Unthinkable (43 page)

Containment is also not the same thing as deterrence. Containment is a strategy and deterrence a tactic often employed as part of that strategy. The two terms are often used synonymously, but containment is much more than mere deterrence, typically encompassing political, economic, diplomatic, and other methods as well, and having both offensive and defensive dimensions. Deterrence is a purely defensive tactic and in this context is limited to the narrow military aim of preventing aggression. During the Cold War, the United States contained the Soviet Union, and one of the ways that we did so was to employ both nuclear and conventional deterrence to keep the Soviets from attacking the U.S. homeland directly or invading Europe, the Middle East, and Japan. Similarly, with Iran since 1979, the United States has employed containment to minimize
the Islamic Republic's ability to cause harm abroad, and part of that has been by deterring an Iranian (conventional) attack on U.S. allies in the region.

The basic concept of containment is as old as civilization. Thucydides describes how Sparta tried to contain Athenian power after the defeat of Persia in 480–479
BC.
For Americans, the intellectual framework for “containing” an unfriendly state derives from George Kennan's work on U.S. policy toward Russia at the beginning of the Cold War. Kennan started from two key assumptions. First, for both ideological and geostrategic reasons, the Soviet Union would always be an adversary of the United States. Second, because of the unimaginable costs of conquering the Soviet Union, the United States would not seek to eliminate the communist regime by war. Containment, as Kennan proposed it, would be an alternative strategy to prevent Soviet military expansion and political aggrandizement until the Soviet regime collapsed of its own dysfunctionalities. In this sense, it was a defensive effort to prevent Soviet aggression, limit Moscow's ability to gain allies or undermine American allies, and erode the Soviet economy—upon which Soviet military power rested. However, it also contained a crucial “offensive” element as well in that it sought the demise of the communist regime. Containment worked admirably in the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union, although critics claimed that the strategy was failing from the moment it was unveiled to the moment before it succeeded with the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

Thanks to the success of containment toward Russia, Washington came to see containment as a useful strategy in a host of lesser cases during the Cold War and after. The United States has pursued containment strategies at various times against China, North Korea, Cuba, Libya, Iraq, Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan, among others. The range of instances in which the United States has employed a strategy of containment also makes clear that it is a highly flexible one, encompassing
a wide range of tactics. What's more, those tactics can be employed in a broad range of combinations so that there can be lots of different “flavors” of containment.
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At different points during the Cold War, the United States pursued variants of containment toward Russia that emphasized engagement and arms control (Nixon and Carter's policies of détente), or aggressive unconventional or proxy warfare and information operations (under Eisenhower and Reagan). Against Cuba, containment relied on sanctions and information operations, but a lower-key approach to covert action after the Cuban Missile Crisis. At that point, the United States largely ended its support to Cuban insurgents, but fought back whenever Cuban emissaries attempted to stir up trouble in Latin America and Africa. Against Saddam Husayn's Iraq, containment featured draconian international sanctions, overt and covert efforts to topple the regime, and the periodic use of air strikes to prevent Saddam from breaking free. Containment of Nicaragua, in many ways an outgrowth of the containment of Cuba, featured considerable assistance to insurgents attempting to overthrow the regime. In short, the basic theory of containment is typically just the foundation of the strategy, and many different kinds of policies can be developed from it.

Because the American commitment to containment of Iran has been so ambivalent, Washington's application of the strategy has been erratic. At times, America has pursued containment of Iran in a more confrontational manner, and at others Washington has paid little attention to it at all. Some administrations have employed sanctions and other punishments to try to pressure Iran to change its behavior, others have tried offers of rapprochement to change its course.

Although the intensity with which they have been employed over time has varied, the essential elements of America's containment of Iran have remained largely unchanged. These have consisted of:

• 
Diplomatic efforts
to isolate Iran and enlist as many countries as possible to help the United States in containing it.

• 
Sanctions
to prevent Iran from becoming economically or militarily powerful. These have focused on preventing or dissuading Iran from acquiring ballistic missiles or weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons.

• The delineation, either explicitly or implicitly, of “
red lines
” that would trigger the use of force by the United States against Iran if Tehran crossed them.

• The
basing of American military forces in the Persian Gulf
to defend American allies, deter an Iranian attack, and enforce the red lines.

• And on occasion, modest
covert action
to support various groups inside Iran that have opposed the regime politically.

After the Iranian Revolution and the Carter administration's brief flirtation with counterrevolution, Washington reached out to the new regime and offered to establish normal relations. That policy went up in smoke in November 1979, when a group of Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, kicking off the 444 days of the hostage ordeal. Carter and his senior aides considered a range of military options in response to the embassy seizure, but settled for a policy of pressuring Iran via economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation. Moreover, in response to the fears of other American allies in the Persian Gulf, the United States began to increase its military assets in the region to deter or defeat an Iranian attempt to spread the revolution by force. In effect, if not original intent, it was a policy of containing Iran—limiting its ability to cause harm beyond its borders and hindering its ability to generate greater power to do so.

Although the Reagan administration took office convinced that everything its predecessor had done had been a mistake, they retained containment as their Iran policy. Despite their aggressive “cowboy” reputation, Reagan's team showed a remarkable reluctance to confront Iran throughout their eight years in office. They were mostly content to continue the
buildup of U.S. military forces in the Gulf, and ramp up arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states.

