The Looming Threat of a Nuclear Crisis with IranBy Robin Wright - December 27, 2021
Shortly
after his Inauguration, Joe Biden appointed Rob Malley to be his
special envoy for Iran. Malley, who is fifty-eight, grew up in France
and was in the same high-school class in Paris as Secretary of State
Antony Blinken. He graduated from Yale and Harvard Law School, won a
Rhodes Scholarship, and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron White.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg officiated at his wedding.
Malley has long
experience with the Middle East. His father was a French journalist
known for his support of anti-colonialist movements. Working on the
National Security Council during the Clinton Administration, Malley
participated in the Camp David peace talks. After they collapsed, in
2000, he broke with the conventional analysis that the summit had failed
because of Yasir Arafat’s intransigence. Malley published detailed
insider accounts about how the Israelis shared the blame, for making
proposals difficult for Arafat to accept. Critics declared Malley
rabidly anti-Israel. Former colleagues publicly called the attacks on
Malley “unfair, inappropriate, and wrong.” After Clinton left office,
Malley worked on Iran at the International Crisis Group, which tracks
global conflicts. As part of his job, he met with Iranian officials and
travelled to Tehran.
During the Obama Administration, he was on
the team that produced the Iran nuclear deal, in 2015. The agreement,
formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was the most
significant nonproliferation pact in more than a quarter century.
Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia were equal partners, but the
United States had a virtual veto, and Iran knew it. During two years of
tortuous talks, the Iranians often met the Americans in hotel hallways
to thrash out issues. Malley, who deliberates with the intensity of a
lawyer but is soft-spoken in person, was on a first-name basis with his
Iranian counterparts. They exchanged family stories, cell-phone numbers,
and e-mail addresses.
The agreement survived for only two years.
Influenced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and by
Republican hawks, President Donald Trump abandoned the deal in 2018. He
also imposed more than a thousand sanctions on Iran. They targeted the
Supreme Leader, the Foreign Minister, judges, generals, scientists,
banks, oil facilities, a shipping line, an airline, charities, and
allies, such as the President of Venezuela, for doing business with
Tehran. Trump also designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the
country’s most powerful military branch, as a terrorist group—an action
that the U.S. had never taken against another nation’s military, even
the Nazi Wehrmacht.
During the Trump years, Malley was appointed
president of the International Crisis Group. He kept in touch with some
of his Iranian contacts. But when he became Biden’s envoy the Iranian
diplomats he’d known for decades refused to meet with him. During talks
in Vienna this past spring, the Americans stayed at the Hotel Imperial.
The Iranians were eight blocks away, at the InterContinental. Enrique
Mora, a Spanish diplomat for the European Union, carried proposals back
and forth. Delegations from the other five nations consulted at a third
hotel.
Malley compared proxy talks to a Woody Allen story, “The
Gossage-Vardebedian Papers.” In it, two men play chess by mail. A letter
goes “missing.” Moves are lost. Both players claim that they are
winning. Infuriated, they stop playing before the game is finished. The
Russian envoy, Mikhail Ulyanov, described the Vienna process as one of
the strangest in modern diplomacy. “The aim isn’t to update an agreement
or elaborate a new one,” he tweeted. “The goal is to restore a nearly
ruined deal piece by piece. Was there a similar exercise in the history
of international relations? I can not recollect anything like that. Can
you?”
The bizarre diplomacy, Malley told me, took on
unprecedented urgency in November. “We’ve seen Iran’s nuclear program
expand, and we’ve seen Tehran become more belligerent, more bellicose in
its regional activities,” he said. “They are miscalculating and playing
with fire.”
The stakes extend well beyond Iran. The world’s
nuclear order, already perilous, is now at risk of unravelling. Nuclear
pacts hammered out in the last century are dated or fraying, as the
U.S., Russia, and China modernize their arsenals. The Pentagon estimates
that China could have at least a thousand bombs by 2030. The talks with
Tehran are designed to prevent a tenth nation—the latest was North
Korea, in 2006—from getting the bomb.
