Saddam years but not too far, and the sectarian violence that followed the invasion inflicted fresh wounds and set off fresh cycles of revenge. Shias still fear Sunni rule, and Sunnis rue their loss of power and dream of climbing back to the top. Each has a different vision of the past and a different dream for the future. There are still scores to settle, decades of them.

Sectarianism is an old wound in the Middle East.¹⁵ But the recent popular urge for democracy, national unity, and dignity has opened it up and made it sting afresh.¹⁶ This is because many of the Arab governments that now face the wrath of protesters are guilty of both suppressing individual rights and concentrating power in the hands of minorities.

The problem goes back to the colonial period, when European administrators created state institutions designed to manipulate religious and ethnic diversity to their advantage. They handed minorities greater representation in colonial security forces and governments in order to give these minorities an intense stake in the colonial regime and, in effect, make them its gendarmes. This is what the French did with the despised (by the Sunnis) Alawite minority in Syria; what the British did with the Hashemites, Bedouins, and Circassians in Jordan; and what the Ottomans and later the British did with the Sunni Arabs in Iraq.

The Arab states that emerged from colonialism after the First World War and the end of the League of Nations mandates promised unity under the banner of Arab nationalism. But as they turned into cynical dictatorships, failing at war, economic development, and governance, they, too, entrenched sectarian biases. They were still the same states Europeans had built. This scarred Arab society so deeply that the impulse for unity was often no match for the deep divisions of tribe, sect, and ethnicity. Some also argue that the infatuation with Arab unity prevented Arab states from developing proper national institutions, which also made them vulnerable to the surge of tribal loyalties and identity politics.

These sectarian states survived for a long time, seeking to hide their deep divisions via tricks such as taking census surveys as seldom as possible. Their authoritarian governments resorted to force when they had to, but more often persuaded restless majorities and minorities to accept things as they were by relying on what the scholar of ethnic conflict David Laitin calls a “hegemonic common sense.”¹⁷ Arab nationalism served as that common sensibility. The promises of fulfilling a historic destiny and standing up to America and Israel were potent enough to push sectarian worries to the side.¹⁸ But over time the pan-Arabist ideology lost its allure, and as its promise increasingly rang hollow, states built to keep in place minority overlordship grew vulnerable.

Iraq is a preview of what the Arab Spring may bring across the region. The loosening of the grip of stolid and brutal states over society brings to the surface competitions for power and resources centered on long-suppressed ethnic and sectarian divisions.¹⁹ At its worst, conflict could turn into full-scale civil wars culminating in the redrawing of maps. (Already the example of South Sudan, born after decades of conflict over irreconcilable differences, is looming large in the region’s imagination—just ask the Kurds.) The specter also looms of broader regional conflagrations as developments in various countries—often involving the same issues, sects, tribes, and ethnic groups in ways that cross borders—become linked together in a chain of conflict. We thought of the fall of dictatorships in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America as a democracy wave; in the Middle East it will be a wave of tribal and sectarian conflict. It is only now, after the American invasion of Iraq and the Arab Spring, that the Middle East is finally throwing off the yoke of colonialism and—via the terrible means of fratricidal bloodletting—getting past its legacy.

So it is that with Gaddafi’s brutal regime gone, Libya is gradually coming apart along tribal and regional lines. Likewise, Yemen is inching closer to civil war and a north-south division, and Syria is descending into a sectarian war between the Sunni majority and the minority Alawites and their allies.²⁰ But the struggle that matters most is the one between Sunnis and Shias. The war in Iraq first unleashed the destructive potential of their competition for power, but the issue was not settled there. The Arab Spring has allowed it to resurface. Today, Shias clamor for greater rights in Lebanon, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, while Sunnis are restless in Iraq and Syria.

