Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon
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It is true that Iran has committed
more than its share o atrocities. Yet it is
no longer the same country that it was in
the 1980s, when its revolutionary Islamist
government really was bent on remaking
the regional order. Iran’s support for
terrorism, for example, has diminished
substantially in the last 20 years. And
although Tehran and its proxies still
occasionally pull o a successful attack,
such as the 2012 bus bombing in Burgas,
Bulgaria, their attempts are o a smaller
scale than before, and many o their recent
plots have been absurdly ineective. In
2011, for instance, an Iranian plot to
assassinate the Saudi ambassador in
Washington was doomed from the outset
because the Iranian agent approached
an informant for the Drug Enforcement
Administration to carry out the killing.
And in 2012, Iranian terrorists in Bangkok
accidentally set o an explosion in their
own safe house. When Thai police arrived
at the scene, one o the Iranians threw a
grenade—which hit a tree, bounced back
at him, and blew o one o his legs.
All terrorism is bad, but the hawks
exaggerate the threat posed by Iranian-
sponsored terrorism, which is relatively
lackluster compared with the jihadi
terrorism that has at times been tolerated
or even Änanced by Washington’s Sunni
partners. Iran’s activities are less damag-
ing to global stability than, say, Pakistan’s
support for terrorist groups that target
India or Russia’s annexation o Crimea,
yet Washington treats Tehran as a
pariah while preserving relations with
Islamabad and Moscow. There is clearly
something going on that transcends
strategic interest.
One major caveat is that Iran supports
the Lebanese terrorist group–cum–
political party Hezbollah, whose largean atomic weapon, it could conceivably
establish the regional hegemony that
U.S. strategic doctrine seeks to prevent.
A nuclear-armed Iran would revolution-
ize the strategic landscape in the Middle
East and pose a signiÄcant threat to
Israel, Washington’s closest ally in the
region. Under U.S. President Barack
Obama, the United States largely solved
this problem with the 2015 nuclear deal,
the Joint Comprehensive Plan o Action,
which for all intents and purposes ended
the country’s nuclear program for 15
years. In 2018, however, Trump withdrew
from the È¢¬, arguing that a better
agreement with Iran was possible. Since
then, his administration has been using
sanctions to try to force Iran’s leaders back
to the negotiating table.
Much o the administration’s antipathy
toward Iran is explained by what Secre-
tary o State Mike Pompeo routinely
refers to as Iran’s “malign activities”—its
attempts to spread its inÁuence across the
Middle East through terrorism, politi-
cal subversion, and assistance to Shiite
groups. These activities are the reason why
Iran is routinely (and deservedly) referred
to as “the world’s foremost state sponsor
o terrorism.” They are also, for Iran
hawks, the best evidence that the coun-
try is still a revolutionary power dedicated
to undermining the interests o the
United States and its allies. For oppo-
nents o the È¢¬, including the Trump
administration, the deal oered Iran tacit
recognition as a legitimate interlocutor.
Iran’s compliance with the deal, these
opponents argued, was a cynical ploy to
advance its expansionist objectives within
the region. (This, o course, was a classic
Catch-22: the hawks saw both compliance
with the deal and any lack o compliance
as evidence o Iran’s malign intentions.)