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What the U.S. Gets Wrong about Iran

(New York Times) Karim Sadjadpour - In the 1979 Iranian revolution, religious fundamentalists with fire in their bellies transformed the country into an anti-American Islamist theocracy. Under the leadership of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 83, who has ruled since 1989, anti-Americanism has become central to Iran's revolutionary identity. Indeed, few nations have spent a greater percentage of their political and financial capital to try and topple the U.S.-led world order than Iran. On virtually every contemporary American national security concern, Tehran defines its own interests in opposition to the U.S. Iran's successful entrenchment of powerful proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, coupled with America's humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, have further convinced Iran of its own success as well as America's inevitable decline. The more committed the U.S. has been to diplomacy, the lesser Iran's sense of urgency to compromise. Even if the nuclear deal is revived, Tehran's worldview will endure. Multiple U.S. attempts to coerce or persuade Iran to reconsider its revolutionary ethos have failed. The reason is simple: U.S.-Iran normalization could prove deeply destabilizing to a theocratic government whose organizing principle has been fighting American imperialism. The U.S. has sought to engage a regime that clearly doesn't want to be engaged, and isolate a regime that thrives in isolation. Khamenei understands that the greater danger to his theocracy is not global isolation but global integration. The writer is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
2022-08-15 00:00:00
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