Is the Memorandum of Understanding a staggering defeat as the critics suggest or a less than ideal path forward for a conflict that has been simmering for almost 50 years?
To hear detractors tell it, President Donald Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding with Iran is nothing short of a humiliating defeat, an appeasement of if not outright surrender to a terrorist regime that will go down in history as one of the worst foreign policy blunders ever. In their view, the defeat had many causes, either a lack of strategy, a lack of will, a lack of focus, or even a lack of courage to prosecute the conflict fully. This is a concept that is rarely defined, but which we can take to mean achieving either some form of unconditional surrender or regime change, meaning the President didn’t “finish the job.” While there are certainly legitimate concerns to have about the memorandum as well as some of the statements the President has made during the war, namely that he himself once insisted that unconditional surrender was the only option, the extreme view of the potential deal as a staggering defeat isn’t remotely accurate. Indeed, maintaining it requires the intentional avoidance of several key facts which should have been beyond dispute from the onset of the conflict combined with some seriously circular reasoning that can’t withstand larger scrutiny, especially in the context of a conflict that has been simmering to varying degrees for almost fifty years.
First, the facts. Whatever anyone may wish, there was no universe wherein the United States was going to commit troops for the sort of land invasion and sustained in-country operations that would make regime change or unconditional surrender possible. Even if President Trump wanted to pursue such a course, there aren’t close to the 60 votes in the Senate required to authorize and fund such an action under our system of government. For that matter, there might not even be 40, especially considering Republican defections in the recent vote in the house on the War Powers Act. Pretending otherwise to support the conclusion that a more aggressive option than five weeks of an aerial assault and two plus months of blockade simply ignores reality. Moreover, the fact that Congress would refuse to support a full blown war should rightly be seen as a positive development, a lesson learned from our previous failures and a rational desire to avoid making another catastrophic mistake. After all, it was less than five years ago when precisely this sort of large scale action resulted in actual defeat – complete with soldiers getting blown up at Abbey Gate and people falling out of airplanes – in Afghanistan, despite spending almost 20 years in the country, an incredible $2.2 trillion, and losing 2,400 soldiers and contractors. Less than a decade before that disaster, the final results in Iraq weren’t all that stellar either. In that case, we spent nine years in the country, around $3 trillion, and lost 4,400 lives to stand up a barely functional state that remains only a nominal ally. Thus, even if applying the same scale to Iran were possible, knowing it’s larger and more populated than the previous two efforts combined, there are no shortage of reasons to believe the result would be far from the success tacitly assumed in the arguments that the President failed because he didn’t commit the necessary resources. At a minimum, anyone arguing that we should’ve done more should be required to explain both what that more actually is and why it would lead to a better outcome than the last two times it has been tried.
Second, criticisms that focus exclusively on the Memorandum of Understanding generally ignore the fact that the United States spent five weeks engaged in 14,000 some odd sorties targeting Iran’s military infrastructure, air force, navy, nuclear programs, weapons programs, and leadership. As a result, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had ruled the country since 1989, and around 50 of his senior leaders are dead, his replacement has not been seen in public since his ascension to power and is said to be seriously injured if not dead himself, and their capacity to make war has been greatly diminished. Further, the aerial campaign was followed by a naval blockade that greatly damaged their economy and caused inflation to skyrocket, prompting many analysts to believe the country was on the verge of a fiscal collapse. While the infrastructure and assets can be rebuilt in principle, it will take years in practice, not to mention billions upon billions of dollars. Though detractors sometimes dismiss these as mere tactical victories rather than strategic ones and there is some truth to that, they are measurable victories nonetheless and for the foreseeable future, they will greatly reduce Iran’s capacity to terrorize the region and the world. Unfortunately, we cannot say with any surety at this point how long it will take to rebuild these assets and infrastructure, or how much it would cost with some estimates putting the total figure as much as $1 trillion, but whether it takes three years, five years, or ten years, any comprehensive analysis of the merits of the deal needs to take into account the reality that the Iran making it is not the same as it was before the war. Instead, it has been diminished in some large, though admittedly unknown capacity and while the new leaders might want to return to the old formula of wreaking havoc through state sponsored terror and threatening their neighbors with ballistic missiles, it simply will not be able to do so for some time, time we can take advantage of to apply more pressure.
