Barbara Slavin and John Glaser on Iran, the Bomb, and Prospects for a Deal

John Glaser is the director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is also the host of the Power Problems Podcast and coauthor of the book, Fuel to the Fire: How Trump Made America's Broken Foreign Policy Even Worse (and How We Can Recover). You can follow John on Twitter at @jwcglaser.

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

Axis of evil speech State of the Union Address (George W. Bush, 2002)

Archival audio:

The President Announces a Historic Nuclear Deal with Iran (The Obama White House, June 14, 2015)
President Trump announces U.S. to withdraw from Iran Nuclear Deal (C-SPAN) (C-SPAN, May 8, 2018)
BIDEN DIPLOMACY: Biden talks climate change, Iran deal (Forbes Breaking News, February 20, 2021)
Joe Biden says the only way out of Iran crisis is diplomacy (CBS News, January 7, 2020)
Biden Administration Agrees To Nuclear Talks With Iran | TODAY (TODAY, February 19, 2021)
CNN asked Iran's President-Elect about nuclear deal. Hear his reply (CNN, June 21, 2021)
Newly Elected Iranian President Throws Doubt On Restoring Nuclear Deal (NBC News, June 21, 2021)
State Of The Union Address 2002 (Politics 101, February 2, 2017)
Iranian President Faces Challenge (VOA News, June 10, 2009)
Exclusive Access Inside Iran: Is The Maximum Pressure Campaign By The US Working? | NBC Nightly News (NBC News, August 19, 2019)
Donald Trump applies 'maximum pressure' on Iran | ITV News (ITV News, May 8, 2019)
Nat'l Security Adviser: Trump's 'maximum pressure' campaign against Iran is working (Fox News, January 12, 2020)
CIA involvement in 1953 Iranian coup (CNN, August 23, 2013)
1979 Iranian Revolution (NBCUniversal Archives, June 18, 2013)
OLD NEWS: The Iranian Revolution (ABC News, March 12, 2015)

Transcript:

July 20, 2021

BARBARA SLAVIN: How many chances do you get? Now, this is not to excuse Iran. Iran has been a very disruptive force in the region and has caused untold misery in many, many countries. But the United States has often opened the door and taken other steps which have, frankly, only made it easier for Iran to continue down this path.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah. Last week marked the anniversary of the passage of the Iran nuclear deal. Negotiated under President Obama, supporters of the deal argued that it contained Iran's nuclear program.

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HANNAH: But for its critics, the deal was far from comprehensive.

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HANNAH: Now, under President Biden, who aims to revive the deal, the drums of war may have subsided.

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HANNAH: But the antipathy between Washington and Tehran remains, and the prospects for a revitalized nuclear deal are unclear. So, to help us make sense of all of this, I've decided to speak to two colleagues in Washington who know a lot about it.

SLAVIN: The most we can expect is a restoration of the JCPOA. We're not going to get elaborate negotiations on some new understanding with Iran.

HANNAH: That's Barbara Slavin, an Iran expert who had a distinguished career as a journalist. Barbara is now the director of the Future of Iran initiative at the Atlantic Council.

SLAVIN: I think what we're going to have to do is support quiet diplomacy on the part of countries like Saudi Arabia and others to try to bring down the level of violence in the Middle East. But there will be no new breakthroughs with the United States. I just don't see it.

HANNAH: In part, that's because of the new Iranian president, Ibrahim Risi, a former judge and conservative cleric. As President Biden attempts to reestablish the JCPOA, he'll be facing a new and as yet largely unknown quantity.

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SLAVIN: Risi is very anti-Western. He's under sanctions—and rightfully so—for grotesque human rights abuses. The people he will put in positions of authority will not be like Javad Zarif—educated at American universities and easy or relatively easy to deal with. This will be hardline characters. I think if you want an analogy, go back to 2005 when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected. I mean, you can draw a direct line between George W. Bush's “Axis of Evil” speech in 2002, his rejection of a better relationship with Iran after 9/11, and the demise of the reformist camp then and the election of Ahmadinejad. We had two terms of this guy.

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SLAVIN: And what happened? Iran advanced its nuclear program. It became much more aggressive regionally and much more repressive domestically. I'm afraid we may see a sequel to that movie, and it's not going to be pretty.

HANNAH: Barbara, what do you make of the observation that this breakout time—the time it would take Iran to develop nuclear weapons—has shrunk so much that the deal, which was jettisoned under President Trump's maximum pressure campaign, has passed the point of no return, and it simply might be too late to restore it?

