May 29, 2015 | The Weekly Standard

Transformational Diplomacy

Many supporters of an Iranian nuclear agreement believe that a deal could help to moderate, even democratize, Iranian society. Barack Obama’s constant allusions to the transformative potential of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action for U.S.-Iranian relations suggest that he believes an agreement, which would quickly release tens of billions of dollars to the Islamic Republic and reintegrate it into the global financial system, would improve the clerical regime’s behavior. Democrats and Republicans have often touted the transformative power of global markets; our bipartisan China policy is built upon this pedestal. As much as free-trading corporate Republicans, the Clinton administration loved advancing the idea that business spreads amity. A former State Department adviser to Richard Holbrooke and now the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Vali Nasr, wrote a well-received book, Forces of Fortune, which argues that commerce and capitalism are the best ways to vanquish the Middle East’s demons, authoritarianism and Islamic militancy. Although Obama likely doesn’t care too much for Nasr, who also wrote a scathing critique of the president’s foreign policy, he’s advocating the scholar’s medicine for the Islamic Republic.

A cynic might suggest that such apostles of economic determinism are reverse-engineering their ultimate goal: a smaller U.S. military role overseas. Economic “engagement” tends to gain ground in Washington when the alternatives, war and containment, are too unpleasant and expensive to contemplate. Like war-averse enthusiasts of sanctions, trade diplomatists are essentially saying you can have it all: greater global security and prosperity without the blood and guilt of Pax Americana. There is certainly a wide overlap between those in Washington who have already conceded the Islamic Republic atomic weapons and those who find the president’s developing nuclear deal to be an imperfect, but still pretty splendid, arrangement.

But it’s best not to be too cynical. Although most fans of realpolitik do have a soft spot for the gospel that American commerce can soothe the foreign savage beast, Obama has never been a convincing practitioner of this morality-lite school. He’s too uncomfortable with power politics and American hegemony. He cares too deeply about transforming the United States and mirror-imaging his national aspirations overseas. Quintessentially an American liberal, the president really does seem to believe that familiarity, even with Islamist regimes, ought not to breed contempt.

Many Iranians, too, cling to the idea that domestic liberalization cannot happen unless foreigners—principally Americans—do the right thing. Prominent dissidents have advocated trade and diplomacy with the West as a means of opening up their own society. A huge fan of the president’s foreign policy, the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart, recently highlighted Akbar Ganji, a famous journalist and dissident who was once a hard-core member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as an example of an Iranian democrat who believes that the West’s nuclear diplomacy with the clerical regime could lead, eventually, to a more open, democratic society. Military threats and sanctions against the mullahs are, Ganji emphasizes, always counterproductive.

As a tool of regime change or nuclear diplomacy, sanctions have been predicated on the assumption that economic coercion can deliver unsustainable political pain. Many Iranian dissidents still hold fast to the belief that the Islamic Republic can have a smooth transition from autocracy to representative government, that the ugliness of the revolution, the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), the continuing brutal repression of dissent and democracy (especially the Green Movement in 2009), and the blood-soaked denouement of the Arab Spring have created a nation of fallen and depressed revolutionaries who don’t have the stomach for confronting head-on the mullahs and their Revolutionary Guards. They envision a peaceful, more prosperous, sanctions-free future in which the ruling elite will evolve. Islamist ideology may not disappear from Iran’s discourse, but the appetite for violence will evanesce. Although many Iranian dissidents are socialists (Marxism is far from dead in Persia), they still see global commerce and greater foreign contact as a softening force, at least vis-à-vis the clerical state. An Iranian Thermidor will arrive in part courtesy of Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Boeing, and Western tourists.