In the Middle East, Israel
has had a nuclear weapon since the late nineteen-sixties. Saudi
officials have also threatened to pursue the bomb if Iran obtains one.
“The Iranian nuclear crisis can’t be viewed in a vacuum,” Kelsey
Davenport, of the Arms Control Association, told me. “The broader
nuclear order is in chaos.” The collapse of the talks with Iran—Biden’s
first major diplomatic foray—would have consequences worldwide.
Both
Washington and Tehran are violating the deal. A year after Trump
abandoned the accord and launched his “maximum pressure” campaign,
Tehran began breaching its obligations. It installed IR-6
centrifuges—which are much faster than the IR-1s allowed by the deal—and
developed even more efficient models, including the IR-9. Centrifuges
are tall tubes that enrich a gaseous form of uranium. They spin at
supersonic speeds several thousand times faster than the force of
gravity. Iran also increased enrichment from under four-per-cent
purity—the limit in the agreement, and a level used for peaceful nuclear
energy or medical research—to sixty per cent. “Only countries making
bombs are reaching this level,” Rafael Grossi, the chief of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, said in May. Weapons grade is ninety
per cent, which, for Israeli officials, is a decisive juncture. “We
don’t want to reach a point where we will have to ask ourselves how Iran
was allowed to enrich to ninety per cent,” Zohar Palti, the former
director of intelligence at Mossad, who is now at the Israeli Ministry
of Defense, told me. The so-called “breakout” time for Iran to produce
enough fuel for a bomb has plummeted, from more than a year to as little
as three weeks. “It’s really short, and unacceptably short,” a senior
Administration official said. “Every day they spin centrifuges, and, for
every day they stockpile uranium, the breakout time continues to
shrink.” Additional steps—including weaponizing the enriched uranium,
marrying it to a warhead, and then integrating it with a delivery
system, such as a missile—are required to field a bomb.
Israel
has tried to slow Iran’s progress. In late 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the
father of Iran’s nuclear program, was assassinated as he drove with his
wife and bodyguards to a weekend home. From more than a thousand miles
away, the killer used artificial intelligence and a satellite connection
to trigger a machine gun mounted on a parked pickup truck, spraying
Fakhrizadeh with bullets. Tehran retaliated with a law that limited
international inspections by blocking access to surveillance footage at
nuclear sites. Experts fear that Iran may be considering a “sneak-out”—a
covert path to a bomb. Tracking Iran’s facilities has become like
“flying in a heavily clouded sky,” Grossi said.
The first six
rounds of diplomacy this spring, Malley told me, made “real progress.”
In June, he presented a nuclear package that included ending most of
Trump’s sanctions. “The collective sense of everybody—obviously the
Europeans, the Russians and Chinese, but also the Iranian delegation at
the time—was that we could see the outlines of a deal,” he said. “If
each side was prepared to make the necessary compromises, we could get
there.”
The talks paused that month, after Iran’s Presidential
election. Hassan Rouhani, the previous President and a reformist, had
won in 2013 and 2017 on a platform of engaging with the United States.
But Trump’s sanctions sabotaged the economic benefits promised by the
nuclear accord, so in 2021 a majority of Iranians didn’t bother to vote.
Ebrahim Raisi, a rigid ideologue and the head of the judiciary, was
elected. The U.S. had already sanctioned Raisi, noting his role on a
“death commission” that ordered the execution, in 1988, of some five
thousand dissidents. At his Inauguration, in August, Raisi pledged, “All
the parameters of national power will be strengthened.”