SLAVIN: Yeah, that's the reason we have to get back into the deal. Without an agreement, that breakout time will vanish. If we get back into the deal, there are restrictions on Iran.

HANNAH: Indeed, America's own hardline stance over the past four years might have helped lead Iran to elect its new hardliner.

SLAVIN: The damage we've done to the Iranian people is not reversible either. The Trump Administration's activities were an enormous blow—not just to the JCPOA, but to the prospects for any kind of positive relationship between the United States and Iran. And the election of Ibrahim Risi directly flows, I think, from the maximum pressure campaign and the fact that Trump basically proved to the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, that he was right not to trust the United States because the United States is not trustworthy.

The neocons who say we can't go back are the ones who oppose this deal to begin with. And these are the architects of maximum pressure. These are the people who put us in the mess we're in now. So, with all due respect to these characters, I don't listen to them.

HANNAH: Are you hopeful that a deal can be restored?

SLAVIN: Yes, I remain hopeful, although I am worried about the delay that is taking place. I wish the Biden Administration had taken more steps early on that might have been able to resolve this matter before the Iranian presidential elections. But as it is, it appears most of the negotiations are done, and it is a political decision in Tehran to delay any announcement until after the inauguration of the new president, Ibrahim Risi, in early August. The idea, I think, is to give him some kind of boost, which will be important for him because he was elected with a very, very small percentage of the Iranian electorate. Turnout was below fifty percent, and of that, I think he got essentially about seventeen or eighteen million votes, which is the same amount he got in 2017 when he lost to the incumbent, Hassan Rouhani. When you add up the percentages of people who came out and voted but put in blank ballots or spoiled ballots, he truly is a minority president. He's not popular. So, I think they are sort of slowing everything down and waiting until he's ready to take office.

HANNAH: So, what you're telling us is that it's an open secret that there's a deal, and it simply hasn't been announced.

SLAVIN: I think the way the Iranian foreign minister has expressed it is that they're about ninety percent done. The U.S. has already informed Iran which sanctions will be lifted. Iran has informed the U.S. how it will roll back its nuclear program. There may still be some details about the sequencing—what step is taken in return for what step and the deadline for a return to full compliance on both sides. I think most of the work has been done, but the U.S. side has been very closed-mouthed. And there's a lot of frustration, frankly, at the way it's dragging on, because in the meantime, Iran's nuclear program is advancing.

HANNAH: Despite the Obama Administration's success, there is still political resistance to these talks, which colors President Biden's approach.

JOHN GLASER: There's a lot of domestic resistance here in the United States to engaging in another deal with Iran. I don't believe it's merited, but there's a sort of ideological position in which much of the right and many people in the establishment foreign policy community think we need to have a target on Iran. They think it's a major threat and that we need to protect the rest of the Middle East from Iran, but if they really wanted a reentry of the deal, they could have done so kind of immediately.

HANNAH: That's John Glaser. The director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, John is an expert on American grand strategy and U.S. foreign policy.

GLASER: They just needed to demonstrate to Iran that they were serious about sanctions relief. And instead they came in posturing, kind of insisting the Iranians move first. They insisted the Iranians have to come back into compliance with the JCPOA before they would receive any sanctions relief. A simple and fair resolution to that dispute is to go at the same time. And the Iranians, as a matter of fact, proposed a kind of synchronized, choreographed message to go about this at the same time so both sides could save face, and the U.S. side rejected that. This is needless, tough guy posturing that's making the deal the Biden Administration says it wants harder to get.

HANNAH: Iran's nuclear capability has been a major foreign policy obsession for decades. John, why do you think it continues to figure so prominently in U.S. foreign policy? What's at stake here?

GLASER: Well, on the one hand, this is one of those global responsibilities that America, as the world's policeman, has adopted for itself—that is, we need to aggressively prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. We don't have a great track record across the board of doing that. A lot of times our policies incentivize nuclear proliferation, and in some sense, that might have been the case with Iran. But it would be better, I think, if Iran didn't have a nuclear weapon. More states with that kind of capability, I think, is always something to be trepidations about. But it doesn't seem to me that they're terribly interested in obtaining the bomb for its own sake. I think they've calculated that they can use the threat—the possibility of having a breakout capability, having a short period between when they decide to obtain a bomb and when they actually are able to obtain a usable nuclear weapon. They want that time to be as short as possible, basically as insurance and as a deterrent, and they know they can use this as leverage in negotiations with the United States. And so, this elevates the importance of the nuclear problem inside Iran to U.S. national politics. But Iran could get a nuclear weapon tomorrow, and I don't think all that much would change for us. This is a third-rate military power with very limited military capacity and power projection capabilities. It can't really project a lot of power outside its own region. U.S. policymakers like to clutch their pearls over Iran's missile program. Well, the missiles can't extend much beyond the region, certainly not with any accuracy. And we're far away. We're really insulated from any conceivable threats Iran could pose to U.S. national security as a whole. And so, it's just out of whack—the prominence this country has in our in our national security discourse.

