Can the U.S. Contain Iran's Nuclear Ambitions?

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Dennis Ross, left, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, right at center, visiting the Natanz uranium enrichment facilities.

(l to r): Cris Bouroncle / AFP / Getty; Getty

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The Long War
There is nothing new about enmity between the U.S. and Iran; they have been in a sort of low-level war for 30 years. After the hostage crisis began in 1979, the U.S. seized Iranian assets and cut diplomatic relations. U.S. officials have alleged that Iran was behind the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. During the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, the U.S. tilted toward Iraq. Following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush lumped Iran with Iraq and North Korea in an "axis of evil," embraced a policy of regime change in Tehran and rebuffed Iran's offer of talks in 2003. By 2008, Tehran was on the way to building a nuclear weapon, which it saw as advancing its defense.

From outside government, Ross watched these developments with increasing alarm. He became convinced that Obama could change the context of the relationship with Iran. An Obama presidency, he thought, could transform the Iranian image of America and "make it easier to explain your policies and get more of a hearing" from Tehran, Ross told me last July. "Iran's almost reflexive suspicion of the U.S. would be removed. That's not insignificant." (See pictures of Bush in the Middle East.)

Ross is not naive; he did not think a new President — and nothing more — would be enough to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear goals. So he and Obama put together a policy they called "bigger carrots, bigger sticks." Iran would get real benefits if it halted its pursuit of nuclear weapons and incur real costs if it did not.

The key, in Ross's view, is the state of Iran's economy. Though it sits on the world's third largest reserves of oil, Iran faces a growing economic crisis. The government is dependent on oil exports for 85% of its revenue, but Iran's aging production capacity is diminishing by about 500,000 bbl. per year, according to some analyses. What oil it can produce, it has little ability to refine, importing as much as 50% of its gasoline. In 2007, Iran imposed gas-rationing, which set off riots.

Ross wanted to target that economic vulnerability. "If you're really going to concentrate the Iranian mind to what they stand to lose, they're going to have to see that the economic price goes up dramatically from where it is right now," he explained. But to make sanctions work, countries like Germany, China and Russia would have to join in an economic crackdown. To get those countries on board, Ross wrote last year, "there may be value in enlisting Israel to send a high-level delegation privately to European capitals to make the point that while others feel they can live with a nuclear Iran, Israel does not have that luxury." The implications of such a message would get anyone's attention.

Working the Back Channels
At first, the "bigger carrots, bigger sticks" approach seemed to show promise. When, after eight years away, Ross returned to the State Department in early February, he quickly assembled a seven-person team and began working through a long list of moves. The first and still the most important came on March 20, when Obama gave a speech to Iranians on the holiday of Nowruz. The President made it clear that the U.S. would seek full normalization of relations with Iran, that it recognized Iran as an Islamic republic, that it would not pursue regime change there and that his Administration would talk about any issue Iran wanted to discuss, without conditions.

Ross then laid the carrots on thick, dispensing with the formal line that the U.S. doesn't talk to Iran. On the weekend of March 27, a U.S. diplomat discussed economic issues with his Iranian counterpart in Moscow. Days later, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, met with Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed Mehdi Akhundzadeh at an international conference in the Hague. At a Friends of Pakistan meeting in Tokyo, one of Holbrooke's diplomats met with his Iranian counterpart. And in a secret back-channel outreach in April, State Department staffers working for Ross got clearance from Tehran for a possible trip there this summer by a U.S. diplomat, according to a senior Administration official and a senior European diplomat.

As if all this striped-pants nicety were not enough, on April 8, the State Department announced it would join the Europeans, Russia and China in nuclear talks with Iran without condition — meaning that Iran could continue enriching uranium while all sides figured out how to start talking, a concession the U.S. had never made before. The U.S. also backed the package of Western incentives offered to Iran in July 2008 — including economic, humanitarian and development aid — and formally invited the Iranians to talk.

See pictures of the rise and fall of the Shah of Iran.