How Trump can offer Iran a way out

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The writer is senior counsellor at Centerview Partners, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former US diplomat

Until now, the initiative in the most recent Middle East conflict has been all Israel’s. It was Israel’s government that decided to undertake a war of choice, a preventive attack on the gathering nuclear threat posed by Iran. Israel has dominated the airspace over Iran, destroying or damaging several nuclear-related facilities, killing several senior military and nuclear officials, and further degrading Iran’s defences and its ability to launch retaliatory attacks against Israel.

But after less than a week, the Israeli war effort may have reached its limit: Israel alone cannot accomplish its two principal objectives. Ending Iran’s nuclear programme in the immediate term requires military capabilities that Israel does not possess. And the region’s history strongly suggests that bringing about regime change by force in Iran won’t be easy and may not bring about the desired result. 

What happens next will therefore depend on the two other principal protagonists in this conflict: the US and Iran.

US policy so far has been inconsistent. Washington was against Israeli military action before seeming to accept and even claim credit for it. It has provided Israel with arms and helped defend it from retaliation but has not joined Israeli offensive actions. It made a run at a diplomatic settlement, held five rounds of talks with Iranian officials, and then gave up. Now President Donald Trump is demanding that Iran unconditionally surrender.  

Currently the Trump administration is debating whether the US should attack the underground Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow, which can only be penetrated by large, heavy bunker-busting bombs carried by B-2 bombers, which Israel does not possess. 

There is some relevant history here. In the early 1990s, Bill Clinton’s administration considered attacking North Korea’s nuclear programme when it was vulnerable and still in its early stages. Ultimately, the US held off, fearing that such an attack could trigger a second Korean war, one that would result in tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of South Korean and American casualties. It was an understandable decision, but came with a significant long-term cost. Today, North Korea has dozens of nuclear weapons along with the intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver them as far as the US mainland. 

The downside of a US attack on Iran is not comparable, in that Iran cannot do much more against Israel than it is already doing. But Iran could attack the 40,000 US forces stationed throughout the region. Tehran could also widen the war, choosing to threaten its recently improved relations with the Gulf states and attack its Arab neighbours, in the process driving up world energy prices. 

An American strike on Fordow would also weaken the international norm against preventive military attacks, something Russia, China and North Korea might then choose to emulate. It would reduce America’s ability to respond effectively to military challenges elsewhere. It would more closely align the US with a deeply unpopular Israeli prime minister whose policies in Gaza and the occupied West Bank have outraged much of the world. And it is far from certain that a US attack will succeed if success is defined as destroying all that remains of Iran’s nuclear programme.

But allowing Fordow to survive makes it highly likely that Iran will manage sooner rather than later to produce nuclear weapons, something it is likely to see as essential in the wake of its failure to deter Israel in the current crisis.

Israel alone could slow, but not prevent, this outcome. And if a nuclear-armed Iran emerges, it would pose an existential threat to Israel and others. It would also be in a better position to resume support of its regional proxies. And an Iranian nuclear weapon would also prompt a number of other countries in the region to follow suit, putting the Middle East on a dangerous hair trigger. 

There is no easy option without downsides. The best course of action for Trump now would be to give Iran one last chance to accept a diplomatic deal. Such a proposal would require that Iran agree to hand over all of its enriched uranium, dismantle centrifuges and other known elements of its nuclear programme, and agree to open-ended inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. 

Such an offer would include relief for Iran from economic sanctions, a withdrawal of the US threat to attack, a larger ceasefire and some face-saving mechanism by which Iran could participate in a regional uranium enrichment consortium tied to the generation of nuclear energy, not weapons.

Iran might accept it. After all, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini reluctantly agreed to an end to the war with Iraq in 1988 to save the 1979 revolution that brought the Islamic Republic into existence. Khomeini compared making this decision to drinking poison.

The time is fast approaching when his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, might have to swallow the poison too.