The big picture

On April 2, a relieved American President Barack Obama extolled the virtues of the Iran nuclear deal: “if we can get this done…we will be able to resolve one of the greatest threats to our security, and to do so peacefully.” Although he inherited a destabilised region, Obama failed to restore order or restructure American interests in West Asia. The Iran deal may have finally given the White House a legacy to crow about. But is the deal likely to be the silver bullet?

Since dramatically losing the Shah’s client regime to the Iranian revolution in 1979, America has struggled for decades to produce the necessary equilibrium in West Asia. The two military interventions in Iraq were a reflection of the US attempts to transform regional power balances. While US strategists wisely held their hand in 1991 by limiting their war aims and avoiding nation-building commitments, the post-2003 intervention was devastating for Iraq and regional order, and a tipping point for any further US pretensions to regional hegemony.

Unable to effectively deploy land power to produce geopolitical transformation, the strategic menu was reduced to three choices – retrenchment, burden sharing or multipolarity. The latter akin to a regional order co-sponsored with other great powers. Ultimately, outsourcing security functions to US allies was deemed the preferred means to preserving the same end – US predominance – albeit, on the cheap. Burden sharing embodies the idea that US allies must play their part in maintaining regional security. But in West Asia, burden sharing exacerbated the path to an orderly transition to a regional security architecture that could also make space for Iran.

Having militarily propped up and encouraged its regional clients in assuming larger roles in addressing common geopolitical challenges, the US soon discovered the perils of this chaotic process. Syria is an exemplar of a balancing strategy that emerged from a weak US hand and parochial allied interests whose geopolitical solutions were worse than the defined threat. The rise of the Islamic State and the expansion of proxy conflicts to Iraq and Yemen have proved that burden sharing is hardly the panacea that Western strategists devised to compensate for the limits of US military capabilities.

Unrelenting proxy wars since 2011 drew in other actors seeking to restore their great power roles. Having nearly collided with Russia over Syria in 2013, the prospect of rising extra-regional influence is what probably tilted Washington’s calculus. Its Iran policy in the past decade is notable not just for its robust containment but that other great powers acquiesced to this process.

This tacit support to US regional hegemony has faded away as Washington’s equations with Moscow and Beijing have become fraught with heightened rivalry and mistrust, manifesting in competing images and policies in West Asia. Anticipating an improving Iranian geopolitical position, the White House sought to cut a deal before its bargaining cards weakened or even expired. While endorsing the deal, Obama admitted, “it’s doubtful that we can even keep our current international sanctions in place”.

Tactical accommodation
The one unmistakable inference from the deal is the US has implicitly accepted limits to its global and regional power. But has Washington accepted a genuine accommodation with Iran, which would inevitably involve a region-wide accommodation with US allies, and, presumably also a great power détente with Moscow and Beijing?

Historically, US accommodation of regional power centres such as Japan and Europe in the 1940s and China in the 1970s was predicated, as Edward Luttwak once remarked, on the assumption that “the supposed new centres will absorb and deflect Russian, and not American power.” Such an assumption has little logic in Iran’s case. The Iran deal actually benefits external powers seeking to expand their influence in West Asia.

Indeed, Moscow has already strengthened Tehran’s bargaining posture by reviving a 2007 deal to supply it with the sophisticated S-300 surface-to-air missile system, which raises the costs of any offensive military action near Iran’s frontiers. China too is poised to deepen its strategic partnership with Iran, having been Iran’s biggest trade partner during the sanctions phase. In 2012, China accounted for 50 per cent of Iran’s oil exports.  

What the Iran deal has done is essentially push the can down the road. Both domestically because of a powerful Jewish lobby, and, externally because of an inability to re-orient the calculus of its Sunni Arab clients, the Obama administration has been left with an accommodation strategy that can best be described as tactical in its orientation and aims. Unlike the Nixon deal with China, the US opening to Iran is occurring without any conception of shared threats or interests or what Kissinger and Shultz describe as “congruent definitions of stability”.

The only purported shared threat – the Islamic State – was ironically devised to blunt Iranian influence in Iraq and Syria! It is instructive that strategic bargaining has primarily revolved around the West ceasing its economic warfare on Iran and not on reconciling geopolitical differences in Syria, Iraq or Yemen.

Tehran, whose geopolitical ambitions are linked to a complex regional identity that fuses historical memory of pre-Islamic Persian prestige and power with the Islamic Republic’s self-image as the guardian of Shiite interests across the region, would hardly be enthused with an emasculated role. And, especially not in a context where global politics is enhancing Iran’s options. Brace yourself for a multipolar world!

(The writer is research scholar at King’s College London)