Malley
had left his suits at the hotel in Vienna, expecting talks to resume
before long. But five months passed, and Iran’s nuclear program advanced
further. Malley eventually had his suits shipped home. By the time
diplomacy resumed, in late November, Malley told me, Iran’s program had
“blown through” the limits imposed by the J.C.P.O.A. “As they’re making
these advances, they are gradually emptying the deal of the
nonproliferation benefits for which we bargained,” he said. The Biden
Administration has pushed back. “We’re not going to agree to a worse
deal because Iran has built up its nuclear program,” Malley added. At
some point soon, trying to revive the deal would “be tantamount to
trying to revive a dead corpse.” The U.S. and its allies might then
“have to address a runaway Iranian nuclear program.” Without a return to
the deal, a senior State Department official said, it is “more than
plausible, possible, and maybe even probable” that Iran will try to
become a threshold nuclear state.
The wild card is Israel. In
September, at the U.N. General Assembly, the new Israeli Prime Minister,
Naftali Bennett, charged that Iran’s nuclear program had “hit a
watershed moment, and so has our tolerance. Words do not stop
centrifuges from spinning.” Israel is due to soon begin training for
possible military strikes on Iran. During a visit to Washington in
December, Defense Minister Benny Gantz urged the Biden Administration to
hold joint military exercises with Israel. “The problem with Iran’s
nuclear program is that, for the time being, there is no diplomatic
mechanism to make them stop,” Palti told me. “There is no deterrent.
Iran is no longer afraid. We need to give them the stop sign.” U.S.
officials counter that Israeli operations have often provoked Tehran and
set back diplomacy.
Iran can still reverse technological
advances if a deal is reached. Its knowledge, however, is irreversible.
“Iran’s nuclear program hit new milestones over the past year,” Kelsey
Davenport said. “As it masters these new capabilities, it will change
our understanding about how the country may pursue nuclear weapons down
the road.” Even if the Biden Administration does broker a return to the
accord, Republicans have vowed to scuttle it. In October, Senator Ted
Cruz, of Texas, tweeted, “Unless any deal w/ Iran is ratified by the
Senate as a treaty—which Biden knows will NOT happen—it is a 100%
certainty that any future Republican president will tear it up. Again.”
As
the nuclear talks foundered earlier this year, I flew to the Al Asad
Airbase, in Iraq’s remote western desert, with Kenneth (Frank) McKenzie,
Jr., a Marine general from Alabama, who heads U.S. military operations
across the Middle East and South Asia. It was part of an extended tour
of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Qatar, and Lebanon. In the cavernous cabin
of a C-17, he sat alone in a room-size container draped with an American
flag. McKenzie’s military experience with Iran has been perilous and
bloody. When he was a young officer, two hundred and forty-one marines
were killed in the 1983 suicide bombing of U.S. peacekeepers in Beirut.
It was the largest loss of marine lives in a single day since the battle
of Iwo Jima, in the Second World War. The Reagan Administration blamed
Iran and its then nascent proxies in Hezbollah. Almost four decades
later, McKenzie told me that Tehran’s nuclear capabilities were far from
the only danger it now poses.
Under Trump, hostilities between
the United States and Iran escalated. They peaked in 2020, when Trump
ordered the assassination of General Qassem Suleimani, the revered head
of Iran’s Quds Force, the élite wing of the Revolutionary Guard. As
Suleimani arrived in Baghdad to meet local allies, McKenzie called in an
M-9 Reaper drone to fire four Hellfire missiles at the General’s
convoy. Suleimani and nine others were shredded. His severed hand was
identified by the large red-stone ring often photographed on his wedding
finger.
Five days later, Iran fired eleven ballistic
missiles—each carrying at least a thousand-pound warhead—at Al Asad
Airbase. U.S. intelligence had tracked Iran’s deployment of the
missiles, giving the Americans a few hours to evacuate their warplanes
and half of their personnel. Lieutenant Colonel Staci Coleman, the
commander of an air expeditionary squad, had to decide which of her crew
of a hundred and sixty should leave and who was “emotionally equipped”
to stay. “I was deciding who would live and who would die,” she later
told military investigators. “I honestly thought anyone remaining behind
would perish.” Many of the service members leaving Al Asad anxiously
hugged the ones staying. No American military personnel had been killed
by an enemy air strike since 1953, during the Korean War.
