Imposing conditions on Iran rather than trusting it is the smarter strategy.
Imposing conditions on Iran rather than trusting it is the smarter strategy.
T he return of fighting in the Strait of Hormuz is producing calls for a renewed deal with Iran. But the last deal, the Islamabad memorandum, did not fail for want of good terms. It failed because Iran does not keep its word, a lesson that every president since Jimmy Carter has learned the hard way. The United States should begin to plan for a state of the world after the war that depends not on trusting Tehran, but on imposing conditions on it.
Reaching international agreements involves the same factors as making contracts. The parties must receive benefits from complying with the agreement that outweigh the costs, and the gains from a deal must outweigh the status quo. But of equal importance is that the parties must be able to depend on the enforcement of the agreement. If one party may receive benefits first (such as receiving a car before paying the money), it has an incentive to break the deal unless the courts and police stand by in the background to enforce it. The fundamental problem with ending the Iranian war is that international law, unlike American domestic law, has no supranational institutions capable of forcing nations to keep their promises. Great-power politics has instead required that nations threaten economic, political, or even military violence to force compliance with treaties.
This means that once Iran receives the benefits it seeks from an agreement, it will have little fear of breaking the pact. If President Trump agrees to end combat operations, lift the American embargo, and end economic sanctions, he will have few means of forcing Tehran to keep promises to respect free navigation in the Strait, to end the nuclear program, and to stop its efforts to destabilize the region. Instead of trading American concessions for Iranian promises, the United States should keep the blockade, hold Iran’s oil revenue, and release it only if the mullahs behave. That is not diplomacy; it is containment. The United States and its allies followed a similar approach against Saddam Hussein for twelve years.
The memorandum’s failure should not be confused with the outcome of the war itself. The war has not failed. The United States went to war to strip Iran of the means to threaten its neighbors and to build a bomb. American airpower has destroyed Iran’s air defenses, air force, and navy, wrecked its missile and drone factories, and buried its nuclear program under rubble. But the war has not yet succeeded either. Iran continues to attack shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, to block other export routes for oil from the Gulf Arab countries, and to support rebels and terrorist proxies that continue to threaten Israel and our moderate Arab allies.
What has failed is not the American military war plan, but the political conclusion to the war. The Trump administration erred in thinking it could end the war with a piece of paper. The agreement failed in the way that earlier deals with Iran have failed. The United States has ponied up first; Iran has pretended to reciprocate while secretly violating the terms of the deal. The 2015 nuclear deal released billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets in exchange for promises about the future. Instead of halting its nuclear program, Tehran spent the money arming its proxies in Yemen, Gaza, and Lebanon and paying for thousands of missiles and drones. The memorandum made the same mistake. The United States lifted the blockade and let Iranian oil flow before a single mine had been cleared. Each time, Iran pocketed the benefits first and then defaulted.
The deal’s collapse is not a verdict on the war. It is Exhibit A of the perils of negotiating with Tehran. Iran does not keep its promises, and no amount of careful drafting can make it do so. The memorandum lasted 21 days. Signed on June 17, it was dead by July 8, after Iran attacked three merchant ships in the Strait and tried to charge tolls on an international waterway. The U.S. blockade began in mid-July, and American airstrikes returned on September 1. On the day the war began, Iran’s U.N. ambassador pledged that Iran would strike only American bases and spare its neighbors. Within days, Iranian missiles and drones hit civilian infrastructure across the Gulf. On March 5, Tehran publicly thanked Saudi Arabia for staying out of the war but kept striking Saudi infrastructure anyway. The April ceasefire was conditioned on the complete reopening of the strait. After a handful of ships passed, Iran shut it again on the grounds that Israeli operations in Lebanon somehow violated the peace deal in the Persian Gulf. Even before the war, satellite imagery showed Iranians rebuilding new centrifuges at the enrichment plants at Fordow and Isfahan (which Israel and the United States had attacked in Operation Midnight Hammer). Three rounds of talks collapsed after Iran refused to give up enrichment.
Washington should long ago have understood the depth of Iranian perfidy. Since 1979, the mullahs have made clear that their goal is to drive the United States out of the Middle East, destroy Israel, and replace our allies with their fundamentalist Islamic revolutionaries. The regime seized the American embassy and held its staff for 444 days; its proxies killed 241 Americans in Beirut; its weapons killed at least 600 American soldiers in Iraq. A year after the 2015 deal was signed, the Revolutionary Guard tested a ballistic missile inscribed in Hebrew with the words “Israel should be wiped off the Earth,” and documents seized from a Tehran warehouse showed that the regime had stored its nuclear-weapons research for future use. Iran never abandoned its ambitions; it merely postponed them. At home, the regime shot hundreds of protesters in 2019 and 2020, shot down a civilian airliner, and still executes dissidents. This January, it killed tens of thousands of protesters in the streets — President Trump has put the count at 32,000 — and it has since hanged survivors after secret trials. A government that treats its own citizens this way is announcing that it does not consider itself bound by the rules that govern normal nations. The last thing Tehran would do is obey a treaty to preserve its international reputation.
Democracies should place little trust in autocracies. Tyrannies break their promises to other nations as easily as they break their duties to their own citizens. Contract law has dealt with untrustworthy counterparties for centuries, and its rules apply to nations as well as to other contracting parties. The United States should extend no credit to a serial breacher. It should sequence performance so that Iran goes first. It should demand security, release it only as Iran performs, and keep the remedies in its own hands. The United States, for example, could keep control over Iranian oil revenues, export infrastructure, and international currency reserves, and release them only as Iran complies — while always reserving the right to use force to maintain a no-fly zone and a demilitarized Strait.