For Ganji and many other dissidents, Iranians can’t “build democracy under impossible circumstances. They cannot foster liberty and human rights for their people in the fires of hell, created by war, bloodshed, and destruction”—which is, in Ganji’s mind, what inevitably happens with American military actions against authoritarian Middle Eastern states. Unlike President Obama, who has a nuclear clock ticking against his political aspirations, Ganji appears to be happy to wait out the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guards, confident that history is behind the triumph of democracy. Since Ganji was once close to Saeed Hajjarian, a founding father of the Islamic Republic’s intelligence ministry, he might know something about the early days of the nuclear-weapons program. Like so many Iranian dissidents, however, Ganji gives the impression that he really doesn’t care much about the bomb. He’s consumed by the frustrating, so far intractable question: How does a (Shiite) Muslim country escape from a religious revolution?

The Architects of Theocracy

Pro-democracy Iranian dissidents—and President Obama—are in a predicament: They keep hoping that the “pragmatic” men who’ve done so much damage to Persian civil society will somehow change their spots. As Ganji should know, and the president probably does not, economic dynamism has never been the driving priority for the regime, even for Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the former majordomo of the political clergy and the father of the Islamic Republic’s pragmatic “technocrats,” and Hassan Rouhani, Rafsanjani’s most famous disciple, who’s grown rich through the revolution’s redistribution of wealth to the ruling clerical class. The bonanza that awaits the ruling elite after a nuclear agreement is signed and sanctions are lifted will probably produce an economy proportionally no larger than it was in the 1990s, when American sanctions were weak and European ones were nonexistent. A hopeful Exxon-Mobil may have hired a Washington lobbying outfit to monitor American sanctions, but U.S. corporations are unlikely to return to the Islamic Republic anytime soon. And major European businesses may not gallop back either: The clerical regime has always been a difficult business partner, and the legal and political environment—because of the inherent uncertainty of Iranian politics, the nuclear program, and the reach of continuing American sanctions—may well make the Iranian marketplace less compelling than it was in the 1990s. Ali Khamenei and Rafsanjani then welcomed billions in foreign investments—while they were also green-lighting nuclear-weapons research, terrorism overseas, and repression at home. The unexpected landslide victory of the mild-mannered and bookish cleric Mohammad Khatami in the 1997 presidential election was a nationwide scream against Rafsanjani’s and Khamenei’s despotism (Rafsanjani was president from 1989 through 1997; Khamenei became supreme leader through Rafsanjani’s intercession upon the death of Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989). The Islamic Republic’s only reform period lasted two years, from 1997 to 1999. It wasn’t that long ago that democratic dissidents openly loathed Rouhani for his complicity in immiserating them.

But their public forgetfulness is understandable. They have nowhere else to turn, since within the Iranian system there are essentially two choices: It’s either the clerical and lay technocrats who have been nurtured by Rafsanjani and Rouhani or the progeny of the Revolutionary Guards and the even lower-class Basij, the volunteer mobilization force who during the Iran-Iraq war drove motorcycles across minefields and now provide the manpower for the morals police and the riot-control forces. The much-despised, Holocaust-denying former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom the supreme leader liked until he started questioning the necessity of the clergy as intermediaries between God and man, is the prototypical bright urban peasant raised high by the revolution. In the 2013 campaign, Rouhani’s opponents were typical of candidates in Iran’s stage-managed elections.

Pro-democracy Iranian dissidents—and President Obama—are in a predicament: They keep hoping that the “pragmatic” men who’ve done so much damage to Persian civil society will somehow change their spots. As Ganji should know, and the president probably does not, economic dynamism has never been the driving priority for the regime, even for Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the former majordomo of the political clergy and the father of the Islamic Republic’s pragmatic “technocrats,” and Hassan Rouhani, Rafsanjani’s most famous disciple, who’s grown rich through the revolution’s redistribution of wealth to the ruling clerical class. The bonanza that awaits the ruling elite after a nuclear agreement is signed and sanctions are lifted will probably produce an economy proportionally no larger than it was in the 1990s, when American sanctions were weak and European ones were nonexistent. A hopeful Exxon-Mobil may have hired a Washington lobbying outfit to monitor American sanctions, but U.S. corporations are unlikely to return to the Islamic Republic anytime soon. And major European businesses may not gallop back either: The clerical regime has always been a difficult business partner, and the legal and political environment—because of the inherent uncertainty of Iranian politics, the nuclear program, and the reach of continuing American sanctions—may well make the Iranian marketplace less compelling than it was in the 1990s. Ali Khamenei and Rafsanjani then welcomed billions in foreign investments—while they were also green-lighting nuclear-weapons research, terrorism overseas, and repression at home. The unexpected landslide victory of the mild-mannered and bookish cleric Mohammad Khatami in the 1997 presidential election was a nationwide scream against Rafsanjani’s and Khamenei’s despotism (Rafsanjani was president from 1989 through 1997; Khamenei became supreme leader through Rafsanjani’s intercession upon the death of Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989). The Islamic Republic’s only reform period lasted two years, from 1997 to 1999. It wasn’t that long ago that democratic dissidents openly loathed Rouhani for his complicity in immiserating them.