The
first salvo struck around 1 a.m. Master Sergeant Janet Liliu recounted
to investigators, “What happened in the bunkers, well, no words can
describe the atmosphere. I wasn’t ready to die, but I tried to prepare
myself with every announcement of an incoming missile.” The bombardment
dragged on for hours; it was the largest ballistic-missile attack ever
by any nation on American troops. No Americans died, but a hundred and
ten suffered traumatic brain injuries. Trump dismissed the suffering at
Al Asad. “I heard they had headaches,” he told reporters. Two years
later, many of those at Al Asad are still experiencing profound memory,
vision, and hearing losses. One died by suicide in October. Eighty have
been awarded Purple Hearts.
The lesson of Al Asad, McKenzie told
me, is that Iran’s missiles have become a more immediate threat than its
nuclear program. For decades, Iran’s rockets and missiles were wildly
inaccurate. At Al Asad, “they hit pretty much where they wanted to hit,”
McKenzie said. Now they “can strike effectively across the breadth and
depth of the Middle East. They could strike with accuracy, and they
could strike with volume.”
Iran’s advances have impressed both
allies and enemies. After the 1979 revolution, the young theocracy
purged the Shah’s military and rebuilt it almost from scratch, despite
waves of economic sanctions. Iran fought a ruinous eight-year war with
Iraq in the nineteen-eighties that further depleted its armory. Its Air
Force is still weak, its ships and tanks are mediocre, and its military
is not capable of invading another country and holding territory.
Instead,
the regime has concentrated on developing missiles with longer reach,
precision accuracy, and greater destructive power. Iran is now one of
the world’s top missile producers. Its arsenal is the largest and most
diverse in the Middle East, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported.
“Iran has proven that it is using its ballistic-missile program as a
means to coerce or intimidate its neighbors,” Malley told me. Iran can
fire more missiles than its adversaries—including the United States and
Israel—can shoot down or destroy. Tehran has achieved what McKenzie
calls “overmatch”—a level of capability in which a country has weaponry
that makes it extremely difficult to check or defeat. “Iran’s strategic
capacity is now enormous,” McKenzie said. “They’ve got overmatch in the
theatre—the ability to overwhelm.”
Amir Ali Hajizadeh, a
brigadier general and a former sniper who heads Iran’s Aerospace Force,
is known for incendiary bravado. In 2019, he boasted, “Everybody should
know that all American bases and their vessels in a distance of up to
two thousand kilometres are within the range of our missiles. We have
constantly prepared ourselves for a full-fledged war.” Hajizadeh
succeeded General Hassan Moghaddam, who founded Iran’s missile and drone
programs, and who died in 2011, with sixteen others, in a mysterious
explosion. They had been working on a missile capable of hitting Israel.
Israelis
call Hajizadeh the new Suleimani. McKenzie called him reckless. In
2019, Hajizadeh’s forces downed a U.S. reconnaissance drone over the
Persian Gulf. He also orchestrated the missile strikes on Al Asad. Hours
after that attack, his forces shot down a Ukrainian Boeing 737
passenger plane, with a hundred and seventy-six people on board, as it
took off from Tehran’s international airport. Everyone perished. For
three days, Iran refused to accept blame until, under pressure,
Hajizadeh went on television to admit it.
Iran now has the
largest known underground complexes in the Middle East housing nuclear
and missile programs. Most of the tunnels are in the west, facing
Israel, or on the southern coast, across from Saudi Arabia and other
Gulf sheikhdoms. This fall, satellite imagery tracked new underground
construction near Bakhtaran, the most extensive complex. The tunnels,
carved out of rock, descend more than sixteen hundred feet underground.
Some complexes reportedly stretch for miles. Iran calls them “missile
cities.”
In 2020, the Revolutionary Guard marked the anniversary
of the U.S. Embassy takeover by releasing a video of Hajizadeh
inspecting a subterranean missile arsenal. As suspenseful music plays in
the background, he and two other Revolutionary Guard commanders march
through a tunnel lined with rows of missiles stacked on top of one
another. A recording of General Suleimani echoes in the background: “You
start this war, but we create the end of it.” An underground railroad
ferries Emad missiles for rapid successive launches. Emads have a range
of a thousand miles and can carry a conventional or a nuclear warhead.
