Follow us on social

Shutterstock_1505987069-scaled

Containing Iran and drawing the wrong lessons from the Cold War

Apart from overstating the Tehran threat, a new analysis exaggerates the success of US strategy in the demise of the Soviet Union.

Analysis | Middle East

When it comes to Iran, there is a persistent belief in Washington that the Cold War experience in confronting the Soviet Union is relevant to dealing with the Islamic Republic. Yet the pundits and policymakers insist on drawing the wrong lessons from that experience.

The latest iteration of this theme is found Karim Sadjadpour’s recent article in The Atlantic, conspicuously titled “How to Win the Cold War with Iran.” In it, Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, promotes “containment” as a long-term strategy to deal with Iran, similar to the one devised by the American diplomat George Kennan regarding the Soviet Union in 1946.

What Sadjadpour offers, however, amounts to no more than repackaging of the old “dual containment” of Iran and (then Saddam Hussein-led) Iraq dating back to the Clinton presidency. With higher or lower intensity, Washington has pursued that policy ever since, with the JCPOA providing only a brief interlude, and then confined only to the nuclear issue. Dual containment, however, failed to achieve its more general objective of fundamentally changing the nature of the Iranian regime, or the regime itself. Essentially, Sadjadpour proposes to pursue the same, decades-long strategy hoping for a different result.

Enlisting the U.S. Cold War experience as a guide in this effort is not helpful. At a time when Washington has to deal with a rising China and a hostile Russia, it is baffling, to say the least, that it should focus on “winning the Cold War with Iran” — a distant middling regional power, surrounded by hostile states, with a struggling economy and an out-dated military that, unlike the Soviet Union of the original Cold War, poses no direct threat whatsoever to the United States

Apart from overstating the Iranian threat, Sadjadpour exaggerates the success of the original containment strategy in bringing change to — and the eventual demise of — the Soviet Union. Although U.S. pressure and the arms race undoubtedly contributed to exhausting the Soviet economy, there was nothing inevitable about the reform, or perestroika, process launched by then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s.

For proof, one only has to look at Cuba or North Korea, where one-party “communist” regimes are still in place, despite decades of isolation, sanctions, and pressure. That the Soviet Union ended its existence peacefully 30 years ago is nothing short of miraculous and is mostly attributable to Gorbachev’s refusal to use violence to arrest the country’s disintegration. The set of circumstances that led to the Soviet demise is unique and not easily replicable elsewhere.

Crediting containment alone also does not do justice to Ronald Reagan’s and George H.W. Bush’s careful engagement with the Soviets on arms control. They were attacked by hawks at the time who claimed that the  “Soviets could never be trusted,” exactly the same kind of rhetoric anti-Iranian hard-liners use today against any rapprochement with Tehran. Yet history vindicated Reagan and Bush as their diplomacy helped to end the Cold War.

Sadjadpour and fellow new cold warriors, by contrast, subscribe to a notion that it was not the arms control-centered diplomacy, but rather U.S. support for democratic and nationalist aspirations of the Soviet peoples that ended the Cold War. It follows that Washington should adopt a similar approach to Iran. Yet this fundamentally misreads both the Soviet experience and conditions in Iran.

The democratic aspirations of the Soviets were galvanized by Gorbachev’s top-down policies of openness (glasnost). They didn’t suddenly blossom as a result of some cumulative, pent-up pressure from the populace. American diplomacy at the time was focused on strengthening Gorbachev’s domestic position. When centrifugal forces gained steam in the Soviet Union as an unanticipated consequence of his reforms, Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, were notoriously cautious in embracing them, out of a well-founded concern that doing so would provoke Soviet hard-liners and roll back all the progress achieved in bilateral relations until then. As to the nationalist impulses that ran through the Soviet periphery, far from encouraging them, Bush in fact showed a distinct lack of enthusiasm as when, in his stop-over in Ukraine in 1991, he warned against “a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”

In Iran, the reformist, moderate aspirations of a significant part of the population found their outlets, since early 1990s, in the elections of former presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, Mohammad Khatami and the incumbent, Hassan Rouhani. Each of them reached out to Washington — from Rafsanjani’s offer of a contract to an American oil major Conoco to Khatami’s “dialogue of civilizations” and practical help in the U.S. war in Afghanistan to Rouhani’s JCPOA and de facto cooperation with United States in fighting ISIS in Iraq.

Each time these overtures were ultimately rebuffed by Washington. It is therefore disingenuous for Sadjadpour to claim that the JCPOA failed to soften the Islamic Republic’s anti-American posture: like previous efforts, the attempts at engagements were simply not given chance to consolidate themselves, provide economic dividends to Iran, develop new dynamics in U.S.–Iran relations and eventually set the country on a more liberal trajectory. It was the failure of the JCPOA — due to an extreme form of the containment policy under President Trump — that vindicated the Iranian hardliners’ dim view of the United States and politically undermined the moderates. A true lesson of the Cold War would have been to do the exact opposite: empower the moderates by giving arguments in favor of engagement with the United States. 

More than a viable blueprint for a successful U.S. strategy on Iran, Sadjadpour’s advice is just another example of a conventionally hawkish analysis, based on a selective and ideological reading of the Cold War and its lessons.

This article reflects the personal views of the author and not necessarily the opinions of the S&D Group and the European Parliament.


Image: Novikov Aleksey via shutterstock.com
Analysis | Middle East
Munich Dispatch: Vance lectures Euros on democracy & tolerance
Top photo credit: MSC/Lennart Preiss

Munich Dispatch: Vance lectures Euros on democracy & tolerance

Europe

MUNICH, GERMANY — The Munich Security Conference started this Friday in a city recovering from an attack in which a suspect drove his car into a crowd of people, leaving 36 people injured on Thursday morning.

The international meeting also takes place against the backdrop of the German parliamentary elections on Feb. 23. Friedrich Merz, the chancellor candidate of the center-right Christian-Democratic Union (CDU) — which comfortably leads the polls with around 30% of support — could be spotted in the first row of the conference hall. Merz held a short meeting with United States Vice President J.D. Vance earlier in the day.

keep readingShow less
'People-centered peace' lost a major advocate this week
Top photo credit: Screenshot TRT World (6/5/23)

'People-centered peace' lost a major advocate this week

Europe

On February 12, President Trump revealed he had talked to Putin about a peace deal in Ukraine, and Defense Secretary Hegseth gave a speech about what a peace settlement would not entail (NATO membership, US protection, return of occupied territories).

This left Ukrainians reeling with feelings of betrayal and being steamrolled, while European leaders looked shellshocked at finding themselves sidelined. I thought the right moment had arrived to finally write a long-planned article, on inclusive, people-centered peace-making, with my co-author Wolfgang Sporrer.

keep readingShow less
Nuclear missile
Top image credit: Eric Poulin via shutterstock.com

Time to DOGE the nuclear triad

Military Industrial Complex

The Pentagon is in the midst of a three-decades long plan to build a new generation of nuclear weapons, and it is not going well — so badly that the Air Force announced this week that it will pause large parts of the development of its new intercontinental ballistic missile, known officially as the Sentinel.

The pause will impact design and launch facilities in California and Utah and is projected to throw the project 18 to 24 months off schedule.

keep readingShow less

Trump transition

Latest

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.