Let us recall the “serious” alternatives to Rouhani: The longtime mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqir Qalibaf, was a famous commander in the Revolutionary Guards and a former commander of the national police forces, who proudly bragged about how he had beaten student demonstrators from a motorcycle in 1999. Saeed Jalili, the favorite of Khamenei, is a one-legged Iran-Iraq war survivor, a former “diplomat,” and a nuclear negotiator with the European Union who intensely disliked spending time with Europeans. He could, however, opine on the iniquity of the West’s irreligious culture and the intense joy of visiting every Shiite shrine in Iraq, no matter how small. Then there’s Mohsen Rezai, boss of the Revolutionary Guards from 1981 to 1997, whose campaign motto was “Say Hello to Life!”

By comparison with these men, Rouhani might be a moderate. From 1989 to 1997, he and Rafsanjani oversaw the largest foreign assassination campaign and the most intense period of anti-Western terrorism in the history of the Islamic Republic, but so far as we know, he never personally participated in any killing or act of terrorism. Rouhani, who studied at the secular Tehran University before the revolution and undertook a long-distance Ph.D. in the 1990s at Glasgow Caledonian University (whether he actually wrote his dissertation is open to question), appears to have sincerely wanted a Western, secular seal of approval. That at least makes him more cosmopolitan than many in the Islamic Republic’s ruling elite.

Akbar Ganji is an extreme example of how convoluted the reasoning can get with dissidents searching for a way out. As an investigative journalist, he claimed in 2000 that Ali Fallahian, Rafsanjani’s former minister of intelligence, was the mastermind of the so-called Chain Murders, a series of assassinations of Iranian intellectuals from 1988 to 1998. There is little doubt in Ganji’s own reporting that Rafsanjani, and therefore Rouhani, were complicit in these murders. In 2000 Hajjarian, who was probably Ganji’s primary source for his exposé, was shot in the head and paralyzed. And yet Ganji’s sympathies, at least publicly, still lean towards Rouhani and, as always, away from the United States. Like a sentimental old European Communist whose dreams survived the trauma of Stalinist purges and “fraternal” Soviet invasions, Ganji still can’t let go of his tiers-mondisme. As much as anyone from the revolution’s first generation, Rafsanjani and Rouhani can lay claim to forming the institutions and ethics that have allowed the Islamic Republic to survive as a functioning theocracy. It is a perverse irony that so many Iranians who’ve grown hostile to the nature of that republic default in elections to the technocratic class who built the theocracy.

Edge of Tomorrow: Live. Die. Repeat.

Iranians aren’t the only ones captured by their own illusions and fear of violence. Leaving aside his fascination with transformative capitalism, President Obama’s entire approach in the nuclear negotiations can be boiled down to one factor: fear of American military action against the Islamic Republic. The clerical regime will retain a substantial nuclear-weapons infrastructure under any deal Obama concludes because the president fears that Khamenei will walk if he insists on greater curbs. As Johns Hopkins University’s Michael Mandelbaum put it in an unflattering comparison between Soviet-American arms-control talks and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, “Surely the main reason [Obama has conceded so much] is that, while there is a vast disparity in power between the two parties, the United States is not willing to use the ultimate form of power, and the Iranian leaders know this.”

