A Détente Option for Iran

Foreign Affairs -April 3rd, 2024

By Jon B. Alterman

America Needs a Simpler Policy—but Not Rapprochement

On April 1, Israeli warplanes attacked a building in Damascus that is part of the Iranian embassy there, killing seven senior figures in the Iranian military. Tehran has yet to respond. But when it does, the scale and nature of its actions will help answer a basic question at the heart of many debates about the current situation in the Middle East: Has U.S. deterrence worked against Iran?

Washington has had its difficulties with Iran since the Islamic Republic was founded in 1979, and since then, the United States has struggled to find a successful strategy for dealing with it. Despite the fact that the U.S. economy is more than 16 times as large as Iran’s and its military budget more than 100 times as large, Iran has consistently blocked U.S. efforts to create a stable regional order. Although it is hard to think of any measure in which Tehran is even vaguely competitive with Washington, all U.S. efforts to sideline Iran have failed for most of the last four decades. This presents a puzzle. The disparities between the two sides are so great that it could be supposed that deterring Iran’s malign behavior would be a straightforward question of properly calibrating U.S. policy and resolve. This was the logic behind the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign from 2018–21, and it has also informed Washington’s course in the Middle East following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. But that assumption is mistaken.

The problem is not with deterrence. Rather, it is that Washington has been trying to do too much with Tehran, with too limited a set of tools, over too long a period of time. Although prioritizing U.S. objectives and adopting a more flexible set of responses will not fix the Middle East, it will certainly improve it. Iran may remain a challenge for U.S. policymakers—but it will at least become a more predictable one.

A SLIPPERY ADVERSARY

For the last 45 years, the United States has tried to deter and compel Iran. But this is the wrong approach. Deterrence theory is not suited to dealing with the sorts of challenges that Tehran presents today. Deterrence was developed during the Cold War, when—from the successful testing of a Soviet atomic bomb in 1949 to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991—U.S. strategists were rightly preoccupied with preventing a global catastrophe. To that end, they labored mightily to persuade the Soviet Union to not abandon the status quo by using nuclear weapons. At heart, Washington’s strategy was a bet that if nuclear war broke out, the conflict would impose massive, unbearable costs on both sides. The hope was that the U.S. nuclear arsenal on land and sea and in the air, combined with a show of resolve, would ensure Soviet inaction. Costly as it was, neither side would then pay the much higher costs of all-out war. “Compellence,” meanwhile, is the effort to persuade an adversary to stop or reverse an action it has already begun. Compellence is much harder than deterrence, as it requires an adversary to stop doing something already in motion, and it requires the compeller to follow through on their specific threats. It is estimated that compellence works only about a third of the time, often because the other side refuses to capitulate.

Neither deterrence nor compellence theory has solved the problem of what to do with Iran. From the Islamic Republic’s founding, the United States has had to decide whether to take Iran’s revolutionary rhetoric literally—and given both its tone and Iran’s support for violent nonstate actors throughout the region, it has often seemed foolish not to. Successive U.S. presidents have accordingly regarded Iran’s efforts to project strength as threatening, and Tehran, in turn, has perceived Washington’s responses as equally so.

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