In a certain sense, the Middle East is starting to look like South Asia. Politics in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka can be messy. They are more open and democratic than Middle Eastern politics, but South Asian societies feature communal and ethnic divisions that can sometimes erupt into violence. Sri Lanka is the most violent example, and India arguably has done the best job of holding its many separatist groups together. The Arab world, with the exception of Lebanon, was the “anti”–South Asia: authoritarian but stable and united culturally (everyone claims to be Arab first, then something else) and politically (anti-Americanism and opposition to Israel encounter no dissent). But that is no longer true. We are seeing personal and civic ties that bind sects and ethnicities together coming apart,²¹ and political incentives putting a wedge between erstwhile friends and neighbors—and sometimes right through families.²² Weak states do less to protect minorities and lack capacity to prevent outbreaks of violence.²³ When the state’s ability to contain communal violence collapses, yesterday’s unity can quickly give way to today’s hatred and disorder. Regions find peace when states and nations there mirror one another.²⁴ In the Middle East, states do not mirror their nations, and until they do the region will be racked by conflict.

Iraqis like to claim that there was no sectarianism in their country before the U.S. tanks showed up. Shias had Sunni friends, there were mixed marriages, collaborations, and partnerships—although mostly among the urban middle classes. The historian Niall Ferguson reminds us that pluralism was an inverse guide to ethnic and communal violence during the First World War. Wherever there was more intermarriage there was also more ethnic and racial violence.²⁵ We saw this happen in Sarajevo as well. The Middle East is now where Europe was in 1914—gone is the unity and peace that held sectarian violence at bay.

Along the arc from Syria in the Levant to Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, Arab dictatorship has kept in place the dominance of one sect—often the one that is locally in the minority—over the other. The very first consequence of the weakening of those states will be a knife fight between the stubborn, desperate minority that has held power and the energized majority that now wants it. In short, Arab dictatorships from Syria to Bahrain are variations of Saddam Hussein’s state, and the Arab Spring is doing to them what the American invasion accomplished in Iraq: transferring power from the minority to the majority.²⁶

So far Shia protests in Bahrain have gone down under hails of lead and failed to repeat the outcome in Tunisia and Egypt. The Bahraini monarchy has defended its grip on power with ferocity, and with generous Saudi support.

But what the Arab Spring did not do for Bahraini Shias, it did do for the region’s Sunnis. The regime changes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya all empowered the Muslim Brotherhood and, more worryingly still, Salafis. This puritanical sect subscribes to a narrow reading of Islam and loves to patrol its constricted boundaries with an avid hostility toward deviants. Shias come in for special contempt not merely as infidels who refuse the message, but as heretics and apostates who insist on garbling and perverting it. The type of Sunni Muslim fervor that the Arab Spring has unleashed will not stop with vicious assaults against religious “outsider” groups such as Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian minority. On the contrary, it will take aim at perceived enemies within the house of Islam itself and allow greater scope for conflict with Shias.

The uprising in Syria also upset the sectarian status quo. Assad’s Syria was the mirror image of Saddam’s Iraq. Iraq was a Shia-majority country in the clutches of a Sunni regime, whereas Syria is a Sunni-majority country ruled by Alawites, generally viewed as part of the Shia family. True, Bashar al-Assad had been no friend to Iraq’s Shias. To protect Syria’s facade of Arab unity for domestic consumption, Assad decried the American occupation while joining in with the regionwide sympathy for Iraq’s Sunnis (all the while continuing to suppress Sunnis at home). As a result, he supported all manner of Baathist and jihadist outfits in the insurgency that killed and maimed thousands of Iraq’s Shias and challenged their newfound hold on power. Still, his fall from power and Syria’s passage into Sunni hands (the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis are major forces among Syrian Sunnis) cannot help but energize the Sunnis just across the border in Iraq. The despair that led them to accept the outcome in Iraq in 2008 could be replaced by exuberance and a belief that this outcome may still be reversed.

A Sunni regime in Damascus—or controlling large parts of Syria bordering on Iraq—could do for Iraq’s Sunnis what Iran did for its Shias. If you add to that the full force (and cash) of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE—to say nothing of Turkey, Egypt, and the rest—the Arab world could be quite a lonely place for Iraq’s Shias. It was for this reason that Maliki lobbied on behalf of Assad with everyone he met while in Washington in December 2011. He even told President Obama that if the region’s Sunnis—backed by the Arab Gulf states—try to roll back gains made by Shias, “we will all become Hezbollah”—that is, turn radical and wage armed resistance.