Third, there is the reality that Iran cannot be trusted to abide by any deal in any event. Whatever the merits of this particular deal compared to a hypothetically stronger one, the country doesn’t have a history of living up to its obligations over the past five decades regardless. While this is likely why many insist that only some ill-defined regime change is acceptable, we’ve already seen that’s impossible, which leaves us with two options. We can either attempt to force them into a larger, more comprehensive deal with a broader set of terms regarding ballistic missiles, sponsorship of terror, etc., or we can focus on the most important underlying issue, nuclear weapons, and keep the terms as simple as possible while including incentives to help address the other challenges with their behavior. The only question that truly matters is which approach is likely to be more successful. If we can’t trust them on any issue, should we limit the number at play or address as many as possible? Here, it’s difficult to argue that the simpler with incentives for good behavior isn’t better. As the MOU is structured now, it’s focused almost entirely on three things: The Strait, nuclear weapons, and cessation of hostilities throughout the region. In addition to being simple and straightforward, these issues also have the benefit of being easily verifiable. Either the Strait is open, or it isn’t. Either Iran allows the International Atomic Energy Agency to take control over the nuclear dust and conduct further inspections, or they don’t. Either they stop firing missiles or allowing their proxies to fire missiles, or they don’t. If they don’t, the deal is dead. When you consider potentially broader terms, however, the verification becomes much less clear. Ballistic missiles and drones can be built almost anywhere in a country of Iran’s size, even underground. Terror can be funded via complex financial transactions that are nearly impossible to track. Are we seriously going to believe that we can monitor the entire country physically and financially to make sure they aren’t engaging in these activities?
Instead, as we shift from facts to potential outcomes and logical fallacies, the MOU chooses to address these concerns through another means: The much maligned $300 billion fund financed by Middle Eastern countries under the facilitation of the United States. To critics, this is paying Iran reparations they will use to fund terror and evidence that they ultimately won the war, but why would Iran’s neighbors keep putting money into a fund that was used to destabilize their own neighborhood? Instead, it seems clear to me that the goal of the fund is to create the structure for a regional partnership, where Iran is incentivized towards better behavior to benefit from the funds. Whether this will work is admittedly unknown, but considering that President Trump was able to leverage financial ties between key Arab States and Israel into the Abraham Accords during his first term, ending longstanding hostilities and creating the current environment where previous adversaries have been working in partnership throughout the conflict, it’s not unreasonable to believe that partnering on this fund will bring the region closer to together and potentially reduce Iran’s perceived need to build missiles and fund terror.
As I’ve previously opined, the future of Iran will ultimately be defined by the choices the new leadership makes. While these new leaders were members of the previous regime, they are still new to their roles and might well respond differently than the old guard for any number of reasons even if they share many of their philosophies and sympathies. The previous Ayatollah ascended to power barely a decade after the Islamic revolution and was deeply embedded in the radical politics that drove it, as were his top lieutenants. To varying extents, politicians are bound by the conditions that put them in power in the first place and beholden to certain aspects of their rise, limiting their range of choices moving forward. The current Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, however, was already considered a reformer. The two other prominent leaders, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the Speaker of the Parliament of Iran, and Ahmad Vahidi, the Commander in Chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have more hardline backgrounds and might be less amenable to reform, but even so, it appears that Speaker Ghalibaf in particular has favored negotiations, suggesting that there is an ongoing power struggle for the future course of the country – and an opportunity to push the direction towards reform. While we cannot say for sure, certain signs are obviously there, and yet the deal’s detractors consistently argue that Iranian leadership, either now or in the past, doesn’t respond to incentives in any rational manner, being too radical, theocratic, evil, or whatever combination you prefer, setting up the circular reason and the logical fallacy mentioned earlier.
In their view, Iran is not a country composed of leaders who make decisions based on their best interests, much less the best interests of the country. Instead, it is a sort of parasitic mind virus, wherein whoever the Supreme Leader and top officials might be or however long they might have been in power, they are instantly transformed into Islamic fundamentalist zombies completely incapable of considering another course, even if it would greatly benefit them personally (Speaker Ghalibaf for example is a wealthy man that owns multiple luxury apartments in Turkey, which we can assume he would want to maintain). Therefore, nothing short of regime change will do and any deal, even a stronger one, would be untenable because they can’t be trusted to hold up their end of the bargain. This, however, only serves to reduce our choices to two equally undesirable options. We can pursue regime change to finish the job, or we can do nothing, and since regime change is impossible, we’re left with nothing, but how does doing nothing remotely solve the problem? During the conflict itself, Iran fired a secret ballistic missile the world knew nothing about with a range of almost 2,000 miles, far enough to hit Paris. Are we to wait until they have a nuclear weapon and start threatening Europe? Instead, President Trump has opened up a middle ground, hitting them hard, setting them back substantially militarily and economically, and ushering in new leaders he insists will be held accountable to a simple, imperfect deal. Though it might not work, the old expression that something is better than nothing comes to mind.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 