We Don’t Need a Deal with Iran

M uch of the Iran war discourse of the past several weeks has been about whether or not we are close to a deal with Iran and what that deal might or should look like. But that’s the wrong question. What we should be asking is whether we get more out of having an agreement than not having one. There are good reasons to doubt that we would.

To start with, of course, it would help if we had a clear idea of what we’re fighting for in the first place. As I’ve argued from the outset, given that we already bombed Iran in mid-2025, a significant escalation to target the regime itself made sense only if we actually aimed to bring the regime down. Which is something we should want. The regime, not its armaments, is the real weapon of mass destruction, and it always was. It will be at war with us as long as it exists, no matter what tools it has to pursue that war. It will be a weapon in the hands of China and Russia, too. By contrast, while we prefer to avoid nuclear proliferation, a less radically anti-American regime would be far less of a threat even with more weapons.

It’s now clear that we are not removing the Iranian regime — at least, not directly or before we have ended the war. If the regime is overthrown, it might be due in part to this war, but it will have to be done from within, and it could be months or years before that happens.

That leaves us with the lesser war aims that have been promoted by the administration’s spokespeople and the war’s defenders, but never really systematically explained by the president. We want to restrict Iran’s capacity to rebuild its nuclear program. We want to strip it of ballistic missiles. Since the start of the war, we have also focused more directly on Iran’s capacity to threaten free commercial navigation of the Strait of Hormuz.

These are harder war aims to resolve. Regime change is a visible and undeniable victory. It doesn’t depend on promises of future Iranian behavior, which can be compelled only by continuing threats of force — by a forever-war commitment to national probation — and can be judged only by classified intelligence estimates that have to be filtered through agencies the president may not trust, using evidence the public cannot see or evaluate.

There’s a fundamental difference in any negotiated agreement between what you get now, when you have the leverage to strike a deal, and what you get in future promises, when your leverage is only as good as the credible threat that you can both prove breach of the agreement and enforce consequences for that breach. The dissipation of leverage in the future is most acute in this kind of situation, when Trump faces opposition to his policy from Democrats and even, it seems, from his own vice president, and when his current bargaining position is assisted by an ad hoc coalition of regional allies that may not be that easy to assemble again.

You can’t just assume the good faith of your adversary, especially when your adversary’s entire ideological basis for existence is to make war on you. You also can’t assume that you’ll be able to gather accurate information, especially if the deal involves weapons-development programs of the sort that are invariably conducted in deepest secrecy. American intelligence on foreign WMD programs has been badly mistaken on more occasions that can be counted since the start of the Cold War, and not even reliably wrong in the same direction: We’ve underestimated foreign programs at least as often as we’ve overstated them.

So, what do we get from an agreement? Something real, if it involves, say, immediately handing over specified quantities of nuclear material. But most of what we’ve heard from the talks has been about promises to not build things or to stop threatening to shoot at ships in the strait. Those will, at best, require extensive monitoring. There’s a good reason why disarmament agreements that end wars typically don’t last beyond about 15 years: Either the disarmed party rearms without consequence as its adversary loses the will to keep enforcing the agreement (as happened in Germany after the First World War and Russia after the Crimean War), or the victor decides to go back and conquer the place before it can do so (this remains the problem with Ukraine agreeing to disarmament as a condition of peace with Russia). In either event, disarmament is only a temporary fix that doesn’t address the actual reason for hostilities.

There are two drawbacks to an agreement that seeks to obtain such potentially illusory benefits. One is that we will be tempted to give the Iranians something of value in return, rather than just unilaterally ceasing to bomb them. The other is that any agreement at least implicitly commits us to not violate it in the future. That can put us in a tighter box with fewer options than we had in January before the war began.

If we are making concessions entirely to reopen the strait, then we really are paying for something we already had before the war. That’s a loss. And if we walk away with no agreement and the Iranian regime commits acts of violence against civilian ships, we’re on firmer ground to restart military operations. Meanwhile, we have a free hand to continue economic sanctions that may be very painful for the regime. We can easily send the message to Iran that an embargo can be lifted when we are satisfied that the strait is open for business, without having to commit any specific quid pro quo to writing.

By contrast, if the Iranians simply start extracting tolls directly from ships transiting the strait without our blessing, that’s also bad, but it may have some unexpected silver linings. First, anything that raises the cost of shipping will increase incentives to find routes (including pipelines) away from shipping through the strait. That would reduce Iranian leverage in the future. Second, anything that makes the regime financially dependent upon free commerce in the strait (as opposed to living off political decisions in Washington to subsidize the mere appearance of peace) makes future closures of the strait even more of a double-edged sword than it already is. Third, perversely enough, anything that separates the regime’s streams of income from the gainful employment of the Iranian population may prop up the regime, but at the cost of exacerbating popular anger at the regime’s abject failure to deliver any benefit to its subjects.

Finally, none of this is going to look much like a win for Donald Trump in domestic politics. But inking an agreement that reeks of the Obama JCPOA would be especially humiliating. Deciding to end the war entirely on our own terms, having done extensive damage to the Iranian regime’s armaments and senior leadership, may not be a very satisfying ending, but at least it is a power move that would not show us meekly submitting to terms.