And even the big bet that Obama is making on a rapid Iranian evolution is surely in part also based on his fear that the Iranian side will not long allow constraints on its atomic aspirations. To appreciate the audacious optimism of this wager, it’s helpful to look at the Islamic Republic’s history in 10-year increments. The nuclear agreement envisioned by Obama—assuming it doesn’t collapse of its own complexity, contradictions, and the certainty of Iranian cheating—gives Tehran an industrial-sized uranium-enrichment and plutonium-production capacity after a decade. Ten years is a lifetime in foreign policy; it is, however, usually a small evolutionary span for a nation. Here, for instance, are snapshots of the “progress” made by the Islamic Republic over six different periods of 10 years:

* In 1983 the Iranians, using their allies in Beirut, blow up the U.S. Marine and French military barracks there (in his published diary, Rafsanjani, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s right-hand man, slyly alludes to the bombing before it happens); in 1993, while Germany and France are kicking into high-gear their economic engagement with post-Khomeini Iran, the Iranian intelligence ministry, under Rafsanjani’s direction, is still killing Iranian expatriates in Europe. As late as 1996, an Iranian agent shoots Reza Mazlouman, an education minister under the shah and Rouhani’s detested teacher at Tehran University, in Paris. With Khatami’s election in 1997, the assassinations in Europe stop.

*  In 1984 Rafsanjani, Rouhani, and their close ally Mohammad Reyshahri establish the Islamic Republic’s intelligence ministry; 10 years later, the intelligence ministry, now under the operational direction of Ali Fallahian, orchestrates the bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires. Iranian agents kill 85 and wound hundreds. Fallahian, today one of President Rouhani’s closest advisers, remains under international arrest warrants issued by Argentina and by Germany for the assassination of Kurdish Iranian dissidents at the Mikonos restaurant in Berlin in 1992.

*  In 1989 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini dies; in 1999 Ayatollah Khamenei crushes nationwide student demonstrations against press censorship and the police state.

*  In 1996 Khamenei and Rafsanjani approve the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, which kills 19 U.S. servicemen and wounds 498 others; 10 years later Khamenei reenergizes Iran’s nuclear program, which is by this time successfully running uranium through the entire nuclear-fuel cycle. The atomic program, revealed by an Iranian opposition group in 2002, hadn’t significantly advanced after the American invasion of Iraq for fear, as Rouhani colorfully put it in 2005, that “we would have given the knife into the hands of a drunk Abyssinian,” meaning George W. Bush. In 2006, with America overwhelmed by a burgeoning insurgency in Iraq in part fueled by Iran, that fear dissipated.

*  In 1999 Rouhani, then the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, which decides great matters of internal security and foreign affairs, including terrorism, attacks the nationwide student demonstrations as a threat to the integrity of the revolution. He lauds the security forces, especially the intelligence ministry, for their “severity” against those who insult the supreme leader and threaten religion and the state; in 2009 Rouhani stands by the supreme leader when he crushes the pro-democracy Green Movement, which has brought nearly three million Iranians into the streets of Tehran to protest a fraudulent presidential election.

*  In 2005 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is elected president, and a major crackdown on dissidents and other “deviants”—especially Baha’is—envelops the country; 10 years later, after nearly 2 years of the “moderate” Rouhani presidency, the persecution of Baha’is and political dissidents, including the routine application of imprisonment, torture, and the death penalty, may have gotten worse.

The Great Healer?

So if we are unlikely to see a nuclear agreement produce moderation in Iranian politics within a decade, what are we likely to see if Khamenei decides to vouchsafe to Obama the diplomatic capstone of his presidency?

Probably the exact opposite of what the president intends. It is entirely conceivable that Obama will engineer what has been unthinkable in Iranian politics: a  sustainable alignment between the technocrats and the Revolutionary Guards. In foreign policy, this will likely translate into more, and more skillful, Iranian adventurism. This will be no mean achievement by Obama, since beyond Westernized, pro-democracy university students, there is probably no one in Iran for whom the guards have had greater contempt than Rafsanjani and Rouhani. These two mullahs have severely criticized the Guard Corps since the Iran-Iraq war. They even once tried to abolish it for fear the corps would become what indeed it has: the supreme leader’s praetorians, a state within a state, highly resistant to Rafsanjani’s and Rouhani’s suasion.