In 1982, Iran's battlefield victories in the Iran-Iraq War allowed the Islamic Republic to counter-invade Iraq to try to overthrow Saddam in what Tehran proclaimed would be a march to Mecca or Jerusalem. In response, the Reagan administration “tilted” toward Iraq as a way of preserving containment. Washington began to provide Baghdad with trade credits and critical intelligence on Iranian military moves, while encouraging its European allies to supply weapons to Iraq. Even after Iran helped drive American forces from Lebanon by creating Hizballah and directing it to seize American hostages and launch horrific terrorist attacks on the U.S. Marine barracks and the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, the Reagan administration made no effort to adopt a more aggressive policy toward Iran.

Later the Reagan administration would depart from containment, attempting a rapprochement with Iran through a series of backchannels to Hashemi Rafsanjani, then the Iranian Majles speaker. This effort, part of the wider Iran-Contra scandal, would end in humiliation when Iranian hardliners throttled Rafsanjani's scheme. Thereafter, the Reagan administration reverted to its restrained version of containment. When Iranian forces began attacking Gulf Arab oil tankers in the Persian Gulf in 1986–87, the United States initially shied away from defending them for fear of being dragged into a fight with Iran. When the United States agreed to the reflagging and the deployment of additional U.S. Navy ships to defend the reflagged tankers, American rules of engagement were kept tight and Washington intervened repeatedly to prevent conflict with Tehran. It took ever more aggressive Iranian attacks on American forces to provoke limited American military countermoves—although the disparity in strength was so great that the U.S. Navy still managed to sink half of Iran's major surface warships in a single encounter.

George H. W. Bush took office looking to improve relations with Iran and signaled to Tehran in his inaugural address that “goodwill begets
goodwill.” Seeing an opportunity, Rafsanjani (by then Iran's president) secured the release of a number of American hostages being held by Lebanese allies of Iran in the hope that this would start a rapprochement. But he proved unable to control other groups—and even parts of his own regime—from taking new hostages and threatening American interests in other ways. Meanwhile, the many other demands on the administration's plate—the fall of communism, the crisis with China over Tiananmen Square, and the Persian Gulf War—forced Bush 41 to rely on a passive version of containment toward Iran. Indeed, Washington was so determined to minimize the amount of energy and resources it committed against Iran so as to maximize its efforts elsewhere that it virtually ignored Iran.

The Clinton administration was the first to publicly embrace the term, announcing a policy of “Dual Containment” of both Iran and Iraq.
⁹
Clinton and his advisors believed that there was an opportunity to forge a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arabs, and they wanted to pursue it as hard as they could. They feared that Saddam's Iraq and revolutionary Iran would both seek to undermine an Arab-Israeli peace process. Thus both Iran and Iraq would have to be prevented from killing the peace process, but the United States had to minimize the resources it expended on them so that it could instead focus on the peacemaking itself. That meant containment—Dual Containment.

Iran pushed back hard on Dual Containment, waging an aggressive, asymmetric campaign against the United States and its allies in the Middle East. This campaign, in turn, convinced the Clinton administration to get tougher still, shifting from a more passive version of containment to a much more aggressive one. Goaded by a Congress that had little love for Iran, the administration imposed comprehensive unilateral sanctions against Iran, threatened secondary sanctions against non-American companies doing significant business with the Iranian oil industry, and even modestly rejuvenated the moribund covert action campaign against Iran.
¹⁰

If Clinton's first term saw the most aggressive version of containment
ever pursued against Iran to that point, his second term saw a dramatic reversal. In 1997, Iran elected the reformist Mohammed Khatami as president, who reached out to the United States to try to improve relations. The Clinton administration accepted the offer, seeing in Khatami's opening a chance to finally end the long, debilitating enmity between Iran and America. However, once again, Iran's hardliners stepped in and killed the budding reconciliation.

In the wake of Clinton's failed rapprochement, the George W. Bush administration saw little reason to accommodate Iran, but could not agree on a more aggressive policy. Ultimately, they slipped back into containment as well, and initially a laissez-faire version at that. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the United States and Iran engaged in extensive cooperation against their mutual adversaries, the Taliban and al-Qa'ida. There is evidence that some in the Iranian regime hoped to turn this tacit cooperation into a wider opening, but it came to naught. Although there was some evidence that the hawks in the administration hoped to pursue regime change in Iran after Afghanistan and Iraq, the disastrous mishandling of the Iraq War put an end to any such notions and the United States settled in to renewed containment instead.

Washington's complacency was shattered in 2002 by the news that Iran was making far greater progress toward acquiring the capability to make nuclear weapons than previously believed. Americans feared that this progress would undermine the containment of Iran and lead to widespread instability, if not outright warfare. In response, first the Bush 43 administration and then the Obama administration attempted to employ a carrot-and-stick approach to convince Tehran to halt its nuclear program. In both instances, the United States and its allies offered Iran (modest) economic and diplomatic inducements to halt the program while threatening to impose new, more stringent sanctions on Tehran if it refused to do so.

Both administrations saw this policy as having two goals. First, the policy was intended to buttress containment. In that sense it was a continuation of America's long-standing effort to prevent Iran from increasing
its military power, in this case by acquiring nuclear weapons. However, both administrations also hoped that Iran would be willing to accept the American offer of a negotiated resolution. This was especially true of the Obama administration, which genuinely sought engagement as a path to real reconciliation. They hoped that Iranian pragmatists willing to accept restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program in return for concessions from the West would prevail over hardliners unwilling to give up the nuclear program. Implicit in this gambit was the possibility that a victory by the pragmatists might lead to their ascendance, which in turn might create broader openings for rapprochement. In this way, the carrot-and-stick approach was not only an effort to bolster containment, but also a bid to end it by shifting the composition and the policies of the Iranian regime.