A “containment” strategy for Iran has been set out in a little-noticed policy paper by Peter Rodman, until recently a senior Pentagon official. “The nature of the regime is at the core of the challenge it poses,” the paper argues, adding that “the starting-point of a counter-strategy is containment”. Formerly assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs, Rodman is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. (The paper, Countering Iran’s Revolutionary Challenge, can be found at http://www.brookings.edu.)
Key elements of the containment strategy are
Coming from someone who was until recently a senior insider, the paper offers valuable insights into official thinking. It indicates that it is not just Iranian behaviour that the Bush administration finds threatening. It sees Iran – rather as American conservatives saw the Soviet Union during the Cold War – as an essentially ideological threat. “Iran is a revolutionary power,” Rodman declares, “still in an exuberant phase of its revolution.” (Most Iran-watchers, in contrast, tend to regard the regime as being in a post-revolutionary phase – no longer intent, for example, on exporting its revolution elsewhere.)
Rodman favours muscular containment after rejecting the alternatives: military options are dangerous and dialogue is, in his view, a trap. Above all, he sees a crucial link between Iran and Iraq. “There is no way for the United States to be strong against Iran if we are weak in Iraq.” He does not rule out dialogue, but not if America comes to the table as a “supplicant”. “We need a better geopolitical and psychological balance – some deflation of the Iranians’ self-confidence and bolstering of our friends’ confidence in us – before going down this road.”
Some of the elements of such a policy – and some of its potential drawbacks -- are already apparent. External pressures are fuelling a mood of growing paranoia within the regime in Tehran. Convinced the US is trying to instigate a “velvet revolution” in Iran, hardliners in the regime are battening down the hatches – cracking down on students, women’s rights activists and trade unionists, locking up Iranian-American researchers, imposing new curbs on the media, and introducing petrol rationing (in the teeth of popular opposition) in order to remedy an acknowledged economic vulnerability. Further pressure will add a new element of volatility to an already dangerous situation.
The question remains whether Cold-War-style containment will resolve the Iran problem or make it worse. Few would dispute Rodman’s view that Iran and Iraq are now inextricably linked, but many would argue that, whether the US stays in Iraq or withdraws, it will be in no position to dictate terms to a resurgent Iran. Multilateral engagement with Iran (as recommended by the Baker-Hamilton commission) offers some prospect of tying the Islamic Republic into a regional settlement of the Iraq problem. A mix of muscular containment, destabilisation, and brinkmanship is a far riskier option.
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