Iraq’s Sunnis may still hope to take back Baghdad, but failing that they could opt out of Iraq. A larger Sunni zone stretching from Anbar to northern Lebanon on the one side and the Turkish border on the other would be sandwiched between Shia southern Iraq and Shia and Alawite pockets to the north.

Iraq’s Shias would be sitting in the midst of a hostile Sunni world. Turkey and Saudi Arabia would be supporting their Sunni rivals, with the Turks possibly applying additional pressure via the Iraqi Kurds. Iran would then be the Iraqi Shias’ only friend. The Arab Spring may have weakened Iran’s influence in Egypt and the Levant, but it has confirmed it in Iraq. The political and religious resurgence of Sunni Islam is pushing the region’s Shias closer to Iran.

People in the Middle East talk of religious and national unity, and there are voices calling for bridge building. Egypt’s new president has reached out to Iran and wants his country to bring Iran into the Middle East fold. But sectarianism is the rising tide. It is setting in train complex and interrelated developments that will change the strategic—and possibly the physical—map of the Middle East, deciding regional dynamics for years to come. The sectarian impulse will guide strategic decisions such as Turkey’s support for Iraq’s Sunnis and Saudi Arabia’s mobilization against Iran. America has had nothing to do with this second wave of sectarianism—that was the fruit of the Arab Spring—but the hasty U.S. departure from Iraq paved the way for the tsunami to wash unimpeded over the region.

We cannot prevent all conflict in the Middle East, but we can hope to reduce its impact. A more gradual withdrawal from Iraq or an earlier push for political settlements in Bahrain and Syria would have kept the embers of sectarianism from erupting into raging flames. Left unchecked, strife in Iraq and Syria (and, before long, Bahrain) could combine to produce a belt of instability stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. That would threaten America’s allies in Jordan and Saudi Arabia as well as jack up oil prices and hence threaten the global economy. There would be ethnic cleansing, floods of refugees, humanitarian disasters, and failing states with ungoverned territories that would provide opportunities for al-Qaeda. As Ayad Allawi has sagely and succinctly put it: “The invasion of Iraq in 2003 may indeed have been a war of choice. But losing Iraq in 2011 is a choice the United States and the world cannot afford to make.”²⁷ Too late.

The general verdict on the Obama administration’s Middle East policy is that “it has not done too badly.” There are no blatant mistakes, bleeding gashes, or crippling crises. In fact, the argument goes, the president’s hands-off policy has been good in that it has made the Arab Spring about Arabs—at the height of the protests there were no American flags burning in Cairo or Tunis, and plenty being waved in Tripoli.

This may be “good enough”—for today—but it provides precious little assurance about tomorrow. America’s aim remains to shrink its footprint in the Middle East, and so its approach to unfolding events there has been wholly reactive. It may get a passing grade in managing changes of regime as old dictators fall, but it has largely failed at the real challenge, which is to help new governments in the region move toward democracy and reform their parlous, sclerotic economies. Removing a dictator is only the first step on the road to democracy; beyond that, America has been nowhere to be seen. The Obama administration has neither come up with a strategy for capitalizing on the opportunity that the Arab Spring presented nor adequately prepared for potential fallout in the form of regional rivalry, the explosion of sectarian tensions, and deep-rooted economic crises.

What are America’s interests in the Middle East? How will we protect them as old regimes fall and new ones try to take shape? Can we influence outcomes? How should we prepare for the rise of Islamism, civil wars, state failures, reversals, and recrudescence of dictatorship? We need answers to these questions and a strategy for realizing the best, avoiding the worst, and protecting our interests in the process. America cannot and should not decide the fate of the Middle East, but it should be clear about its stakes in the region, and not shy away from efforts to at least nudge events in more favorable directions as a critical world region faces momentous choices. A “lean back and wait” posture toward unfolding events will not be enough—a series of reactions and tactical maneuvers do not amount to a strategy. A strategy requires having a clear view of our interests and of how to realize them by influencing as best we can the dynamics that are shaping the region.

