Supreme Loser: Why Iran’s ayatollah-in-chief always gets it wrong.
Khamenei’s nuclear gamble has been painful for the Iranian people. Corralled by sanctions and plagued with mismanagement, the country’s economy is ruined, its financial sector is paralyzed, and its energy sector is in shambles. This month, an ill-considered threat to halt trade with the United Arab Emirates caused the Iranian rial to go into a free-fall, hitting its lowest-ever mark against the U.S. dollar.
International developments have also not been kind to Tehran’s ruling cabal. After marginalizing the reformists, the conservative factions of the Islamic regime are now engaged in a political fratricide. In the wake of uprisings in the Arab world, Iran’s popularity in the region has plummeted. The Syrian regime, Tehran’s sole regional ally, increasingly appears unable to resist the calls for change shaking the entire region. Even Iran’s former allies in the Non-Aligned Movement have repeatedly voted against Iran at the IAEA and the Security Council, perceiving Tehran’s nuclear quest as too controversial for the country to serve as the developing world’s standard-bearer. Nearly a decade since the advent of the nuclear crisis, Iran is internally divided, regionally diminished, and internationally isolated.
Not only have Khamenei’s strategic goals proved elusive, but his atomic dreams remain unfulfilled. Despite Iran’s bragging that it will eventually install 50,000 centrifuges, the number of machines that it can keep spinning still hovers around 8,000, and their output continues to wane. Development and mass production of the more sophisticated machines has also stagnated.
Notwithstanding these setbacks, Khamenei remains steadfast. Preserving the ideological order of the Islamic Republic is more important for the supreme leader than crossing the nuclear Rubicon. For a leader who, in the words of John Milton, prefers “to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” surrender is political suicide. In the eyes of this custodian of political Islam, surrounded by a culture of complacency and mendacity, a Pyrrhic victory is divine providence.
Against this backdrop, Washington’s belief in the ability of sanctions to curtail Tehran’s atomic ambitions proves credulous. Iran’s nuclear defiance is ideological and thus cannot be resolved by coercion. Rather than repeating the failed policy of pushing the supreme leader into a corner, the Obama administration should aim for piecemeal solutions that would allow for a face-saving compromise. The goal should be to decelerate Iran’s perilous nuclear activities and put it under rigorous international monitoring until cooler heads prevail in Tehran.
There are a number of problematic elements in this article but I’m too amused by the title not to post it.
