It no longer matters what might have happened if the U.S. stuck by the Obama nuclear accords, or any other of the what-ifs, all the way back to the CIA overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953. All that matters is what happens next, now. Here are three scenarios, from just OK to really bad.
One of the few certainties is that the Middle East clumsily wrought by the U.S. War on Terror is gone. That Middle East eliminated Iraq as a regional power and replaced it with an emboldened Iran. U.S. wars eliminated Iran’s two border enemies, Iraq and Afghanistan, and pulled most of the Gulf States into the U.S. military orbit. At the same time, American reliance on Gulf oil and the Straits of Hormuz faded from the Policy Imperative Number One position it had held since the 1970s.
The Middle East formed into two regional power blocs, Iran (backed by a threshold nuclear program) and its proxies in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza, and elsewhere, and the U.S./Israeli/Gulf bloc, backed by the Israeli nuclear program. The Russians and Chinese were not serious players anymore—Russia cut out of Syria and China dependent but powerless with its need for oil. It looked like that was going to be how things played out for some years to come (see the Biden administration). The nuclear question kept things from escalating too far too fast, and Iran’s influence over the terror forces of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis balanced in part the American armada.
Then came Trump 2.0.
Trump 2.0 unabashedly made it possible for Israel to get as close to destroying Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon as they will ever get. The U.S. and friends neutralized the Houthis. These were all severe brushback pitches against Iranian regional power. Then came the first U.S. and Israeli bombing of some/all/most of the Iranian nuclear program. Now the U.S. has ceased to hold back Israel from overt, direct, undeniable attacks inside the Iranian homeland for fear of starting a major conflict. (Remember “SCUD hunting” and how throughout the Gulf Wars keeping Israel out of the fight was a major U.S. objective?) However much of the Iranian nuclear program may have been destroyed last year, the U.S. and Israel are going after the rest of it now, along with the Iranian navy and probably soon ground elements.
Unless Iran has a hidden doomsday nuke, the country as we knew it for the past few decades is no longer a regional power. If it takes more bombs to keep it that way, so be it, they say; the gloves have truly been taken off. Trump talks now of a four- to five-week bombing campaign. At the rate of hundreds of sorties or more a day, what will be left to blow up? Call all that a Mission Accomplished moment.
The remaining question is what happens in Iran the day after the dust settles. External bombing does not determine internal political outcomes in complex societies.
The best scenario is what we’ll call Islamic Republic 2.0. Iran’s powerful built an internal security apparatus and theocratic structure designed to keep themselves in power. It has a vicious internal spy network, a well-armed Revolutionary Guard, a propaganda operation that preys upon very deep and sincere Islamic feelings among the people, especially the middle and technocratic classes, and will use all those formidable tools to cling to power. The system was designed to support a way of ruling, as in China, not a man, as in Iraq or Syria.
It may take a Tiananmen Square incident or three to achieve, which the U.S. will sit back and allow to happen as it did in Beijing (and in Tehran earlier this year). Iran does not live in fear of an Islamic revolution as the Saudis do; they already had theirs in 1979 and thrive on it. Don’t be swayed by CNN clips of random women burning their hijabs; my own visits in Iran with many ranks of people suggested a dissatisfaction with plenty the clerical government does that helps maintain U.S. economic sanctions, but not necessarily a dissatisfaction with the form of government (which includes local and regional elements of democratic elections) itself.
Stripped of its nukes and aware of the people’s dissatisfaction, Islamic Republic 2.0 will be forced to negotiate with the U.S. to lessen sanctions. What matters most to Iran is national survival, and some form of diplomacy, albeit at gunpoint, is the only path. A modus vivendi with Israel and America. The decades-long strategy to match Israel as a regional nuclear power has failed. The U.S. will go along to secure the “win” for Trump, and Israel will be satisfied in having ensured its survival. Weird, but everyone sort of wins something for the trouble.
If somehow the clerics fail to retain power and before chaos ensues, there exists the possibility of an internally negotiated secular government in Tehran, not quite Islamic Republic 2.0 but not quite a Jeffersonian democracy. The U.S. failed to see it, but this was always the sort-of best resolution for Iraq by say 2005 or so. The clerics retain majority control internally, the civilians assume responsibility for foreign affairs and most of the non-nuclear military, and the U.S. backs off enough of the sanctions to help keep the new system alive and in place for a while to see what happens. It is, however, very unclear Iran has the internal webs of cooperation to pull this off, or whether the Israelis will tolerate such a crapshoot for the country they just defeated.
It is mostly a Western fantasy that the Iranian people will rise up and take over the government. There is no nationally organized movement to rush to the barricades like revolutionary Islam in 1979. (MEK and Reza Pahlavi have no real following inside the country.) There is no clear leader to get behind, as with Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979. Ali Khamenei was disliked by many but not hated by most, as with the shah. The only way mobs succeed against armed police and troops is if many of the crowd are willing to die. Thousands in Tehran earlier—and who-knows-how-many in Tiananmen and Johannesburg and the Hungarian Revolution longer ago—were never enough. If the clerics close the universities, that eliminates most of any organizational base that may precariously exist. In sum, why would the Revolutionary Guard allow all this power-sharing, why would Israel trust it, and what institutional mechanism would formalize this division?
The worst-case scenario is very bad: chaos. Think Libya 2011, or Iraq during the darkest days, but this time with ballistic missiles and maybe even some fissionable material loose among the competing factions. What if the Revolutionary Guard breaks away from the clerics and clings to the missiles, going all out inside the country and/or against Israel? What if the religious cities of Qom and Mashhad try to break off from a civilian government growing in Tehran? What if the small but always angry Kurdish minority in Western Iran, denied a homeland by the U.S. in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, decides to rise up? What if just all hell breaks loose as the U.S. and Israel destroy the things that keep order, as in Baghdad in 2003 when the entire civil infrastructure was wiped out by the Americans? The cops stop coming to work, the army stays in barracks, and suddenly you have a free-for-all inside a nation of 92 million people that requires—external peace-keeping forces? How it could end up is God’s will, mashallah.
Only the most deluded in Washington and Jerusalem think they know which scenario will be the next step in a new Iran. Only the most deluded in Washington and Jerusalem think they will have decisive influence themselves in what happens next.
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