Aside from the appeal of democracy to educated Iranians, the core political problem of the Islamic Republic has been the growing disunity of the ruling elite. This fracturing was on display in 2009 when founding fathers of the Islamic Republic Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi (both presidential candidates) and Rafsanjani split from Khamenei, who’d made it clear before the election that he wanted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reelected and after the vote that he wanted the president’s critics within the regime to cease their protests against the official election returns. Although no friend of democracy, Rafsanjani loathed Ahmadinejad, the Islamic Republic’s first populist lay president, who took great joy in going after the fabulously wealthy mullah and his allies.

Before Rouhani’s election in 2013, the regime had four big fissures: Mousavi/Karroubi vs. Khamenei, Rafsanjani vs. Khamenei, the college-educated vs. the revolutionary urban peasantry, and the lay/clerical technocratic class vs. the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij. All of these antagonisms overlap, and foes in one struggle may be allies in another, sometimes producing, at least for many Westerners and Westernized Iranians, contradictions difficult to understand. For example, the technocratic class, which Rafsanjani and Rouhani have led for four decades, has leaned towards Rafsanjani in his struggles with Khamenei. Sometimes, though, it hasn’t. Many technocrats don’t like Rafsanjani, aka “the Shark.” After watching him double-cross and abandon his friends over the years, few in the elite, perhaps even including Rouhani, trust him.

Mousavi, for example, is a lay, seriously left-wing technocrat, who along with Rafsanjani made herculean efforts as prime minister to keep Iran functioning during the Iran-Iraq war. He has long shown considerable contempt for Khamenei. They were often at odds during Mousavi’s premiership (1981-1989), and even before the titanic clash in 2009, Mousavi clearly didn’t consider Khamenei his political and intellectual equal. Yet Mousavi has never been comfortable with Rafsanjani and Rouhani: He may have—it’s not clear—jettisoned completely the idea that Shiite clerics should have privileged political positions. After years of house arrest and intrusive surveillance, Mousavi may believe that only elected leaders ought to govern. Khamenei needlessly traumatized himself and the country in 2009: If Mousavi had become president, the odds are good that he would have done what Rouhani did four years later, except better. An intellectually hip, anti-American tiers-mondiste, Mousavi likely could have aborted European sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program.

Some members of the technocratic class are also religiously hard-core: They loathe and fear the less-religious, pro-democracy, university-educated crowd that gathered behind Khatami in 1997 and propelled the massive street demonstrations of the Green Movement. The current speaker of parliament, Ali Larijani, has many things in common with the technocrats. He’s very bright, well-educated (he appears to have actually earned his Ph.D.), rich, and passably comfortable associating with Europeans—the former EU diplomatic chief Javier Solana liked him as Iran’s nuclear negotiator. He comes from a prestigious five-star revolutionary clerical family who can’t stand the sight of Ahmadinejad. However, Larijani, a former commander in the Revolutionary Guards, is vigilantly opposed to expanding the bandwidth of acceptable Western cultural expression, especially concerning women’s social rights (something not true of Ahmadinejad) and has consistently sided with Khamenei against Rafsanjani in their great tug of war.

Although those who favor American and European engagement remain willfully blind to this fact, it is the more cosmopolitan technocrats and their allies in the ministry of intelligence, not the more parochial and less-well-traveled leaders of the Guard Corps, who have engaged more enthusiastically and with greater success in terrorism overseas—often at the same time they were reaching out to Europeans and Americans for investment in Iran. One of the enduring political achievements of Rafsanjani and Rouhani was to centralize national-security decisions at the Supreme National Security Council, which Rouhani managed as secretary from 1989 to 2005. (When Rouhani resigned in disgust because of Ahmadinejad’s crude handling of the United Nations’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, Khamenei immediately reappointed him his personal representative to the Supreme National Security Council). Unintentionally, engagement enthusiasts caricature the Islamic Republic as a banana republic when they ascribe the clerical regime’s nefarious foreign actions, especially terrorism against the West and Jews, to “rogue” forces unaffiliated with the technocrats, especially Rafsanjani and Rouhani. Many autobiographies of revolutionary VIPs, including members of the supreme council and senior intelligence officials, have been published: All point to the preeminence of the council in foreign affairs and national security. There is no evidence to suggest that when it comes to terrorism abroad or the nuclear program the Supreme National Security Council hasn’t been the decisive forum for determining policy since 1989.