President Obama’s approach to the Middle East has been distant from the outset. He has wanted to improve America’s image in the Muslim world and feels that the best way to do this is to end America’s unpopular wars there. His modus operandi has been disengagement: end existing commitments, foremost among them Iraq and Afghanistan, and avoid new entanglements. His approach to the Arab-Israeli peace process typifies this. Obama’s June 2009 Cairo speech impressed Muslims with its call on Israel to halt the building of settlements in the West Bank. In 2011, he made a similarly provocative call on Israel to agree to return to its 1967 borders (with mutually agreed swaps of territory with Palestinians). But the Muslim world was wrong to assume that these exhortations signaled a readiness on Obama’s part to roll up his sleeves and help fix problems.¹ In fact, “nowhere in Obama’s foreign policy has the gap been wider between promise and delivery,” writes former American diplomat and observer of the Arab-Israeli scene Martin Indyk, “than in the [peace process].”²

Obama started with a new approach to the issue. He was fervent in his commitment to Israel. Yet he also recognized the corrosive effects that the simmering conflict was having on America’s image and the region’s stability, and was not shy about speaking out against the everyday indignities that Israeli occupation meant for Palestinians. Many Arabs and Muslims were elated and many Israelis incensed, but no one on either side of the divide should have become so excited. All were wildly overestimating Obama’s willingness to get involved in moving the peace process along.

What Obama had in mind was to placate Arab opinion while laying down markers for Israel to abide by. This, he hoped, would by itself spur diplomatic engagement and ultimately a solution. What he did not have in mind was to pick a fight with Israel or commit to a greater U.S. role in facilitating a diplomatic breakthrough. He definitely did not think about a comprehensive diplomatic strategy that would have created the proper context and framework for compromises by both sides (halting new settlement construction could have been a part of that). Instead, he proceeded in an uncoordinated and unproductive fashion by laying undue stress on a single unrealistic demand in a way that stopped the entire process in its tracks. He was determined to extricate America from the Middle East and thought he could do so by talking tough but from the sidelines.

Dealing with Arab and Israeli leaders on the Palestinian issue must have been eye-opening for the president. Publicly Arab rulers pressed him on Palestine, but privately all they wanted to talk about was defanging Iran (the same is true of the Israelis). Obama may have thought that fear of Iran would create common ground between Israel and the Persian Gulf monarchies, enough for them to join hands to resolve the Palestinian issue. The Saudi ambassador to Washington may have fueled such expectations by telling Obama early on that King Abdullah was eager for him to visit Riyadh and would not let him leave empty-handed.³ But the Saudi King was definitely not prepared to lend a hand to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. When Obama met Abdullah in Riyadh in June 2009, most of the hour-long meeting was taken up with a royal lecture on the Iranian threat. The Saudi king wanted America to fix the Iranian problem, not the Palestinian one, and he did not want any linkages between the two issues. In that, the king and Netanyahu were on the same page.

Whatever his personal views, the president quickly handed off the management of the Israel-Palestinian problem to his special envoy, former senator George Mitchell. But in effect, it was Obama’s senior White House adviser, Dennis Ross, who decided the matter. Ross had a long history with the issue, going back to managing the 1991 Madrid Conference that convened shortly after the first Gulf War. He differed with Obama over how best to influence events. He warned against publicly parting ways with Israel, such as by taking a stand on settlements—“showing daylight between the United States and Israel would only encourage Arabs to sit back and wait … rather than step forward and engage with Israel.”⁴ Ross argued that Netanyahu had to work with a difficult domestic coalition, and that the more Obama built trust with the Israeli public—by backing away from publicly pressuring Israel—the more likely the Israeli government would be to cooperate.⁵

Whether or not this was an accurate reading of the situation, it meant that what Obama said turned out to be different from what his administration did. No deeds matched Obama’s bold words. Israelis found little reason to budge, and the Palestinians found themselves worse off. It was hard enough getting Israel to move, and nearly impossible when the president’s lack of follow-through allowed Israel to stand its ground. The Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, told the Daily Beast’s Dan Ephron:

It was Obama who suggested a full settlement freeze. OK, I accept. We both went up the tree. After that, he came down with a ladder and he removed the ladder and said to me, jump. Three times he did it.

