No country is watching the theatrics of the American presidential campaign more closely than the Islamic Republic of Iran. As the object of U.S. President Barack Obama’s most significant foreign policy initiative, Iran has a bigger stake in the outcome of the race than at any time since the end of the hostage crisis, which was timed deliberately by Tehran to coincide with the January 1981 inauguration of President Ronald Reagan.
Now, as then, Washington and Tehran find themselves navigating the murky territory of a negotiated truce that has deescalated the most dangerous aspect of their bilateral conflict without ameliorating, at least in the short-term, the underlying drivers of their mutual animosity. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) represents a diplomatic feat, one that wrangled six sovereign nations, two multilateral bureaucracies, and a near infinite array of technical and financial minutia into a complex arrangement for deferring Iranian nuclear ambitions.
However, the nuclear deal rests on an inherently precarious foundation of intense domestic opposition within both the United States and Iran, deep-seated reciprocal suspicions, and a fierce struggle for influence between Tehran and its regional rivals, all of them American allies. For this reason, the next occupant of the White House will wield enormous influence over the fate of the nuclear deal and, by extension, Iran’s economic prospects and its role in the broader Middle East.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has been a vocal defender of the nuclear bargain fashioned by the Obama administration, and as president would seek to sustain support for the JCPOA and its implementation. However, in her campaign and in her track record as senator and as secretary of state, she has articulated a more hawkish approach to Iran that foreshadows a more contentious dynamic between Washington and Tehran if she wins the November election.
Iran was of course an issue of early divergence between Clinton and Obama. In their tough 2008 primary battle, Clinton scorned the future president as “irresponsible and frankly naïve” for his advocacy of direct diplomatic engagement with American adversaries, including Iran’s then-president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In contrast, she emphasized her own longstanding commitment to Israeli security and proposed extending security guarantees to Israel as well as to Iran’s Arab neighbors in the event of an Iranian nuclear strike.
These gaps were bridged smoothly during Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. She proved a formidable champion of the administration’s dual-track strategy on Iran, which featured both an assiduous effort to initiate a constructive dialogue with Tehran and a creative, determined, and ultimately successful effort to impose the “crippling sanctions” that Clinton herself had advocated.
As secretary and in the current campaign, the hallmark of Clinton’s approach to Iran is her intrinsic realism; as she put it in a 2009 interview on Iran, while “you hope for the best, you plan for the worst.” Clinton may have harbored justifiable skepticism about Obama’s public and private overtures toward Tehran, particularly as compared with her successor, John Kerry, but she also remained convinced that diplomacy represented the only viable pathway for addressing the nuclear crisis with Iran. She defended that view even as Iran was rocked by epic turmoil in June 2009, arguing only a few weeks later that “you can go back in history – and not, you know, very long back – where we have negotiated with many governments who we did not believe represented the will of their people… That's what you do in diplomacy.”
In her current bid for the nation’s highest office, she has never distanced herself from the Obama Administration’s outreach to Tehran or the nuclear agreement, despite the fact that the serious negotiations only got underway after she left office, and despite polls suggesting that a majority of Americans disapprove of the deal. Her emphasis on Iran in both the primary and general election campaigns seems designed to demonstrate toughness, a track record of diplomatic achievement, and – perhaps most notably – a capacity for conflict resolution without incurring the costs of direct military engagement.
But while she has embraced the deal, candidate Clinton has also sought to carve out some meaningful differences from the post-deal tactics on Iran embraced by Obama and Secretary Kerry. Describing her stance on Iran as “distrust but verify,” she has advocated a comprehensive approach to confronting the broader challenges posed by Iran’s involvement in an array of regional conflicts, emphasizing her readiness to deploy new sanctions as well as military force in order to protect American interests and allies in the Middle East. She has offered a series of hard-nosed warnings to Iranian leaders, promised to craft a global coalition to counter Iran’s proxies and paramilitaries, and insisted that Washington will push back harder against Iran’s human rights abuses, expressing regret that the Obama administration was “too restrained” in response to the 2009 unrest within Iran. It is a strategy for countering Tehran’s ambitions that could be adopted in full by many American policymakers on the opposite side of the political aisle.
Clinton would surely benefit from considerable prior experience among her senior advisors with the Iran file and with the Iranians themselves. Her senior foreign policy advisor, Jake Sullivan, played an integral role in the Iran nuclear negotiations, from their earliest inception through the toughest bargaining. But a new Clinton administration will also draw on a Democratic foreign policy establishment that is literally chomping at the bit to take the reins from an Obama team that they perceive as overly gun shy and responsible for an American retreat from the Middle East at a time when Washington’s leadership is more necessary than ever. What this will mean in practice is exceptionally unclear, but President Clinton will be staffed by a policy team seized with the strategic imperative to take aggressive action in Syria and to counter Iran’s influence elsewhere.
Of course, if she prevails over Republican nominee Donald Trump in the current unpredictable campaign, Clinton and her team would be tested as president to translate her tough talk into coherent policy steps. The unprecedented global consensus around the imposition of pressure on Iran evaporated with the implementation of the deal and the multilateral measures associated with the nuclear crisis. Tehran would surely welcome any new sanctions that could be depicted as an American violation of the nuclear deal, since this would afford the Iranian leadership an opportunity to walk away from its own obligations while blaming Washington. And a more substantial U.S. intervention in Syria or direct efforts to take on Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, or Iraq poses the potential, perhaps even the likelihood, of escalatory pressures that will be difficult to predict or to control.
She will find receptive audiences for her proposed policies among America’s Arab allies, where a number of leaders became alienated from what they perceived as an Obama tilt toward Tehran. However, it’s worth noting that Clinton has also suggested a tougher line in managing these relationships, criticizing the context that has facilitated radicalization and enabled funds to flow to terrorist organizations and hinting at some frustration with Gulf leaders that parallels that articulated more openly by Obama.
For their part, Iranian leaders will approach a President Clinton with a considerable degree of trepidation. Media coverage of the campaign within Iran has emphasized the hawkish positions she adopted on the stump in 2008, including her promise that “if I'm the president, we will attack Iran” in response to any Iranian attack against Israel, a warning to which she added “we would be able to totally obliterate them.” Her husband’s presidency is remembered by many in Iran as the initiation of an American policy of dual containment and the intensification of sanctions, his later overtures toward Tehran largely dismissed.
There are murmurs, mostly half-serious, that many Iranians might prefer a Trump presidency for whatever pragmatism is presumed to accompany a seemingly successful career in business; similar suggestions proffered in past races over candidates such as George W. Bush, only underscore the limitations on Iranian capabilities for appreciating the nuances of American politics. The next American president will take office as Iran’s own presidential campaign kicks into high gear, complicating the lines of communication and intensifying the domestic political uncertainties on both sides.
In any case, as Clinton herself has predicted, Iran will surely test the next American president, and she or he will be challenged to devise viable strategies for achieving the aims articulated during this very memorable campaign.