Iran’s
missile program “is much more advanced than Pakistan’s,” Uzi Rubin, the
first head of Israel’s Missile Defense Organization, told me. Experts
compare Iran with North Korea, which helped seed Tehran’s program in the
nineteen-eighties. Some of Iran’s missiles are superior to Pyongyang’s,
Jeffrey Lewis, of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at
Monterey, told me. Experts believe that North Korea may now be importing
Iranian missile technology.
The Islamic Republic has thousands
of ballistic missiles, according to U.S. intelligence assessments. They
can reach as far as thirteen hundred miles in any direction—deep into
India and China to the east; high into Russia to the north; to Greece
and other parts of Europe to the west; and as far south as Ethiopia, in
the Horn of Africa. About a hundred missiles could reach Israel.
Iran
also has hundreds of cruise missiles that can be fired from land or
ships, fly at low altitude, and attack from multiple directions. They
are harder for radar or satellites to detect, because, unlike ballistic
missiles, their motors do not burn brightly on ignition. Cruise missiles
have altered the balance of power across the Persian Gulf. In 2019,
Iran unleashed cruise missiles and drones on two oil installations in
Saudi Arabia, temporarily cutting off half of the oil production in the
world’s largest supplier.
The Biden Administration has hoped to
use progress on the nuclear deal to eventually broaden diplomacy and
include Iran’s neighbors in talks on reducing regional tensions. “Even
if we can revive the J.C.P.O.A., those problems are going to continue to
poison the region and risk destabilizing it,” Malley told me. “If they
continue, the response will be robust.”
It may be too late.
Tehran has shown no willingness to barter over its missiles as it has
with its nuclear program. “Once you have spent the money to build the
facilities and train people and deliver missiles to the military units
that were built around these missiles, you have an enormous constituency
that wants to keep them,” Jeffrey Lewis said. “I don’t think there’s
any hope of limiting Iran’s missile program.” President Raisi told
reporters after his election, “Regional issues or the missile issue are
non-negotiable.”
From Al Asad, I flew with McKenzie to Syria in a
convoy of Osprey helicopter gunships. Airmen were positioned at machine
guns from an open ramp in the rear as we crossed the border. Our first
stop was at Green Village, a former compound for oil-field workers on
the Euphrates River. I was last there in 2019, for the final military
campaign against the Islamic State. A small contingent of U.S. forces
has been deployed in northeast Syria since late 2015 to aid and advise a
Kurdish-led militia fighting isis. Officially, their mission is to
contain isis remnants. Unofficially, they are also supposed to prevent
Iran from gaining access to strategic border crossings from Iraq.
Abu
Kamal, a once sleepy desert outpost, is sixty miles southeast of Green
Village. isis jihadis seized it in 2014, and it became their main
border-crossing point between Syria and Iraq. In 2017, three
Iranian-backed Shiite militias and the Syrian Army captured it. Iran’s
proxies have since absorbed—politically and militarily—much of the
territory ruled by the Islamic State, including areas liberated by the
Iraqi Army and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. “The best thing
that ever happened to Iran was the U.S. coalition taking out isis,” a
senior American military official told me.
Iran now uses Abu
Kamal as a strategic hub for smuggling missiles and technology to its
militia surrogates. The matériel includes kits used to upgrade rockets.
By adding G.P.S. navigation, so-called “dumb” rockets, which are hard to
control and rarely hit the target, can be converted into guided
missiles that have a longer range and greater accuracy. The U.S. and the
region “are worried by the degree to which Iran has been providing,
sharing sophisticated weapons to its proxies,” Malley told me.
