I was also concerned that pulling out could put the United States on the defensive and divert attention from the Iranian regime’s criminality and brutality. Iran’s smooth-talking, Western-educated foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, would undoubtedly attempt to portray Iran as a victim of a U.S. president whom some foreign leaders, especially in Europe, regarded as brash and impulsive. Corrupt Iranian clerics and officials would use the U.S. pullout to shift responsibility for Iran’s failing economy away from themselves and toward the United States. Conversely, applying sanctions for nefarious Iranian activities abroad while staying in the flawed agreement might make it clear to the Iranian people that their leaders were the true authors of their problems, as they were squandering the nation’s potential wealth on violence and destruction abroad.
It was for those reasons that I asked the president to give his cabinet time to develop options for an overall Iran strategy into which the JCPOA decisions fit, instead of viewing “stay or get out” in isolation. Toward that end, I asked our weapons of mass destruction senior director, Andrea Hall, and the senior director for Middle East affairs, Michael Bell, to intensify their work to frame the problems associated with Iran. They worked with Dina Powell, deputy national security advisor for strategy; Brian Hook, the director of policy planning at the Department of State, and all relevant departments and agencies to identify the challenges associated with the Islamic Republic and draft goals, objectives, and assumptions as the foundation for a fresh Iran strategy. In May 2017, I convened a Principals Committee meeting, composed of the relevant members of the cabinet, to review our collective framing of Iran’s challenge to our national security and provide direction on the development of options. After the meeting, the president approved our assessment. All agreed that the fundamental problem was the Iranian regime’s permanent hostility to the United States, Israel, its Arab neighbors, and the West.
But the president was impatient. And what made him more impatient was domestic legislation that the Republican-majority House of Representatives and Senate had passed in 2015, meant to force an expected Hillary Clinton administration to publicly and serially confront flaws in the nuclear deal. The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 (INARA) required the administration to certify to Congress every ninety days that the agreement “meets United States non-proliferation objectives, does not jeopardize the common defense and security,” and ensures that Iran’s nuclear activities will not “constitute an unreasonable risk . . .”7 It was a tall order, and one that cut directly against the president’s assessment of the JCPOA.
The first INARA deadline arrived in April 2017, less than two months after I started as national security advisor. When I discovered that the secretary of state intended to send a perfunctory letter certifying that Iran was in compliance, I knew that the president would be incensed. Our team worked with the State Department and other agencies to propose alternative language that certified under the INARA legislation, but also stated clearly that Iranian behavior in the region, enabled by sanctions relief under the nuclear deal, threatened “common defense and security.” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who at times seemed reflexively opposed to suggestions from the White House, rejected that option and sent the terse certification letter. After the president reacted as anticipated, I joined Secretary Tillerson in the Oval Office for a discussion. Tillerson subsequently amended the letter, noting that the nuclear deal “fails to achieve the objective of a non-nuclear Iran. It only delays their goal of becoming a nuclear state.” He stated further that the Iran deal “represents the same failed approach of the past that brought us to the current imminent threat that we face from North Korea,” telling reporters that “The evidence is clear: Iran’s provocative actions threaten the United States, the region and the world.”8
In anticipation of the two remaining INARA certifications in 2017, one in July and another in October, I asked our team to accelerate work on the Iran strategy. We referred to the series of discussions prior to those deadlines as the “gift that keeps on giving.” It was our job to give the president options and, once he chose a course of action, to assist with the sensible execution of his decision. At each deadline, we were prepared to either get out or stay in—we had two sets of diplomatic and communications responses ready that reflected each option.9 Though the decision changed after nearly every conversation, in the end, the president was persuaded to stay in the deal while asking other nations to join us in the imposition of non-JCPOA-related sanctions and help fix the deal’s flaws, an endeavor that ultimately proved unfruitful. In July, simultaneous with the State Department’s certification that Iran was conforming to the letter of the agreement, Treasury secretary Stephen Mnuchin announced sanctions on eighteen Iranian entities that supported terrorist organizations.10
Still, this action was not enough to placate critics who saw pulling out of the deal in much the same way that Obama administration officials had viewed signing it in the first place: as an end in and of itself. Partly in response to those critics, President Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he would be “surprised” if Iran were found compliant in ninety days.11 Unfortunately, public discussion on Iran continued to focus almost exclusively on whether the United States would stay in or get out of the deal, rather than on the broad range of Iranian actions that undermined peace and security in the Middle East and beyond. Few people, either inside or outside the government, articulated how the decision would fit into an overall strategy not only to block Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but also to end its proxy wars.
I asked our National Security Council staff to develop Iran strategy options for presentation to the president prior to the next INARA deadline, in October. The president approved the new Iran strategy in early September, and we started work on a presidential speech meant to inform the American people and international audiences of the Iranian threat and our strategy to protect U.S. and allies’ interests. Another painful conversation on INARA certification was impending, but the president could finally consider options in the context of a comprehensive approach to Iran.