⁶

But Abbas could not jump, and remained stuck in the tree. “How can I be less Palestinian than the president of the United States?” was how he put it to anyone ready to hear his complaint. In other words, how could Abbas ask for less from Israel than Obama had? Abbas had to start from the marker that Obama laid down and face the Israeli intransigence that Obama prompted and was unwilling to deal with. His plaint captured the souring mood across the Arab world.⁷

Obama reacted to Israeli intransigence and Arab disappointment in much the same way he dealt with the thorny problems posed by Pakistan: he walked away. The White House periodically repeated its desire for a breakthrough in peace talks, especially when crisis loomed, such as the Palestinians’ threat to ask for UN recognition of their statehood in September 2011. But for all intents and purposes, the president put the issue on the back burner. Obama did not want to get involved, and by the end of his second year in office, relations with Israel had come to focus solely on managing Iran’s nuclear program.

The White House attitude toward the Arab-Israeli issue reflected the administration’s broader desire to dial back U.S. involvement in the Middle East. But that goal was frustrated by the onset of the Arab Spring. America was folding its tent when, in December 2010, a young fruit seller in an obscure Tunisian town set himself on fire to protest the daily injustices that he, like so many of his countrymen, suffered at the hands of a dictatorship. Mohamed Bouazizi’s story went viral on social media as he lay dying in a hospital, and just like that, the wheels of history turned. Obama understood what was happening in the Arab world; in his inaugural speech he had told “those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent” that they were “on the wrong side of history.”⁸ He would call the Tunisian uprising that Bouazizi’s desperate act set off “an inspiration to all of us who believe that each individual man and woman has certain inalienable rights.”⁹ But Obama’s rhetoric did not make up for a reluctant and sputtering response to fast-moving events.

In early 2011, the Middle East looked poised for democracy—you cannot think of a transformation with more significant strategic impact. The outcome would mean much to America, perhaps even a final satisfactory solution to all that in the Middle East had flummoxed us, threatened us, emptied our pockets, and cost our soldiers’ blood. That may be wishful thinking, and there is plenty of evidence today that the Arab Spring will produce illiberal new regimes, hybrid governments blending surviving security forces with rising Islamic parties of various hues. There will be civil wars, broken states, sectarian persecutions, humanitarian crises, faltering economies, and new foreign policy challenges (ranging from warming of relations between Egypt and Iran to new issues to fight over with Russia and China)—nothing resembling a resounding march to democracy and economic prosperity, and no clear embrace of free institutions and norms.

But we did not know this for sure in the heady and hopeful days of early 2011, nor can we say now that the Arab Spring would have been such a disappointment had we engaged with the region quickly and forcefully to give change an economic direction, helping bloated public sectors to reform and integrate into the global economy. We could have had an impact on the outcome had we had a strategy other than washing our hands of the region, and had we shown willingness to exercise leadership. We might not have averted conflicts and humanitarian crises, but we would have had a significant impact in those countries that got through the initial change of leadership and, in the fog of victory, needed help, especially with their economies.

As the extraordinary events were unfolding, there was certitude of a sort in the White House. Obama remained intent upon leaving the Middle East, and he was not going to let himself be distracted from that mission by sudden eruptions of pro-democracy protests, teetering dictators, and looming civil wars. He did not know whether the Arab Spring would lead to ubiquitous democracy or a prolonged period of instability, but regardless, he was determined that America would not try to influence the outcome—not if that meant reversing course to get involved in the region.

Take the case of Egypt, the most important Arab country and the touchstone for change in the Arab world. When hundreds of thousands of Egyptians jammed Tahrir Square to demand that President Hosni Mubarak give up power, Obama took the bold step of supporting their demand for change—first cautiously encouraging reforms, but soon calling on Mubarak to step down immediately.¹⁰ This was a new chapter for America in the Middle East, but not one that amounted to a new approach to the region. Mubarak was on his way out, to be sure. But by encouraging him to resign immediately Obama was not making a commitment to support democratization across the board in the Middle East. America remained closely allied with some of the region’s most authoritarian regimes, and calling for Mubarak to leave soon muddied the waters with them—with Saudi Arabia in particular. Faced with that reality, the administration toned down its unbridled support for change. Rulers in Bahrain or Yemen would not be subject to the same White House demands to heed their people’s call for democracy.

