Nuclear deal with Iran more likely to benefit hardliners than promote democratic reform

President Obama responds by saying that, nevertheless, the deal is indeed a poison pill for Iran’s hardliners. As the president himself explained, “It is possible that if we sign this nuclear deal, we strengthen the hand of those more moderate forces inside of Iran.” Even if the deal seems disadvantageous to the U.S. today, in the long run it will unlock a new relationship. Once international investment begins to flow, and the benefits of cooperation grow tangible, Tehran’s hardliners will find themselves enmeshed in a policy of engagement.

Our allies characterize this sort of argument as the worst kind of wishful thinking. Their attitude is much more in tune with Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz who recently asked, “What gives us the confidence that we will prove more astute at predicting Iran’s domestic course than Vietnam’s, Afghanistan’s, Iraq’s, Syria’s, Egypt’s or Libya’s?” The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, oversees a ruthless security state that has endured countless challenges, including an eight- year war with Iraq and the Green Revolution of 2009. Time after time, it has squelched domestic dissent. It is highly implausible to believe that the flooding of the country with cash will simply wash the regime away.

In fact, our allies say, it makes much greater sense to assume that the nuclear agreement’s actual, tangible benefits will immediately prop-up Iran’s hardliners. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—which acts as the custodian of the 1979 Revolution, both at home and abroad—commands an economic empire whose tentacles reach into the key sectors of the Iranian economy. It will certainly benefit greatly from the lifting of sanctions and the rush of international investments that will follow a nuclear accord. In fact, it is so deeply entrenched in Iran’s economy that it will probably profit more than anyone else from the new era of international investment.

This deal, instead, seems part of a broader policy to embrace Iran and effectively nourish its regime with tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief and rejuvenated trade and exports. The result will not be greater Iranian moderation, as the Administration hopes, but will be a strengthening of its regime internally and a more aggressive posture abroad. A regime guilty of some of the world’s worst human rights abuses – jailing political opponents and journalists, executing the most people per capita of any country, denying the Holocaust and threatening to annihilate Israel – and reeling from the pain of tough sanctions, will be taken out of intensive care and made healthy and immune to attack by this deal.

A policy of accommodation will maximize ‘blowback’ from the JCPOA, throwing the region and America’s key alliances into deep disarray. The more credible the perception is that the United States is prepared to accept and perhaps facilitate a large regional role for Iran, the more the United States will be seen as having taken the anti‐Sunni side in a widening sectarian war. Gulf states who have long considered the United States a reliable protector will see American policy as a threat to their security and will explore new policy options with potentially very dangerous consequences for stability and American interests. The gap between radical and fanatical fighting groups and militias on the one hand and governing elites in the Sunni world will compress; alignments that are unthinkable today could become quite likely if key Sunni states come to believe that the United States has chosen Iran and the Shi’a in the sectarian war. Such a course of action is also more likely to empower hardliners in Iran, as they will be able to make a plausible case that Iran has a historic opportunity to vault into the ranks of leading global powers by consolidating its power in the critical Gulf area.

American allies in the Middle East are well aware of this dynamic. This is why they have been seeking more arms and stronger political commitments from the United States as they brace for the impact of a stronger and richer Iran in the wake of this agreement. Fueling a conventional arms race in the region and making additional commitments to protect threatened states are among the consequences of this agreement; the Congress should take care to inform itself about the nature of these new commitments and engagements that the JCPOA has made necessary.

Khatami's January 1998 interview with CNN represented a remarkable gambit, given that Iranian officials had granted only rare interviews to the U.S. press. His stunning rhetoric – he began by paying respect to the "great American people" and expressed "an intellectual affinity for American civilization" – stood in sharp contrast to a speech only days before by Khamenei, who accused the West of using "guileful propaganda tricks…to bring about instability and insecurity in the nation." However, while the bold move was intended to open new channels with the West, it closed doors at home. The interview ignited a storm of controversy within Iran, exacerbating conservative mistrust of Khatami. Conservative opposition reflected self-interest, as rapprochement with the United States would have boosted Khatami's approval ratings to stratospheric levels, as well as an ideology that equated regime orthodoxy with regime survival. Two weeks after the CNN interview, after a muted response from Washington, Khatami spoke about the United States in much more strident terms in an address before the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, and on a subsequent visit to the United Nations suggested that the interview had been "misinterpreted" and asked Americans "not to confuse a dialogue among people and cultures with political dialogue." For much of the rest of his presidency, Khatami and the reformists focused their attentions on mending other breaches in Iran's international relations, and took relatively few concrete actions to reach out to Washington or respond to the belated overtures mounted by the Clinton administration two years later.