HANNAH: Why does America care so much about Iran if they don't pose any practical security threat, as you say?

GLASER: Well, I think it matters more to Washington, D.C., than it does to the U.S. national interest. So, it matters because it's highly prominent as a kind of adversary. Iran has played the role of the villain in U.S. politics for a very long time. And this does go back in the tangled relationship between the U.S. and Iran with the U.S.-backed coup in 1953—

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GLASER: —and the tense relationship that has characterized the United States and Iran since 1979, when the Iranian revolution happened

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GLASER: There's been “tit for tat” tensions since then. It's also true that we inflate the strategic importance of the Middle East as a region in general in terms of its impact on U.S. national interests. And in doing that, we get really close with certain partners and allies in the region, and that close partnership and our felt responsibility to manage this region from outside makes us adopt the preferences and strategic views of many of our partners and allies.

HANNAH: You're talking about Saudi Arabia, about Israel—countries like that.

GLASER: That's right. We're closely allied with Israel and the Arab Gulf states, all of whom pretty much see Iran as a regional rival and adversary. And so, Iran's perception in the United States as an adversary is heightened as a result of that.

HANNAH: So, even if Iran doesn't pose a major threat to the United States, it does pose a threat to America's allies. What interest does the United States have in protecting its allies from a more activist or hardline Iran?

GLASER: If Iran doesn't threaten us directly and instead threatens our allies and partners, then we need to evaluate the extent to which those allies and partners are actually assets to the United States. What do we get out of our relationship with Israel? We give them more than three billion dollars in taxpayer money every year, tons of weaponry and training and assistance, and intelligence cooperation. We're very close with Israel. We're a reliable veto at the U.N. Security Council for them. What do they do for us? What do the Saudis provide U.S. interests? What kind of asset? What kind of benefit? How does that redound to the benefit of the American people that we’re so close with the Saudi regime, one of the most repressive authoritarian regimes in the world, who for the past several years, with U.S. help, has been engaging in atrocities and vicious war crimes in neighboring Yemen? Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is profoundly contradictory, hypocritical, and, I think, contrary to U.S. interests. They don't deliver for us. We have taken it upon ourselves to consider their security our burden to carry, and I think that needs to be reevaluated

HANNAH: With all of these setbacks, from the election of a hardliner in Iran to President Biden's airstrikes on Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria this summer, to the fraying of relations under President Trump. I was curious to know whether John and Barbara were optimistic about the future of U.S.-Iran relations.

GLASER: I expect them to come back to the table, and part of the reason is because maximum pressure is still alive and well. Iran is incentivized to come to some kind of arrangement with the P5+1 because it's in dire economic straits. Not just that, but it has the United States essentially engaging in acts of war against it. This is a very vulnerable position for—as I said—a third-rate military power in a dangerous region surrounded by enemies, and they want out. Part of the way out is to negotiate. The problem, I think, is the entire context of how we're entering into these negotiations. The Obama Administration engaged in arduous, years-long negotiations with a number of parties both in the region and the P5+1. Iran ended up making serious concessions to us in those negotiations to reach a deal in which they would roll back their nuclear program, and we would offer economic sanctions relief—would lift economic sanctions.

Then they fully complied with their end of the bargain, according to repeated U.N. watchdog reports and IAEA reports, and we denied them their end of the bargain. And not only did we do that, but we exited the deal, denied them their end of the bargain—which would have been sanctions relief—heaped extra economic sanctions to a full economic warfare status, and then pressured them in other ways, like assassinating their lead generals and looking the other way as Israel assassinates its nuclear scientists. And we don't know the origin of them, but there's been cyber-attacks against Iranian nuclear technology to sabotage them. This is essentially a set of acts of war—forced coercion, collective punishment. And so, you can understand why the Iranians would be reluctant to engage in another negotiation with the United States. There's a major deficit of trust. They need to be somehow reassured that they'll get their end of the bargain if they agree to another deal.

