Four Bad Options in Iran

From the Department of Unintended Consequences

The possible endgames in Iran are starting to look like a Waffle House menu at 3am: Everything will probably give you heartburn, but booze and hunger make people optimistic. The administration is now using phrases like “degrade capability,” “strategic reset,” and “regional stabilization” for the same reason that CEOs do – use enough syllables and it’s less obvious that you’re pin-wheeling. The assumption is that if sufficient pressure is applied to the Islamic Republic, some cleaner, saner political order might emerge.

Well, hope spring eternal, but of the four semi-plausible outcomes, none of them are very good.

Option One: The Regime Survives

Sadly, this is the favorite in histories betting markets. The Islamic Republic has spent four decades surviving sanctions, sabotage and internal dissent. If the regime absorbs the late military punishment and survives, it will not be chastened. States do not survive existential threats and conclude, “We’ve had our fun, we’ll be nice now.” Tehran’s leadership will see survival as proof that its revolutionary model works. The lesson will be “next time hit harder and hit first.”

For a reconstituted Iran, the Strait of Hormuz will the geopolitical equivalent of a loaded shotgun on the coffee table. Every tanker captain, commodities trader, and nervous European energy minister would understand that Iran retains the capacity to ruin everybody’s quarter.

Internally, dissidents will vanish, the Revolutionary Guard will expand its influence and the surviving leadership will possess the most dangerous political asset in the Middle East: a victory narrative. Nothing is more destabilizing than a regime that believes God and history jointly endorsed its survival.

Option Two: The Libyan Nightmare with Better Food

The endgame with only slightly longer odds is the scenario that keeps intelligence sorts awake at night spooning a bottle of whisky: The regime collapses without a credible replacement. In this scenario Iran becomes Libya with ballistic missiles. Or Iraq circa 2006, except with a population three times larger and a strategic position sitting astride global energy routes.

Popular uprisings are inspirational until they develop seven factions, twelve militias, and an enthusiastic black market for anti-aircraft weapons. Iran is not a tidy cultural nation-state but a country riven with ethnic, ideological, and religious fractures. Remove the fear and pressure keeping it all together, and the contents will probably explode.

Now for the fun part: buried nuclear material and expertise to do something with it. A unified nuclear program isn’t the problem, but the mad rush by the above factions and militias to secure the stuff. Hello black market proliferation!

America is in no mood to watch Iraq: The Director’s Cut, but absent a large foreign stabilization force. The resulting vacuum would almost certainly spill chaos and enriched uranium across borders into Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and the Gulf states. This does nothing to help the bottle neck in Hormuz.

Option Three: The Colonels Take Over

Oddly enough, this may be the least catastrophic of the realistic scenarios available, which tells you something about all this happiness. If regular Iranian military - or a younger cohort of IRGC – steps in preserve order after regime collapse, a military dictatorship could emerge that is authoritarian but less ideological. Think less “revolutionary doomsday cult” and more “exhausted nationalist bureaucracy with tanks.”

A military junta won’t win a Miss Congeniality contest, but it might decide that permanent confrontation with the West is economically inconvenient. Détente would be pursued not in the cause of freedom, but for stable budgets and electricity. At this point the why hardly matters.

Option Four: Democratic Transformation

Democratic transition is plausible, if only just. Poland happened. The Velvet Revolution happened in Czechoslovakia. The Iranian Street has plenty of public anger, but lacks legitimate institutions and leadership, as well a symbolic figure capable of uniting wildly different factions long enough to build a new political order. In 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini was rallying point against the hated Shah. Currently there is no obviously comparable figure ready to step forward from the opposition. The clay is there: Iran has an educated population, sophisticated civil society elements, and a long intellectual tradition. They could make the bricks to build a stable democratic outcome. It is just unlikely in an extraordinarily combustible situation. Revolutions devour liberals first because they hold meetings while hardliners seize army barracks.

Like a lot of nights where you do something ill-advised – tequila shots, streaking or starting a war – we are in the Waffle House accessing some options that look less and less appetizing the more we think them through… or somber up. Compounding matters, we’ve lost the ability to order the endgame we want. At this point, Fate will just bring us what she brings us, and we’d better hope keep in down.

In short, heartburn will come in one of the above bad flavors. With a side of volatile energy prices.

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