Egypt had little in the way of sound political institutions—no party system to speak of, a weak judiciary, and an infantile civil society. There was nothing on the far side of Mubarak but the likelihood of instability at best, and chaos at worst. America would have liked to see Egypt’s Facebook generation—young, technologically savvy, and relatively liberal—inherit Egypt, but they had no organization to sustain their political drive or charismatic leader to guide them. In time, the Muslim Brotherhood (and the bevy of more radical voices to its right), with its much sharper and more numerous cadres, would make mincemeat of them. The administration could only hope that the Brotherhood would stay the course with democracy—that our enthusiasm for Mubarak to go would not come back to bite us.

I know it is difficult to argue for caution in the face of the overwhelming exuberance that bubbles to the surface when decades of dictatorship at last give way to rays of democratic hope. But having been a child of the 1979 Iranian revolution, I also know how misplaced and even catastrophic such exuberance can prove to be. It would be a useful exercise to read the Western media coverage of Iran between 1977 and 1979. You will not find much concern with theocracy there; any such talk was quickly drowned by giddy and often Pollyannaish expectations of democracy’s imminent triumph. But Iran’s democrats, as attractive as they may have been, lacked the capabilities of the clerics and the communists. The Pahlavi monarchy’s swift demise caught the democrats unprepared (not that they and their fans in the Western press understood this) and gave the upper hand to the architects of a new dictatorship, who already had a plan and a mass movement in place.

The protests in Egypt captivated the world, but Egyptian liberal democrats are no more likely to win the future than were their Iranian counterparts back in 1979. The Shah’s rapid collapse benefited not democracy but theocracy. Given the decades-long surge of the Muslim Brotherhood, there is a strong chance that the same will happen in Egypt.

Hillary Clinton understood the implications. She argued early on that Egypt needed a peaceful, orderly transition to a democratic future.¹¹ It was better for Egypt’s liberals if Mubarak held on for a bit longer and left gradually—a steady transition was better than sudden collapse. That would give Egypt’s liberals time to make up some of their organizational deficiencies vis-à-vis the Islamists—not to mention afford America time to figure out how best to assist the democratic cause. Egypt’s youth, however, were impatient for freedom and not ready for talk of gradualism. Nor were the American media forgiving of anything short of an uncompromising call for Mubarak to be gone. That is what happened in the end, but with Mubarak’s quick exit the grip on power of the military and the “deep state” remained intact, and it was the Islamist forces of Salafism and the Muslim Brotherhood that dominated the political scene. The administration had no choice but to bet on the Brotherhood doing the right thing, opting for a future different from the one that became Iran’s lot when the Shah fell from power.

In February 2011, Secretary Clinton suggested that President Obama should send a special envoy to talk to Mubarak—to assess the situation firsthand and tell the Egyptian president that he needed to plan an orderly exit and a proper transition to democracy. Clinton recommended veteran diplomat Frank G. Wisner to go to Cairo. Wisner knew Egypt well. He had served as ambassador there between 1986 and 1991. He shared Clinton’s view that after decades of dictatorship a credible transition to democracy would take time and that a gradual process would benefit liberal forces, whose institutional weakness was masked by their momentary show of strength on the street. Obama seemed to be on the same page and instructed Wisner to ask Mubarak to plan for a transition.

Wisner delivered Obama’s message of both American support and the imperative of meaningful reform to Mubarak. Mubarak was not ready to leave but agreed not to use violence against the protesters. But protests only grew in intensity, and with Egypt on edge Obama changed course. Wisner was still on a plane back to Washington when the president called on Mubarak to step down immediately. The change came so quickly that it caught Wisner unawares. He had just got off the plane when he told an international conference in Munich that the United States viewed President Mubarak as indispensable to a transition to democracy (i.e., America needed Mubarak for just a bit longer—to get rid of Mubarak). The press focused on the “we need Mubarak” part of his comments and that caused a furor.