Under
Suleimani, Iran expanded its “axis of resistance” with six core
militias, including Hezbollah, in Lebanon; the Houthis, in Yemen; and
Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in the Palestinian territories. In the
nineteen-eighties and nineties, the resistance coalition carried out
amateurish, albeit deadly, operations, such as suicide bombings and
hostage seizures. Its forces today are coördinated and well armed, and
project power region-wide. “Most countries look at what’s available and
try to establish partnerships with what’s there. Iran created a network
of regional proxies from scratch—its own alliance system,” Michael
Eisenstadt, at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me.
“It’s the most cohesive alliance system in the region.”
The
United States military is still vastly more powerful than anything built
or imagined in Iran. Yet Iran has proved to be an increasingly shrewd
rival. It has trained a generation of foreign engineers and scientists
to assemble weaponry. It has dispatched stateless dhows loaded with
missile parts for Houthi rebels, who have fired missiles at military and
civilian targets in Saudi Arabia. It has provided the older “dumb”
rocket technology to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The majority of the
“precision project” kits crossing at Abu Kamal go to Lebanon, where
Hezbollah upgrades its short-range rockets and missiles to hit more
accurately and to penetrate more deeply inside Israel. Hezbollah is now
estimated to have at least fourteen thousand missiles and more than a
hundred thousand rockets, most courtesy of Iran. “They have the ability
to strike very precisely into Israel in a way they’ve not enjoyed in the
past,” McKenzie told me.
The difference between Iran’s reach in
2016 and in 2021 is “simply remarkable,” a senior naval intelligence
officer told me. Distributing missile technology is strategically
cost-efficient. Missiles are a small fraction of the price of the
defense systems needed to protect against them. Iran spends between two
and three billion dollars a year to support the resistance coalition,
according to the State Department. Yet its defense budget is also a
fraction of what Saudi Arabia, an important U.S. ally, spends annually.
Iran
now has enormous reach in several directions from afar. “If you can
imagine a ring anywhere in Iraq that goes out, let’s say, seven hundred
kilometres, draw your circle,” a senior intelligence official with
Central Command explained. “Do the same thing in Yemen. Draw your
circle. You quickly see the range and capability that Iran has provided.
You can push it all the way to Syria, because, if they have it in Iraq,
they probably have the ability also in Syria. What’s important,” he
added, “is that the rings are now interlocking.”
Iran is gambling
that it can harass the United States into eventually withdrawing from
the entire Middle East, as it did from Afghanistan. Its actions across
the region will have to be addressed in the not too distant future,
Malley said. “If not, it will be a perpetual diversion from the U.S.
shift to China,” and “a cauldron always being one step or misstep away
from a much more dangerous conflagration.”
Seven American
Presidents have failed to contain Iran’s political influence and
military leverage. Distrust has only deepened since Iranian students
seized the U.S. Embassy four decades ago and held fifty-two Americans
for fourteen months. “Each side sees the other as so devious, malign,
and mendacious,” John Limbert, a former hostage, told me. “Any proposal
from the other—especially one presented as a concession—becomes another
means to cheat and deceive.”
Rather than back down under Trump’s
pressure, Tehran accelerated its nuclear and missile programs. Options,
such as sanctions, are exhausted, the senior State Department official
said. “That has clearly not produced the result that we all would have
wanted.”
Besides diplomacy, President Biden has few preventive
tools, and military action is not an attractive or effective long-term
option. Five weeks after he took office, the U.S. tried to disrupt a
nexus of Iranian proliferation. Two American F-15s dropped seven
five-hundred-pound bombs on Abu Kamal. The air strike was in retaliation
for a rocket attack, by an Iranian proxy, on a military base used by
American forces in Iraq. The American bombs had little impact. “Without
being able to crater the place, you’re not going to stop the flow,” the
senior intelligence official with Central Command told me. “In fact, I
think they were back up and running pretty quickly.” Israel has launched
dozens of air strikes in or near Abu Kamal and hundreds more on Iranian
targets in Syria. Weaponry still flows across the border.
Biden
has also tried intimidation. In October, an American B-1B bomber flew
from South Dakota to the periphery of Iran. Fighter jets from Egypt,
Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain escorted it across the Middle East.