In October, in addition to the binary choice of past certifications, we provided the president with a third choice on INARA: to decline to certify that the deal was in the national interest, but stay in the agreement conditionally as a way to incentivize other nations to address the deal’s fundamental flaws and join the United States in sanctioning Iran’s continued support for terrorists and militias. He approved that option. In his speech, Trump announced that “despite my strong inclination, I have not yet withdrawn the United States from the Iran nuclear deal. Instead, I have outlined two possible paths forward: either fix the deal’s disastrous flaws, or the United States will withdraw.”12
In retrospect, tying the speech on Iran strategy to the INARA decision was a mistake. Press coverage focused almost exclusively on that narrow issue and skipped over the significant shift in Iran strategy. We were running out of time to show how staying in the JCPOA, despite its flaws, was the best way to accomplish the new strategy’s objectives. Mike Bell, Joel Rayburn, and Brian Hook, who would later become the State Department’s lead on Iran policy, traveled to Europe to ask allies to support our efforts and keep the international conversation, and pressure, on Iran. Working with the European signatories, we attempted to marshal support for addressing missile development and restricting Iran’s uranium enrichment permanently, rather than allowing those restrictions to expire in 2025 under the agreement, but I knew it was a long shot. In his last certification of the deal under INARA, the president said, “I am waiving the application of certain nuclear sanctions, but only in order to secure our European allies’ agreement to fix the terrible flaws of the Iran nuclear deal. This is a last chance. In the absence of such an agreement, the United States will not again waive sanctions in order to stay in the Iran nuclear deal. And if at any time I judge that such an agreement is not within reach, I will withdraw from the deal immediately.”13
We had cre
ated a window of opportunity for our allies to demonstrate the viability of staying in the deal while imposing costs on Iran for its destructive behavior in the Middle East. That window closed soon after I departed the White House. My last day as assistant to the president for national security affairs was April 9, 2018. A month later, the president withdrew from the JCPOA. The international reaction was as predicted: the conversation shifted from condemnation of Iran to exasperation with the United States. The following year, President Trump announced his intention to designate the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization, recognizing that “Iran is not only a State Sponsor of Terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft.”14 Israel and the Gulf states, those countries suffering directly from Iran’s proxy wars, were supportive. Though the response from European allies was initially negative, I was confident they would recognize the importance of sanctioning Iran. It was only a matter of time before Iranian aggression clarified that the Iranian regime was the real problem—we could count on the mullahs in Tehran to demonstrate their hostility to the West.15
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BY SUMMER 2019, Iran felt the pressure of the reimposed sanctions. The economy was contracting even faster than in 2018, when GDP fell from 3.7 percent growth per annum to 3.9 percent contraction. Crude oil exports, 2.3 million barrels a day in 2018, fell to 1.1 million barrels a day by March 2019. Inflation rose from 9 to 40 percent. Iranian leaders faced three fundamental choices. First, they could attempt to wait out President Donald Trump and work with other countries to avoid the sanctions. But the economic pressure was significant, and faced with doing business either with the United States or Iran, companies and investors were unsurprisingly choosing the United States. European efforts to circumvent the U.S. financial system in trade and investment were insufficient.16 Second, the regime could enter into talks with the United States and other nations to renegotiate aspects of the deal and address their support for terrorist organizations and militias in exchange for sanctions alleviation. But the revolutionaries in Iran, particularly Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the IRGC, were not predisposed to conciliation. Lastly, they could increase adversarial activity against the United States, Europe, and Gulf states while violating the terms of the agreement to extort the United States and others to relieve sanctions.
Their choice became obvious on June 12. Prime Minister Abe was the first Japanese leader to visit Tehran in four decades. He met with Iranian president Hassan Rouhani in Sa’dabad Palace. Japan wanted to avoid an interruption of or reduction in the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf because, of all the industrialized nations, it had the weakest domestic production relative to its needs. After the sharp reduction in nuclear power generation following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, Japan’s need for cheap oil grew. After reviewing a military honor guard, Abe and Rouhani sat on gold-framed furniture in a private meeting room decorated with flowers and the Iranian and Japanese flags. “If we witness some tensions, the root is the U.S. economic war against the Iranian nation. Any time this war stops, we will witness very positive developments in the region and the world,” Mr. Rouhani said. It was the beginning of an attempt at extortion. During the subsequent meeting with the Supreme Leader, Abe delivered a message from President Trump. Khamenei refused to respond.17
As Rouhani and Khamenei hosted Abe, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy was tracking the movement of the Japanese oil tanker Kokuka Courageous in the Gulf of Oman on its way to the Indian Ocean. Just hours before Abe was to meet with Supreme Leader Khamenei, IRGC speedboats approached the tanker under cover of darkness and affixed limpet mines to it. After the boats sped away, an explosion ripped through the starboard side of the tanker, sending a shock wave toward the bridge and blowing a 1.5-meter-wide hole in the aft. Oil spilled from the hull into the ocean, but the ship’s compartments limited the damage. Realizing that not all the mines exploded, the speedboats returned. By then, the crew of Kokuka Courageous had evacuated and the U.S. Navy had the tanker under surveillance, and a navy aircraft recorded IRGC operatives removing the unexploded mines.18 The Japanese tanker was the second ship attacked that morning, as a limpet mine had damaged the Norwegian tanker Front Altair just an hour earlier. The IRGC clearly had timed the operations as an affront not only to Prime Minister Abe, but also to anyone who intended to bring a message of conciliation to the Islamic Republic. The attacks served as yet another corrective to those who preferred to separate negotiations with Iran from the nature of the regime and the ideology that drives its aggressive behavior.