The president’s recent interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reveals, among other things, how poorly Obama understands Iran’s technocratic class. Obama doesn’t appear to realize that Rouhani and Rafsanjani have been proponents of neither greater democracy nor greater government accountability to the Iranian people. They do want a more efficient, powerful state. They certainly believe that they can coopt a bigger slice of modernity without running a severe risk to the integrity of their theocracy, which they again would like to dominate. 

Since Khamenei has extended a friendly and trusting hand to Rouhani for 35 years, the odds are high that the Iranian president hasn’t become, as Obama wants to believe, a robed, white-turbaned, nonrevolutionary, economic pragmatist who must deliver the goods to his constituents. When Obama looks at the relationship between the clerical regime and Hezbollah and sees that the regime will send missiles to its proxy even “when their economy is in the tank,” he unwittingly alights upon the truth: Money doesn’t make the Iranian world go round. It’s striking that such an intellectual politician, who can quickly list the great minds who’ve shaped him, downplays or ignores the formative intellectual forces that have guided the Islamic Republic’s ruling clergy for four decades.

Obama is, like so many others, undoubtedly and understandably swayed by the superior aesthetics of Iran’s technocrats. Rafsanjani, Rouhani, and especially the American-educated foreign minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif know how to interact with foreigners, especially Westerners, without making them nervous. If not pressed on sensitive subjects, they know how to talk to journalists and the Davos business elite. These class-conscious technocrats haven’t abandoned Persian politesse. Amidst so many dour mullahs and Revolutionary Guards, they smile. And they are not so puffed up with revolutionary pride that they mind lying to Westerners. As Secretary of State John Kerry might even say of foreign minister Zarif and his minions, they are, sometimes, fun to hang out with.

If the supreme leader can bring himself to accept the deal offered by the European Union and the United States, Rouhani may be able to heal, or at least better manage, the Islamic Republic’s fractured, mean-spirited elite. He may have convinced Khamenei, who clearly enjoyed the in-your-face nuclear diplomacy of Ahmadinejad and Jalili, that slower is better when it comes to nuclear arms. He may even have the Revolutionary Guards on his side. Both the Guard Corps’s chief, Mohammad Ali Jafari, and the Quds Force commander, Qassem Soleimani, who reports directly to the supreme leader and is responsible for the corps’s operations in Iraq and terrorist activities overseas, have been supportive of the nuclear negotiations. Soleimani has gone out of his way to be nice to Zarif, who, rumor has it, has spent time trying to build personal rapport with Khamenei’s favorite guardsman. When it came to the framework agreement, Jafari even jumped ahead of the supreme leader in endorsing the Iranian nuclear negotiating team’s efforts. These two men are the dominant players within the corps and are sometimes, it appears, unfriendly competitors. If the clerical regime develops atomic arms in the not-too-distant future, one of these men will likely have operational control over them.

And they have good reasons to be supportive of Rouhani’s and Zarif’s handiwork. The framework, assuming it holds, will leave Iran a threshold nuclear-weapons state. All of the atomic sites under the guards’ direct control will remain open. Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman has made it clear that the regime’s intercontinental ballistic-missile programs, which the Revolutionary Guards also oversee, are beyond the nuclear negotiations’ purview. Sherman has said that Washington will focus on the development of atomic warheads, which is an incomparably harder intelligence task than finding and stopping ICBM development. Khamenei has already made it crystal clear that in an acceptable agreement IAEA inspectors will not have “go anywhere, go anytime” access to Iranian facilities. This means that foreigners will not be inspecting Revolutionary Guard bases, precisely where the regime in the past has put suspected nuclear-weapons research programs and where it is likely to have them now and in the future.