Since November, 2020, the United States has dispatched seven missions of
B-52 bombers—nicknamed buffs, or “big ugly fat fuckers,” for their size
and shape—around Iran. Even senior officials wonder about the efficacy
of such tactics. The naval intelligence officer said, “I think to
disrupt is easy, but sustained pressure to change behavior? That
requires a decision to develop some capability on the ground in areas
that, I think we’ve said, we’re just not that interested in, from a
national-priority perspective.” U.S. officials concede that the flights
do more to reassure allies in the region than to scare Iran.
Tehran
seems undaunted. In October, it launched a drone attack on Al-Tanf, a
military outpost in Syria where two hundred Americans have been based.
Al-Tanf’s wider strategic value is its position on the vital highway
between Baghdad and Damascus—and the route to Lebanon and the
Mediterranean. Unofficially, the U.S. goal is again to hinder the
transfer of Iranian weapons and influence. A Hezbollah news site
described the Iranian attack on Al-Tanf as “a new phase in the
confrontation” to force America out of the Middle East.
Iran’s
surrogates in Iraq have taken on bigger targets, too. On November 7th,
three quadcopter drones attacked the home of the Iraqi Prime Minister,
Mustafa al-Kadhimi. Several guards were injured. The strike followed a
parliamentary election in October, when Iranian-backed parties lost
dozens of seats and claimed voter fraud. In a television interview,
McKenzie accused Iran’s allies of “criminal” acts against a head of
state. “What we have seen are groups linked to Iran that see that they
cannot legally cling to power, and now they are resorting to violence to
achieve their goals,” he said. The attack was initially tied to two
Shiite militias—Kata’ib Hezbollah and Asa’ib Ahl al Haq. Both have
engaged in weapons transfers at Abu Kamal.
In September, I met
twice with the new Iranian Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian,
when he attended the U.N. General Assembly in New York. For years, he
was considered Suleimani’s man in the Foreign Ministry. He noted that
the United States had walked away from the nuclear agreement and imposed
massive sanctions. “If the wall of mistrust can be reduced, then there
may be some commonalities, but it’s such a high wall,” he said. “When
we’re forbidden to access our own money for life-saving vaccines, can
there be even a trace of trust between the two countries?” To prove
American good will, Amir-Abdollahian said, Biden must first lift
sanctions and help free billions of dollars of Iranian assets frozen in
other countries, such as South Korea. “If we reach an agreement, it can
be used to make further progress,” he said. “If it fails, we have
already said that we do not tie the future of the country to the
J.C.P.O.A.”
Malley proposed that the two countries agree to
return simultaneously to the accord, and then decide on a sequence of
steps. The Administration does not want to reward Iran without proof
that it is reversing its nuclear advances, reverting to older
centrifuges, reducing its uranium stockpile, and allowing full
inspections. Working with five world powers, the U.S. may somehow manage
to restore the nuclear deal. Iran does face unprecedented challenges at
home and from the outside world. The original revolutionaries are dying
out, and their grandchildren are more into social media than ideology.
In 2021, sporadic protests erupted as more than three hundred cities
dealt with shortages of water and electricity; demonstrators also took
to the streets to complain about low or unpaid wages. But if diplomacy
stalls and Iran continues to accelerate its nuclear program, the senior
Administration official warned, the U.S. could face a nuclear crisis in
the first quarter of 2022.
McKenzie
has analyzed how a conflict with Iran might play out. “If they attack
out of the blue, it would be a bloody war,” he told me. “We would be
hurt very badly. We would win in the long run. But it would take a
year.” Or potentially more, as the United States has learned in
Afghanistan and Iraq. And a full-scale military campaign by Israel or
the U.S. would almost certainly trigger a regional war on multiple
fronts. Iran is better armed and its military and political powerbrokers
more hard-line than at any time in its modern history. The nuclear deal
could be just the beginning—and the easier part of the Iran challenge
for an eighth American President.