As it became clear that Iran had chosen to escalate, the United States announced the deployment of additional military forces to the region. Less than a week after the tanker attacks, an Iranian missile shot down a remotely piloted U.S. surveillance aircraft over international waters. The United States was on the brink of retaliation until President Trump halted the planned strikes due to the estimated loss of Iranian life and his belief that such a response would be disproportionate to the provocation. While some applauded the decision as a way to play a longer game of diplomatic, economic, and financial pressure in which the United States had the advantage, the lack of a response emboldened Iranian leaders. It seemed as if President Trump were trying to give the Iranians an out. Trump told reporters that he found “it hard to believe it was intentional if you want to know the truth . . . I have a feeling . . . that it was a mistake by somebody.”19 The president’s comments may have been well meaning but they were symptomatic of the tendency of American leaders to view the latest act of aggression in isolation, rather than in the context of a four-decade-long proxy war Iran continues to wage against us.
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U.S. POLICY toward Iran across six U.S. administrations has suffered from a lack of strategic empathy and a failure to understand how historical memory, emotion, and ideology drive the Iranian regime’s behavior. An effective Iran strategy requires strategic empathy, and that means rejecting both the flawed assumptions that underpinned a bad nuclear agreement and the ineffective, inconsistent strategies we have been employing to counter Iranian hostility since 1979.
Similar to the long-standing assumption that China’s prosperity would lead to liberalization of its economy and government, President Obama hoped that “seeing the benefits of sanctions relief” would convince Iran to focus “more on the economy and its people.” Obama’s deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, who promoted the deal to the American people based on a false choice between the JCPOA and war, suggested that the deal would cause “an evolution in Iranian behavior” as Iran became “more engaged with the international community.”20 The JCPOA was not the first case of American leaders believing that conciliatory actions, such as sanctions relief, would moderate Iranian leaders’ behavior or cause them to prioritize interests over passion and ideology. Hope for warming relations led some to disregard the tendency of Iranian leaders, since the 1979 revolution, to engage with the United States when fearful or under duress. Such engagements used a veneer of sincerity to mask the leaders’ true intentions of either avoiding consequences for terrorist acts or garnering more resources to fund their destructive operations.
In 1979, for example, President Jimmy Carter’s administration did not recognize how deeply anti-Western sentiment drove the revolutionaries in Iran. Hoping to develop a relationship with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and preserve Iran as a Cold War bulwark against the Soviet Union, Carter administration officials closed their ears to the anti-American cheers of the revolution and averted their eyes from the reign of terror that the Ayatollah was inflicting on his people. While visiting Algiers on November 1, 1979, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski sought out Iranian prime minister Mehdi Bazargan at a reception to tell him that the United States was open to a relationship with the new Islamic Republic. Iranian newspapers published photos of the two men shaking hands, which appeared alongside news that Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the deposed Shah, had been admitt
ed to the United States for medical treatment. Iranian revolutionaries put the two pieces of news together and assumed that the CIA and U.S. military were preparing to return the Shah to power. The Iranians in Algiers immediately ended the talks as outraged students in Tehran seized the U.S. embassy and took fifty-two Americans hostage. It was the beginning of a 444-day crisis that would dominate the rest of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. On January 20, 1981, minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, the Iranian government released the hostages, a supposed conciliatory action of goodwill.21 As a first-year cadet at West Point, I was part of a cordon of cheering cadets who lined Thayer Road to welcome the hostages back to American soil as six green-and-white army buses took them through the campus on the way to a three-day respite with their families at the Hotel Thayer.
The regime had released the hostages under duress. Iraq’s invasion of Iran in September 1980 had increased the cost of Iran’s diplomatic and economic isolation. The first stages of the destructive war depleted Iranian weapons and munitions stocks. Because the United States built the Iranian military when the two nations were allies, Iranian officials had no option but to turn for assistance to the nation they called “the Great Satan.”
During Ronald Reagan’s second term as president, and just two years after the October 1983 Iranian-sponsored attack against a marine barracks in Lebanon that killed 241 servicemen, U.S. officials offered missiles in exchange for the release of U.S. hostages taken in Lebanon. After the Iranians got the munitions they wanted, an Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon took three more Americans hostage. Radical revolutionaries in Iran exposed the embarrassing arms-for-hostages scandal, miring the Reagan administration in controversy for its final two years. 22
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