If President Obama wants an agreement, he (and the more Iran-suspicious French) will have to accept the supreme leader’s terms, which means that Kerry and his team will have to devise language and inspections methodology whereby we pretend to have “go anywhere, go anytime” access, while the Iranians ignore us without consequence. This may yet prove an insurmountable hurdle: Khamenei dislikes pretense. But if the supreme leader can swallow the language, the guards will certainly follow his lead.

Once the Islamic Republic’s nuclear-weapons research developed in earnest in the 1990s, Rafsanjani and Rouhani never once, so far as we know, challenged the Revolutionary Guards’ oversight of the atomic and long-range ballistic-missile programs, which have developed, as they always do, side by side. Rafsanjani, Rouhani, and Khamenei have worked closely over the years on many issues, but probably on none more closely than the nuclear quest. Rouhani is asking, at most, that Khamenei and his praetorians slow down. It will be a miracle if the Obama administration and the European Union are able to maintain any Iranian fear of “snapback” sanctions once the EU oil embargo ends and European companies and investment return. Best-case scenario: We will have 24 months before whatever scant diplomatic utility we currently derive from any lingering fear of economic coercion runs out. Rouhani regularly claims that sanctions are already dead. That’s Persian braggadocio. He is reifying the future too quickly into fact.

Like Khamenei, the Guard Corps has always seen economics as a subset of political power. Khamenei has given the corps so much economic independence and muscle—and largely sided with it in its efforts to develop a state within a state—to ensure its institutional loyalty to him and theocracy in general. If Rouhani can destroy the sanctions regime, then he can claim to have enriched both the guards and the technocrats, whose primary business allies are civilians. Like the guards, this crowd feeds overwhelmingly off government and semi-official contracts. In a sanctions-free world, the guards, who are primary players in many critical areas of the Iranian economy, will probably do better than the private and semi-private firms unaffiliated with the corps. They may do a lot better.

The guards have grown rich off Western sanctions: They have regularly had privileged, no-bid rights to major government projects and subsidized financing where others have not. Some in the corps may fear a more competitive economic environment. But the economic tentacles of the corps—the political power and influence that it wields through its innumerable former officers and the intimate ties the guards enjoy with the economic network around the supreme leader—put it in an exceptionally strong position to exploit the new market that a deal will bring.

Audacity, and Still More Audacity

This good fortune won’t make the guards forgive Rouhani his past sins, but it will help the ruling elite operate more cohesively and be less likely to fracture in the face of future internal dissent. It will also help the political elite circle the wagons around a common, even more aggressive, foreign policy.

Tehran remains an underdog in Syria, its most important regional challenge, since the Shiite Alawite population sustaining the Assad regime isn’t large enough (around 10 percent) to withstand the continuing insurgency, even with the use of barrel bombs and chlorine gas. Tehran and its Lebanese expeditionary force, Hezbollah, will have to do more to keep the regime afloat. More-lethal weaponry, from Iran and Russia, is needed. But the most pressing demand is manpower. Hezbollah must do more, since if the Alawites lose in Syria, its preeminent position in Lebanon will quickly come into question. But when Lebanese Shiite fighters in Syria are as young as 15, it’s pretty clear that Hezbollah, too, is having trouble recruiting. This will inevitably oblige the Revolutionary Guards to do more, including increase and lengthen combat tours for mainline Revolutionary Guards (obituaries and funeral announcements already show that guards serving outside the expeditionary Quds Force are now dying in Syria).

There has been little dissent among the ruling Iranian elite about Syria (Rafsanjani obliquely criticized Assad for using poison gas, suggesting this was no way to rule a country). Rouhani and senior guard commanders, however, have been fire-breathers in their support for the Syrian dictatorship. To save the Alawites, just to maintain the status quo, the clerical regime will have to do more to break the Sunni resistance, which means an even bigger bloodbath. In Syria at least 250,000 have died, several times that number have been wounded and maimed, around 4 million have fled the country, and millions more are internally displaced.