The memorandum did none of this. Its central Iranian obligation was a pledge of “best efforts” to secure passage through the strait, drafted loosely enough that Tehran read it as recognizing its own authority over an international waterway. In the absence of an agreement, the United States could pursue a strategy that confers benefits when Iran withdraws from the Strait and imposes costs when it does not. The United States could simply impose conditions as part of a ceasefire. Iran can meet them or forgo its oil money, trade, and rebuilt arsenal.
The administration has already backed into such an arrangement. After a month of blockade without military action, American forces on September 1 struck Revolutionary Guard targets around the strait and are reported to be weighing a plan for periodic strikes to keep Iran from rebuilding its radar and missile capabilities around Hormuz. Those actions exemplify containment, whether anyone in Washington labels them explicitly.
The question is whether the United States will pursue it deliberately or stumble through it, and it need not stumble, because it has done this before. Between the first Gulf War and the second, the United States never trusted Saddam Hussein’s word either, and it did not need to. For twelve years, American and allied aircraft enforced no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, denying Saddam more than half of his own airspace, flying more than 200,000 sorties without losing a single aircraft to enemy fire, and bombing whenever he tested the limits. The Air Force general who commanded the northern zone, Brigadier General David Deptula, compared the arrangement to a parole officer living in the house with a convicted criminal. “We are going to stay there until we are convinced that he is not going to commit any crimes anymore,” he said. The State Department told the Senate what would bring the parole officer out of his chair: any attempt to rebuild weapons of mass destruction, any strike on a neighbor, any challenge to allied aircraft, any move against the Kurds. Containment never produced regime change from within. But it kept Saddam from rebuilding. American forces in 2003 found an Iraqi military that had been hollowed out, and the postwar search confirmed that Saddam had failed to restart a nuclear weapons program. In the north, under allied air cover, the Kurds built what was effectively an independent state.
Iran should expect the same treatment. Since it cannot make a promise it will keep, there will be no real agreement — only containment — and the United States will use force whenever Tehran gets close to a nuclear weapon or tries to rebuild its air defenses and military. Embargoes, sanctions, blockades, and financial isolation are costing the regime more than $400 million a day. Iran has no effective combat aircraft, no air defenses, and no allies, while the Gulf states, Israel, and American bases in the region together field about 1,300 late-model combat aircraft. Half a century and half a trillion dollars of Iranian military and nuclear investment lie in ruins.
The Iraq precedent also teaches what not to do. The Oil-for-Food program that began in 1996 let Saddam sell oil while the United Nations held the proceeds and released them for food and medicine. The theory was sound, but its administration was not. Of some $64 billion in oil sold under the program, Saddam skimmed nearly $2 billion in surcharges and kickbacks, and he earned nearly $11 billion more by smuggling oil outside the program. The money went to palaces and weapons, and there was no way to be sure any of it went to humanitarian needs. An escrow account is only as good as its gatekeeper and only as tight as its side channels, and Oil-for-Food had neither.
Both defects of the Oil-for-Food program can be cured. The simplest cure is the blockade the Navy is already enforcing, which closes the side channels by itself and asks nothing of Tehran. The blockade also follows the precedent President Kennedy set when he quarantined Cuba in 1962 — a restrained but early use of force that needed no blessing from a Security Council where Moscow held a veto. A more sophisticated version lets Iranian oil reach the market but routes every dollar of the proceeds into an account controlled not by the United Nations but by the U.S. Treasury. Iran would receive periodic disbursements for food and medicine from that account, and nothing more, for as long as the Strait stays open and toll-free, the mines stay cleared, the neighbors go unmolested, and the inspectors get in. Break a condition, and the disbursements stop. For cargoes that run the blockade, the Justice Department is reportedly preparing to revive the federal courts’ long-dormant prize jurisdiction, under which a captured enemy vessel and its cargo are condemned and sold, with the proceeds going to the Treasury. Tankers that defy the blockade should end up in the same account as the oil that complies with it. Iran would be paid exactly as it behaves, and not a dollar more.
The Iraq precedent breaks down at one point, and it is the point that gives Congress its say. Both the Clinton administration and the George W. Bush administration, in which I served, defended the no-fly zones as authorized by the resolution Congress passed in January 1991, and having helped draft the 2001 and 2002 authorizations as a Bush Justice Department official, I know what such a statute looks like. Congress has passed nothing comparable for Iran. The president does not need one to defend American forces and shipping; the Constitution has always left the initiative in war to him and the power to stop him to Congress. A containment regime measured in years rather than weeks makes that power concrete, because containment costs money. The no-fly zones and the embargo on Iraq ran to roughly a billion dollars a year, and members of Congress complained about the bill for the better part of a decade. A blockade of Iran sustained for years will cost more, though no one can say today how much. Congress has chosen to pay thus far, passing a $900 billion defense authorization in December and an $838.7 billion defense appropriation in February. Each time Congress votes to fund the operation, or declines to, it gives a thumbs-up or down to the policy itself. It cut off the funds for Vietnam, and it knows how to stop this war if it wants to. The Republican majority has not done so, and the reason is no mystery. It agrees with the president.
Iran’s leaders may decide they would rather have their oil money than their war. If so, they can earn it, tanker by tanker, under conditions they did not set and cannot alter. That is not a deal, and the administration should stop looking for one. It is the one arrangement the mullahs cannot cheat, because it asks nothing of them. Iran makes no promise and so can break none; it either satisfies the conditions and is paid, or it fails them and is not. A long-term strategy of containment will pay greater respect to reality and the nature of our Iranian enemy than the illusory comforts of peace treaties and the hope that Tehran will keep its promises.