Inspecting Iran
How do you strike a deal when you know your enemy will cheat?
There has been much criticism of the Trump administration’s war in Iran, because there is much to criticize, but whether a deal comes sooner or later, we can’t understand the current negotiations without looking back at the much earlier choice that got us here.
In his first months as President, Donald Trump tore up the JCPOA, the agreement with Iran that the Obama team had crafted over months of laborious negotiations. Was it a wise decision? The answer requires a hard look at cheating.
What Makes Countries Credible Beyond Just Military Might?
Normally, when you make a deal with someone, you expect them to keep their end of the bargain. If they don’t, you probably won’t deal with them again. And if you absolutely must, you’ll be far less likely to trust them, and far more likely to up your demands.
But deals between enemy nations are different. Usually, you expect the other side to cheat. True to form, Iran and the U.S. have both cheated, each in their own way.
One of the first ways you gain credibility on the world stage is by honoring the commitments of your predecessors. For example, whenever a new regime replaces an old one, the new leaders assume the debts of the former government. Imagine if they didn’t. No one would want to loan them money again. After the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the new regime announced that it would not honor the debts of the former Tsars. As you would expect, all the countries that had loaned money to Russia in previous years, such as the French and the British, were incensed. They felt cheated and demanded their money back. Lenin refused to pay. His decision poisoned any hope of building good will for years to come.
Renegotiating flawed deals is one matter; nullifying them is another. When Trump withdrew from the JCPOA, it sent a clear signal to Iran: the Americans will not keep their commitments. And like the Bolsheviks refusing to honor the commitments made by their predecessors, Trump’s refusal to honor the commitments made by his predecessor had the same poisoning effect. The fruits of that action are being felt today as Iran has slowed negotiations over ending the war.
Why did Trump want out of the JCPOA? He saw it as a flawed deal, which it was. It unfroze billions of dollars of Iranian assets, money that did indeed belong to them. By handing over that cash, it helped facilitate their funding of proxy forces in the Middle East, who attacked and killed both Americans and Israelis. But the main reason for withdrawing involved Iran’s cheating.
“‘Trust but verify’ means that if you have to verify, you don’t actually trust.”
Both the Obama and Trump administrations shared the same end goal: to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. They disagreed on how to get there. The crux of their disagreement hinged on whether Iran would cheat. The Obama team insisted that their agreement with Iran created the most stringent inspections ever made. The Trump team asserted that Iran had already begun to cheat by enriching uranium. You and I cannot know the truth because we have no access to intelligence reports, so let’s make an assumption.
Assume that Iran would cheat.
That’s just what enemies do. In fact, you should count on it. If you trusted your enemy, there would be no need for inspections. Reagan’s famous phrase, “Trust but verify,” means that if you have to verify, you don’t actually trust.
Inspectors hope to catch cheaters in the process, call them out, and slow them down. And while the inspectors are there, you want them recruiting spies, forming connections with those secretly opposed to the regime who are willing, either out of hatred toward their government or for love of money, to provide intelligence about what’s really going on. With luck, some of those informants might later be used to sabotage the cheating.
A century ago in the 1920s, the world witnessed another inspections attempt. The victorious Allies of World War One were intent on preventing defeated Germany from rearming. The British, the French, the Belgians, and others established the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission, a team of inspectors sent to Germany to ensure that the Germans were honoring their commitments in the Versailles settlement. The Germans had no intention of honoring those agreements. To get around the restriction against training soldiers, Germans established physical fitness camps, couched as recreational activities for young men, but which looked to inspectors an awful lot like army training. To evade the inspection of weapons factories, the Germans cut a deal with Soviet Russia. They set up satellite factories inside Russia to produce aircraft, tanks, munitions, and poison gas. The Red Army got to keep one-third of what the Germans produced, and the rest was smuggled back into the Fatherland. The Allied inspectors found out what was happening and reported back to their capitals.¹
If the inspectors had not been in Germany, the Western powers might not have known about German cheating, but there was little that the Allies could do to stop it. The episode strongly suggested that it is nearly impossible to prevent an enemy from rearming unless that nation is completely occupied. After the Second World War, Allied powers learned their lesson. This time Germany would be occupied and controlled until the German government and culture of militarism could be changed.
A Cold Equation
Much of the mainstream discussion of the Iran war lapses into simplistic categories: Obama policy good; Trump policy bad, or the reverse. The dismal reality of foreign policy is that you are usually struggling to determine which option is the least unpalatable. To do that, you must often conduct a cold cost-benefit analysis.
If America’s goal was to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, what was the least costly option to achieve that end? The current approach has so far cost $25 billion in military spending, according to the Pentagon. But that figure does not include the costs to American consumers in higher prices of fuel, food, and all other goods whose prices rise with the price of gas. It does not include the costs to nearly every country around the world, now suffering from higher prices due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Nor does it account for the costs in human terms: the low-income family pushed into homelessness because it cannot pay its monthly bills; the elderly retiree living on Social Security checks, having to choose between medicine or food; the young middle class single-income earner who cannot save as much for a home because the money she would have set aside for the future is needed now, or the small business owner forced to shutter his doors because his profits are gobbled up by inflation.
These are just the costs in treasure. The cost in lives must include the many Iranians who died in air assaults, some of whom were innocent civilians, like the little girls whose bodies were shattered by a missile strike on their schoolhouse, and the others in the Gulf states who died from Iranian retaliation. There are the U.S. servicemen and women who died in the conflict as well.
And then there are political costs. Will the war and its resulting inflation cause Republicans to lose the House in November? Will it fuel far Right parties in Europe, destabilizing democratic regimes? Policies have ripple effects, and even though they cannot be measured with precision, they must be accounted for when calculating costs.
The Balance Sheet
And so, the question becomes: Assuming Iran will cheat, is it better to have inspectors in Iran, gathering intel and recruiting spies, while hoping you can slow their progress toward getting a nuke, or is it wiser to blow up the country, decapitate its leadership, degrade its military, and be left to try for a better deal? A weakened Iranian military is undeniably a positive, but was it worth the enormous cost, especially if there were cheaper, more effective alternatives?
If the Trump people can strike a new deal with Iran on the nuclear issue, would you expect the Iranian regime to honor it?
As long as the current regime remains, the way to stop them is to slow them. Bunker busting bombs, cyber strikes on centrifuges, and teams of inspectors can help. All are far less costly than a war.
¹ You can read more about this episode in my book, A Sense of the Enemy: The High-Stakes History of Reading Your Rival’s Mind. Oxford University Press, 2014.