Americans obsess over means, while our enemies focus on purpose. American decision-makers and their paladins focus so intently on the practical requirements of an Iranian nuclear weapon that we forget to ask why this Persian-majority state wants one, thus obscuring simultaneous Iranian initiatives designed to achieve the same strategic ends through other means.
While the prospect of nukes in the paws of the Tehran regime is certainly unappealing, it’s doubtful any Iranians, even the most embittered, would attempt to strike an adversary with such weapons. An Iranian nuclear capability would be about hegemony, not destruction: Iran—Persia still—is interested in empire not suicide.
While there is also a defensive quality—“Better not mess with us!”—to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the real strategic utility is to awe all those still standing amid the wreckage of the Middle East, to facilitate Iran’s return to the regional dominance it believes to be its due: Iran’s leaders, be they shahs or mullahs, see their patrimony—an inheritance stolen, in their view—as an imperial role in the vast region, leprous with history, between Beirut and Kabul, Mecca and Samarkand. We see history in snapshots; Persians read it as an endless scroll.
Suspend, for a moment, our excited focus on the here and now. Consider Persia’s three-thousand-plus years of imperial ambitions, occasionally interrupted but never extinguished: It’s a remarkable chronicle of persistence, whether its rulers were idolaters, Zoroastrians, or Muslims. Persia’s enemies have been reduced to strategic impotence where they have not disappeared entirely: Hittites, Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks (classical or Byzantine), Romans, Arabs, Mongols, Turks…apart from the comically (if deadly) ill-conceived designs of Turkey’s current president, which old foe has a vision of empire restored?
While we have concentrated on the nuclear issue, Iran already has expanded (though not yet consolidated) its influence westward to the Mediterranean Sea, constructing a post-modern empire on the cheap, asserting its strategic vision while exploiting its current religious identity as a Shi’a state.
Not all has gone perfectly for Tehran. The Persian assumption of racial superiority over Arabs is an old, old story still told, impeding Iran’s consolidation of hegemony in Iraq and Syria, while its hatred of Israel leads to tactical and operational setbacks throughout the region—and, probably, the ultimate denial of nuclear weapons to Tehran. Yet, we should be impressed with how much today’s Persians have achieved with little outlay. The vast armies of Cyrus or Xerxes may be present in spirit, but a relative handful of Revolutionary Guards, in concert with clients, have staked today’s claims far from home. Indeed, it may not be excessive to speak of the genius of the late General Suleimani, whose death at the hands of the Trump administration was as justified and essential as the action’s reflexive critics were naïve.
As for an American return to a no-nukes compact of some sort with Iran, it would prove to be of immediate practical—economic—advantage to Tehran, but is unlikely to constrain Iran’s over-arching ambitions. On the other hand, it may be a necessary sacrifice on our part in order to further repair key alliances badly damaged by the last administration’s unilateralism: NATO is worth far more to us than the United Arab Emirates.
An Iran nuclear deal has always been a naïve proposition, but once we were in it we should have honored it to placate our allies—and we should have killed more Iranian mischief-makers than just Suleimani.
If Iran has more than one path to fulfilling its ambitions, so do we: If, for reasons of accord, we must pay Iran a ransom, we needn’t stop killing the bag-men.
