Opinion | America’s failed approach to Iran can’t really be called a strategy

The idea of ‘maximum pressure’ has backfired, adding to instability in the Middle East.

By Fareed Zakaria

The Middle East is today as close to a broad regional war as it has been in decades. There are many explanations for this tense reality but one force casts a shadow over all of them: Iran. Iran has decided that it has more to gain than to lose by pursuing an aggressive policy directed against Washington and its allies in the region. This new and dangerous reality results from one factor above all: the collapse of any coherent U.S. policy toward Iran.

Consider the failure of Washington’s current approach. Since President Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, U.S. policy toward Iran has been one of “maximum pressure.”

The number of sanctions against Iran rose from 370 under Barack Obama to more than 1,500 during the Trump administration, making the country the most sanctioned on the planet. While the other partners in the nuclear-deal negotiations — European powers, Russia and China — objected, the United States used secondary sanctions to effectively block them from trading much with Tehran.

The Biden administration has mostly continued the Trump policy, with a few modifications and relaxations.

And what has been the result of the Trump-Biden policy of maximum pressure? Freed from the constraints of the nuclear deal, Iran has massively advanced its nuclear program. It now has 30 times more enriched uranium than the deal allowed, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The deal created a year-long “breakout time,” the period necessary to produce the nuclear fuel needed for a weapon. Last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tehran is one to two weeks away from breakout capacity.

Meanwhile, Iran has responded to the pressure from abroad by forging closer ties with an array of substate groups in the region — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria.

Together this “axis of resistance” has plunged Israel into its longest and most perilous war in decades, diverted about 70 percent of vessel traffic out of the Red Sea, and turned Iraq and Syria into reliable client states. By virtually any measure, Washington’s policy toward Iran has failed.

Why has maximum pressure not worked? Hadi Kahalzadeh, a research fellow at Brandeis University, has authored a careful study that comes to an important conclusion:

“The expanded sanctions regime … has had adverse consequences for the Iranian middle classes … causing them to lose faith in the reformist politicians who supported a new round of diplomacy. Iranian hard-liners invoked the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal to show that they had been right all along to dismiss the negotiations as a sham.

As European and other international companies began to withdraw from Iran … the hard-liners opened the door to Chinese investors and called on their own loyal business interests to fill the vacuum.”

Even after a reformist, Masoud Pezeshkian, was recently elected president, he still has had to cave to the religious and military establishment who hold real power.

The truth is that, for almost a decade, Washington has had an attitude toward Iran — unrelenting opposition and pressure — but not a strategy. The Obama administration tried an approach that paired extreme sanctions with a way out for Iran — if it would restrict its nuclear program.

By containing Iran’s most potent threat, Obama hoped the country would end up being less aggressive in its neighborhood. International experts agree Iran largely adhered to the nuclear deal. Tehran, however, did not wind down its regional activities (which were never part of the deal).

Could nuclear negotiations have led to some kind of broader relaxation of tensions? It’s impossible to know, because in the span of two years, Trump took power and reversed U.S. policy altogether.

The Biden administration could have changed course but feared that doing so would trigger too strong a reaction from Republicans. The problem is that the current approach does not amount to a strategy. Rather, it is an attitude based primarily on pandering to American domestic audiences by looking “tough.” It’s a vague notion that unrelenting opposition will yield something, perhaps a collapse of the regime itself.

I dislike the Iranian regime and everything it stands for. I admire the brave women and men who have opposed it in the streets and paid a heavy price for their opposition. I applaud those who have tried to moderate the country from within, knowing they’re bucking the regime’s anti-U.S. history and DNA. I hope that, one day, this great nation will be able to return to its rightful place of prestige in the region and the world.

But hope is not a strategy. The United States and its allies need to devise a policy toward Iran that recognizes the reality that the Islamic republic exists — and then put in place threats and punishments to deter it, but also incentives so that it has a reason to relax tensions. This will not lead to a détente, let alone cooperation with Tehran. But it could reduce the many frictions that might tip this volatile region into a long and bloody war.

Opinion by Fareed Zakaria

Fareed Zakaria writes a foreign affairs column for The Post. He is also the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS.Twitter