HANNAH: That deficit of trust has unintended consequences, especially now that the United States is not the only economic superpower with which Iran can do business. It seems our actions have only pushed Iran farther away.

SLAVIN: This is a trend that's been coming for a long time during the first real bout of sanctions in the 2000s under Obama. China became Iran's biggest trading partner. And this trend, of course, has only been reinforced by maximum pressure. Maximum pressure was a total gift to China.

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SLAVIN: Iran is now very dependent on trade with China—on its still exporting oil and its laundering it through Malaysia—and the fact that Iran has managed to survive under these brutal American sanctions for the last three or four years is a testament to Iranian ingenuity and to China's willingness to violate the sanctions and find ways around them. China is a major power. Iran really doesn't need the United States or the West in the way it used to. We've lost leverage. We've lost a lot of leverage through our behavior, through leaving the JCPOA in this this way when Iran was in full compliance with it.

How many opportunities can you lose? When I look at the history of the United States in the Islamic Republic, I see three major missed opportunities. The first was in the 1990s when then-President Rafsanjani offered a big contract to the American oil company Conoco, and in response, the U.S. blocked almost all trade with Iran and passed the first secondary sanctions—the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act—in 1996. The second time was after 9/11 when the Iranians helped us get rid of the Taliban and set up a new government in Afghanistan, and George W. Bush put them on the Axis of Evil and basically implied they might be next to experience regime change. And the third time is when Donald Trump pulled out of this deal for domestic political reasons and not only that—not only the sanctions—but went on to assassinate Iran's most important military figure, Qassem Soleimani.

How many chances do you get? Now, this is not to excuse Iran. Iran has been a very disruptive force in the region and has caused untold misery in many, many countries. But the United States has often opened the door—as we did when we invaded Iraq and got rid of Saddam Hussein—and taken other steps which have, frankly, only made it easier for Iran to continue down this path. So, I think we have to have some humility, and we have to accept a large measure of blame for this very dysfunctional state of affairs between the United States and Iran. Here we are, forty-two years after the Iranian revolution, and if anything we're in worse shape than we were some years ago.

HANNAH: What about sanctions? Is that a useful tool at all in keeping Iran interested in negotiating with us? Many people credit sanctions with forcing them to the negotiating table in the first place.

SLAVIN: I think they work very rarely, only when there is a large international consensus behind them, not when they're a unilateral effort by the United States to force an adversary to change its policies. I think they are, in many cases, sadism masquerading as foreign policy. They make us feel like we're doing something strong, but the only people we're hurting are ordinary citizens. Ordinary people want to live a normal life and see their children do better than they did, like people everywhere. But Iran is also proud. It doesn't like to be pushed around, and there is certainly a resentment of U.S. policies and interventions—a sense that the United States is blundering around in a region it doesn't understand and that it's creating more harm than good.

HANNAH: So, you think we should get rid of sanctions?

SLAVIN: Absolutely. Get rid of the sanctions. Open our doors to Iranian students and Iranian tourists. Support the exchange of technology that helps them with internet circumvention—tools the regime uses to prevent people from accessing certain sites and that kind of thing. In the last few years, we've absolutely taken the wrong policy toward Iran. How many times can you make the same mistake and not finally recognize it?

And we're not going to be invading Iran. I think we've given up on regime change at the point of a bayonet after the experiences we've had—certainly in Iraq and Afghanistan and even Libya to some extent. I think we have to have a major reexamination of our sanctions policy. Countries will change and evolve if you take your foot off their neck.

HANNAH: What has our hostility toward Iran wrought? We've now seen how it's paved the way for fundamentalist leaders. It's pushed Iran closer to China's sphere of influence, and it's hurt ordinary Iranian people and helped build roadblocks to meaningful diplomacy. And while Iran is still a country plagued with its own issues and injustices, and while nuclear nonproliferation remains an important goal, it seems our strategy and tactics over much of the last two decades have done more to hamper those goals than to help achieve them. Maybe it's time for a new approach.

Thank you to both of our guests, Barbara Slavin and John Glaser, for joining us.

I’m Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Special thanks go out to our None of the Above team who make all of this possible. Our producer is Caroline Gray. Our associate producer and editor is Luke Taylor. Music and mixing was done by Zubin Hensler, and EGF’s graduate research assistant is Lucas Robinson. If you enjoy what you've heard, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Rate and review us. If there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there. Catch you next time.

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