With crowds in Tahrir Square growing daily, Mubarak’s position was tenuous to be sure, and the United States was right to look past the stolid dictatorship to embrace the spirit of change.¹² But the president, swept up by the enthusiasm of the moment and egged on by his young staffers, threw caution aside and made a hasty about-face. He reacted to Mubarak’s remarks and maneuvers as if dealing with a campaign news cycle, where every statement had to be quickly countered to catch the next set of newspaper headlines. It was a policy style that reflected the influence of those White House advisers who rose from Obama’s presidential campaign to dominate foreign policy decision making.¹³ They saw the Arab Spring then as “an epochal change in line with their own views of themselves as a new generation.”¹⁴ They had little experience at foreign affairs; what they knew was the fast-paced world of political campaigns. They were dismissive of foreign policy veterans and described them in terms that conjured Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous put-down of France and Germany for questioning the Iraq war. “Old Europe,” he called them—yesteryear’s powers destined for history’s ash heap. Rumsfeld’s wisecrack did not stand the test of time. Wisner and company, too, may yet have the final word on the Arab Spring.¹⁵

Obama’s call for Mubarak to go would not be repeated with other dictators in the region in the months to come—not in Bahrain or Yemen, not even in Libya or Syria as quickly or with the same conviction—and America would in fact deepen its reliance on authoritarian monarchies in the Persian Gulf. Calling for Mubarak to go was an isolated event; it reflected neither an embrace of change across the Middle East nor a commitment to Egypt’s transition to democracy.

Support for dictators has been the bane of American policy in the Middle East. Since Anwar Sadat signed a peace deal with Israel in 1978, America has poured $30 billion in aid into Egypt, with the lion’s share going to the military. The rest, another $3 billion or so earmarked for civilian use, also went to the military—the Egyptian government got to decide which economic or social agencies had technical competence to take advantage of the money and all of them were military owned or contracted their work to organizations and companies backed by the military. America subsidized the growth of the military in the security sector but also throughout the economy.

We have confessed time and again that investing in dictatorship was not a good idea, but we could not identify alternative means for protecting our interests. In time, authoritarian rule proved unstable, producing the very problems we relied on it to contain—and when it started wobbling we were quick to let it keel over. The Mubarak regime was the poster child for this dead-end strategy. Mubarak’s regime was a rock of stability, seemingly unmovable for three decades. Over those decades, Egypt grew poorer and weaker, but also more anti-American and Islamic—with a worrying penchant for extremism. In time, the mismatch between the scale and intensity of Egypt’s problems (including massive unemployment and nonexistent job prospects among the country’s bulging youth population) and the regime’s weak capacity to do anything about them created a tinderbox situation.¹⁶

Mubarak grudgingly embraced reforms, but they only accentuated Egypt’s problems and exposed its vulnerabilities.¹⁷ An unjust, unfree, and corrupt regime is always at its weakest when it begins trying to improve. The fall of Mubarak brings to mind Alexis de Tocqueville’s explanation of the ferment that led to the French Revolution:

Only consummate statecraft can enable a King to save his throne when after a long spell of oppressive rule he sets to improving the lot of his subjects. Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it comes to men’s minds … people may suffer less, but their sensibility is exacerbated.

¹⁸

We should expect authoritarian regimes to go. They cannot survive without changing, and if they change they could fall even more quickly. In the long run it is better to wean ourselves of our dependence on authoritarians and to anchor our interests in democracy instead. But that is a gradual process—and for now America’s policies seem to be divided on this issue. On the one hand, we cheered the downfall of dictators such as Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi; on the other hand, we now rely even more heavily than before on our old authoritarian allies, the Persian Gulf monarchs.

The handling of Egypt revealed Obama’s lack of any game plan for Egypt or the region. Tunisia had been transitioning fairly smoothly, so why would Egypt not do so as well? Why not, in other words, just go with the flow? Tunisia had managed a rapid and painless end to dictatorship—the Tunisian army had wisely refused to fire on citizens or meddle much in politics at all, and Ben Ali was allowed to flee to Saudi Arabia. The administration assumed that Egypt—a larger, poorer, tenser, and less Westernized place than Tunisia—would somehow produce a similarly neat and satisfying outcome. Comparisons then abounded in Washington between what was happening in Tahrir Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Obama’s coterie was afraid that unless he pushed Mubarak out, Obama would be caught on the wrong side of history. But the problem was that the administration had no plans for how to manage the messy process of democracy building that was to follow when Obama called on Mubarak to leave. Nor did Obama ever intend to take ownership of the change as had George H. W. Bush with regard to post-communist Eastern Europe in 1989. The administration’s enthusiasm for democracy remained largely a matter of rhetoric.