Higher bar: Diplomacy more powerful than bombs

One of my most surprising interviews in Iran came two decades ago, on one of my first visits, when I dropped by the “den of spies,” as the building that once housed the US Embassy was known. A monument to anti-Americanism, it was then plastered with posters denouncing the United States as the “Great Satan,” but I managed to chat privately with a uniformed Revolutionary Guard there.

He was a young man, curious about the US, and very amiable. His favourite movie turned out to be “Titanic.”

Iran’s government was then denouncing America for “disgustingly sick, promiscuous behaviour,” and I asked him if he shared that view. He brightened, and it became clear that he considered this one of America’s selling points.

“To hell with the mullahs,” he confided. “If I could manage it, I’d go to America tomorrow.”

Reflecting on that conversation over the years, I’ve wondered how an Iranian regime that is so unpopular can have so much staying power. Everywhere I’ve gone in Iran, on each visit, I’ve found many people to be scathing about the government’s corruption, hypocrisy and economic mismanagement.

President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are therefore right in their aims: to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons and, ideally, to nurture the emergence of a better government. The question is how to advance these goals.

It’s too early to know the results of the bombings by Trump and Netanyahu, but it’s pretty clear that while the nuclear program was not “obliterated,” as Trump claimed, the strikes did inflict very significant damage. The Defense Intelligence Agency initially suggested that the Iranian nuclear program was set back by a few months; other estimates suggest that the delay is several years.

The big problem is that we don’t know what happened to Iran’s cache of highly enriched uranium, enough to make about nine or 10 weapons; some reports suggest that Iran moved it from the nuclear sites before the bombings. Nor do we know whether Iran has surviving centrifuges or duplicate conversion facilities to process uranium. If it does have these things, Iran may now be incentivised to sprint to a crude nuclear weapon and capable of doing so (though not necessarily of creating a warhead that could be attached to a missile). A European negotiator on Iran nuclear issues, Enrique Mora, has bluntly declared that the bombings marked “the day a nuclear Iran was born.”

So we can’t be sure whether the bombings ended Iran’s nuclear program, delayed it or accelerated it — or, very plausibly, both delayed and accelerated. Much will also depend on whether Iran withdraws from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and kicks out international inspectors. If that happens, we may see more crises and more bombings of Iran in the coming years by Israel or the US.

There is a better way. Critics were mostly right in recounting the flaws of the 2015 nuclear agreement reached in the Obama administration, yet while it was in effect, it was also transformative.

We tend to hold diplomacy to a higher bar than bombs. Any ambassador would be laughed out of the room for proposing an accord with Iran that allowed it to keep some nine bombs’ worth of highly enriched uranium, with no inspections — yet that may be the outcome of the bombings that Trump is celebrating. So however we assess the Trump military strikes on Iran, I hope we’ll now pivot and push for a new nuclear accord, one that deals with its highly enriched uranium. We can’t just shrug when nine or 10 nuclear weapons’ worth of uranium goes missing.

Trump may also have an advantage in negotiating with Iran: He can now credibly threaten the use of military force if Iran is intransigent at the negotiating table. One of Barack Obama’s weaknesses as a negotiator was that enemies knew he had a (well-founded) reluctance to use force.

More broadly, what’s our theory of change? Is it that constant sanctions and military pressure change a country? Looking at Cuba and North Korea, it’s hard to see much evidence for that. Having closely followed North Korea for decades, I’ve come to think that nothing works well against rogue regimes — but that isolating such countries is particularly ineffective and sometimes preserves odious governments by giving them an excuse for their own failures.

Someday, the regime will crack and people power will prevail, but I suspect that will be more likely when there’s peace. The implication is that the diplomatic toolbox, reinforced by military might, is profoundly flawed but may still be more likely than bombs alone to contain Iran’s nuclear aspirations and to deliver lasting change in the country.

Bombs can undermine the regime. But maybe so too can “Titanic.”

@The New York Times