Four months ago, Israel bombed Iran for 12 days, in a campaign whose grand finale was the apparent destruction of three Iranian nuclear facilities in strikes by the United States. Last week, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany decided that bombing was not enough. They triggered the United Nations’ crippling “snapback” sanctions, as American hawks had been demanding for years. Iranian officials had tried to avert these sanctions. When sanctions came anyway, those officials minimized their effect by saying that Iran had survived sanctions before. But these are bringing new kinds of pain. Japan has already suspended dozens of Iranian assets. Even Turkey, traditionally a close economic partner, is complying. The Iranian rial has sunk to a historic low.
The combination punch of berubblement and economic devastation is making Iran desperate. Although it still has options, all of them are bad.
Iran’s previous nuclear strategy was slow-and-steady enrichment of uranium, paired with languorous and protracted negotiation with the United States. It struck a nuclear deal with the Obama administration in 2015, then watched the Trump administration withdraw in 2018. The strategy of negotiation has failed Iran and left it with no bomb, humiliated in battle, and facing immiseration.
Iran could surrender its nuclear ambitions. Call this the Libya option, after Muammar Qaddafi’s renunciation of his nuclear program in 2003. The limits of the Libyan option’s appeal are evident when one considers Qaddafi’s fate, which was to be deposed, poked in the backside with a piece of steel, and shot in the head.
More appealing is the relative calm of North Korea, whose combined nuclear and conventional deterrent shows no sign of weakness. States that go nuclear tend to survive. For a North Korean option to work, however, Iran would actually have to get a bomb. Its nuclear scientists would have to report for duty, despite ample evidence that Israel and the United States can find them and kill them, using motorcycle-riding hitmen, drones, bombers, and methods so exotic that even years later, the nature of the attack is not well understood. If these undaunted scientists succeed, the result for Iran will be isolation and poverty (Pyongyang is quiet, but it is still Pyongyang), and the permanent withholding of any carrots Tehran might once have hoped to acquire through negotiation. The only thing worse than not having the bomb might be having one.
Another option would be to go short of nuclear—to go ballistic. One of the perils of the 12-day war, for Iran and Israel alike, was what it threatened to reveal about their respective military capabilities. The first days of the conflict revealed that Iran was naked and defenseless against Israel’s air attacks and intelligence services. Iran’s imported weaponry and aging fighters were irrelevant. In fact, only one element of Iran’s defense strategy worked.
During the war, Iran fired about 500 ballistic missiles. That number is reckoned to be a significant fraction of its total stockpile: 12 days of war didn’t fully deplete its arsenal, but a few dozen more days might have. Its onslaught against Israel worked well enough, as the many videos of fearsome fireworks over Tel Aviv show. Israel’s defenses intercepted a significant number of the missiles overhead. But enough slipped through to show that Iran can overwhelm those defenses and by sheer volume destroy targets of its choosing.
Iran’s foreign-sourced weapons failed, but its own arms industry (one of the few functional institutions that it did not inherit from the Shah’s regime) has produced drones and missiles that have saved it from collapse. Its Khorramshahr 4 carries a 1,500-kilogram payload, shoots within 12 minutes, and can hit a range of 2,000 kilometers. Iran’s drones are probably its most notable industrial export and are in regular use by Russia for its assault on Ukraine. Tehran now operates a drone factory out of Tajikistan, using it to supply Russia.
Even so, Iran’s drones and missiles will never match those held by its primary adversaries. At most, Iran can hope to wound America or Israel when attacked. But its own weapons can never win a war.
That means Iran may feel compelled to seek help from outside. The Iranian foreign ministry’s official slogan is “Neither Western nor Eastern”—a reflection of the old revolutionary goal of providing an alternative to Washington and Moscow. But in recent years, Iran has turned decisively to Russia and China and dreamed of a grand anti-Western Eurasian coalition. Even the less-ideological nationalists think Iran should stop trying to placate the West, and instead build up ties with Arab countries, Brazil, or India. Responding to the European snapback, President Masoud Pezeshkian said that Iran will now prioritize BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
This approach is desperate. Beijing and Moscow treat Iran less like an ally and more like a cheap date. Neither Russia nor China have proved reliable for Iran. They are hostile to its Islamism (they crush it within their own borders), and even if Iran became completely pragmatic, both China and Russia have higher priorities than friendship with Iran. Russia values its ties with Israel at least as much as those with Iran. China does more trade with Iran’s Arab neighbors than with Iran and has more investments in Israel. Russia gladly accepted drones from Iran in its Ukraine war but did nothing for Iran during the 12-day war. Iran relies on China to buy its exported oil. Neither Russia nor China has sold Iran its best military hardware. If they did, the next war with Israel would be an intelligence bonanza for the United States, which could then see exactly what the latest generation of Chinese weaponry can do.
As for Brazil and India: Snapback means that more countries are forced to choose between friendship with Iran and friendship with everyone else. Iran would be a bizarre and masochistic choice. Even close Iranian allies such as Iraq have to observe the sanctions in some form. When India tried building a port in southeastern Iran to rival a nearby Chinese-built port in Pakistan, it faced so many restrictions that it effectively had to give up and leave.
Lacking military solutions, Iran might decide to go for a historic compromise. It would acknowledge that it has lost its anti-Western crusade, stop its “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” obsessions, and meekly shift toward becoming a normal, boring country, more Indonesia than North Korea. Much of Iran’s ruling elite hopes for this path. Accepting the end of the Islamic revolutionary project would be easy for this group—they have long been cynical about it—but they are searching for a way to do so that lets them stay in power afterward.
Soon before his death in 2017, Ayatollah Rafsanjani, a founding figure of the revolution, proposed postwar West Germany and Japan as models for Iran. These countries accepted their defeat at war and gave up their missiles to get a chance at economic development instead. Rafsanjani lost the internal power struggle to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei before dying a mysterious death. But his ideological kin, such as former President Hassan Rouhani, are waiting in the wings, hoping to get their way when the 86-year-old Khamenei finally dies. The challenge facing these reformers is bringing along enough of the economic and military elites with them, and convincing them that an ideological surrender would be their best chance of avoiding all-out war and preserving their wealth and status.
The first three of these options—go nuclear, go ballistic, get closer to China and Russia—have the virtue, to the hard-liners at least, of prolonging the Islamic Republic’s puritanical domestic rule, and not demanding that they admit defeat. (The official Iranian position remains that it did not lose the war, and that Israel gave up the fight because Iran forced it to.) The last option has the virtue, to everyone else, of changing the fundamental character of Iran, and bringing peace and possibly even prosperity. In other words: Anything could still happen.
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