Iran’s challenges in Iraq and Yemen will also demand more. In Yemen, Tehran can continue to get away with doing relatively little and accomplishing a lot, since the Shiite Houthi rebellion (the Houthis are now, de facto, the Yemeni government) has real historical traction among Yemen’s Shiites, who are at least 40 percent of the country’s population. And annoying the Saudis in Yemen, always a popular cause in Tehran across the political spectrum, will cost the mullahs a lot less than the Saudis will have to spend to oppose them. But costs will rise if Riyadh continues to up its military aid to Yemen’s Sunnis.

In Iraq the Iranians also have the upper hand, since their primary objective is to maintain the status quo: keep the country unsettled and the Iraqi Shia beholden. The American withdrawal in 2011 blew the center out of Iraqi politics. It encouraged, and allowed the Iranians to encourage, the worst impulses among the Iraqi Shia. The recent collapse of the Iraqi army in Ramadi before the forces of the Islamic State shows that the army, despite the investments of the Obama administration to resurrect it after its ignominious rout in Mosul last summer, is probably finished as a fighting force. This is mostly good news for Iran, since its primary influence in Iraq arrives via the Shiite militias that it maintains.

The White House has stubbornly refused to admit that the clerical regime replicates itself by establishing variations of the Lebanese Hezbollah wherever it can find fertile ground. This is an issue that unites Iranian technocrats and hard-liners. And since the American military and the Bush administration lost control of the Sunni insurgency in 2005, Tehran has been sowing its seeds in Mesopotamia. The clerical regime may not want Shiite militias to attempt a conquest of all the Sunni regions of Iraq, but it will have to support operations against Mosul and Ramadi, which are too important to leave in the Islamic State’s hands. These battles will consume a lot of Iraqi manpower. Given the Sunni civilian bloodshed that occurred in the much smaller battle for Tikrit, which fell to Shiite militias in April only when American airpower forcefully interceded, the battles of Mosul and Ramadi could well shift Sunni Gulf Arab money towards all of the Sunni Arab forces opposing Iran, including the Islamic State. This is already happening in Yemen and Syria, where the Gulf states (and in Syria, the Turks, too) are supporting Sunni jihadists fairly indiscriminately.

It may not dawn on the Obama administration that Iranian and American interests don’t overlap at all in the Middle East (the clerical regime has willfully created the conditions that allow Sunni jihadists to thrive). Iranian Shiite revolutionaries, even when they’re crude, are vastly more appealing than their Sunni counterparts. Culture matters. Rafsanjani and Rouhani have killed far more Americans, with much greater strategic impact, than has the Islamic State, yet they successfully opposed Iranian fundamentalists who wanted to demolish Iran’s pre-Islamic architectural treasures. Khamenei really is, as President Obama has described him, “complicated,” whereas the Sunni hard core are mostly rapaciously prosaic. And in Persian complexity, the president takes hope.

Yet as the Sunni body count mounts, as Iranian actions become more direct, undeniable, and bloody, the nuclear agreement will be difficult to defend as an instrument reinforcing “moderate” elements in Tehran—except in comparison with the jihadists of the Islamic State. As Professor Mandelbaum noted, Obama has turned Soviet-American arms-control history upside down, freeing the Iranians in the negotiations from any obligation to behave themselves in the Middle East. It is hard not to conclude, as Mandelbaum did, that the only party likely to be transformed by a nuclear agreement is the United States.

It is possible that a new bipartisan consensus has formed: Neither Democrats nor war-weary Republicans want to continue to bear the burden of being, as the American realist Richard Haass nicely put it, the world’s “reluctant sheriff.” Stopping the Islamic Republic from becoming a nuclear hegemon in the Middle East may just be asking too much. If this is so, Iran’s pragmatic technocrats will cheer every bit as loudly as their compatriots in the Revolutionary Guards.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a contributing editor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Issues:

Iran