Vital Interests: Steve, thanks for participating in the VI forum. Iran has been the focus of your attention. For our readers who are not familiar with the background of Iran can you give us a synopsis of what has shaped that country over the last decades? There is no shortage of major events -  the overthrow of the Mosaddegh government and the installing of the Shah, the downfall of the Shah and the Islamic Revolution, the takeover of the American embassy and the hostage crisis, the bloody Iran-Iraq war, the United States war in Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Obama administration nuclear agreement - the JCPOA, and now Trump’s maximum pressure strategy to crush the Iranian regime.

Steve Simon: Yes, recent Iranian history has been action-packed. The tears, the laughter.

VI: The drama.

Steve Simon: The drama. Yes, the melodrama, in fact, has been quite impressive. The United States, interestingly, was unenthusiastic about supporting the British coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, the popularly elected prime minister of Iran. There's some evidence to suggest that Dwight Eisenhower, who was President at the time, regretted having supported it. The U.S. supported it primarily through the application of what we have a lot of, especially compared to Britain in those days, which was money. In 1956, when the British attempted to overthrow Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was the president of Egypt at that time, Eisenhower just said, "No."

He threatened Britain with bankruptcy if it did not withdraw from Egypt at that point. The United States in that period, when its foreign policy towards the Middle East was just beginning to gel, was undergoing some serious oscillation back and forth in what they thought would serve U.S. interests, and what they thought would not. That question devolved to, were we going to support the colonial powers or former colonial powers? Or were we going to support the new nationalist movements in these countries? It was the former at the outset, and that was reflected in the U.S. posture towards Iran.

Iran became important in the post-coup years, when the Shah had been put back on the throne after Mosaddegh was overthrown. The Shah perceived correctly that he owed his throne to the United States and Great Britain. He also saw Iran's interests as aligning with these Western powers, particularly with the United States, even if he disliked the idea of a US military presence in the Persian Gulf The relationship became increasingly warm with growing cooperation, especially between the U.S. security services and military and their counterparts in Iran. This turned out to be one of the things that alienated the Iranian people from the Shah and laid the basis for the revolution that ultimately happened in 1979.

The U.S. relied heavily on Iran in this period, because remember, we're talking about the 1970s, the Nixon administration. The Nixon administration was caught up in Vietnam. They are trying to get out of it. It's a huge sink for U.S. energy, military and diplomatic. There's not a lot of energy left over for other commitments. Then, there's also the quest for some stability in the U.S. relationship with the Soviet Union, and that led to arms control negotiations and so forth. When the administration looked around, they thought, "Well, what do we really have to allocate to protecting our interests in the Middle East, particularly in the Persian Gulf where the oil was?"

The answer was that we were not really in good shape. We didn’t have what we needed. Thus, we were going to rely on Iran and Saudi Arabia to protect our interests in the Persian Gulf. The Nixon administration dubbed that policy the “Twin Pillars” policy, which led to even closer relations with the Shah, and also burgeoning relations between Israel and Iran. In that period, there were a large number of Israelis in Iran. There was a mini Iranian-Israeli city in a part of Teheran, with about 20,000 Israelis. They had their schools and support systems and so forth. They had various jobs in Iran from technical assistance in agriculture to training elements of the security services. So there was this workable coalition between Iran, the U.S., the Saudis, and Israel. I suppose from one perspective, you could say this was a golden age of US-Iran relations.

But it came apart because the Shah was so deeply unpopular. He really failed to create the conditions that would have minimized dissatisfaction with his relationship with the United States, for example, by improving economic conditions for most people in Iran. This was not for lack of trying, but he failed nonetheless and ran into a buzzsaw of a revolution that expressed itself in religious terms. Of course, the new revolutionary regime came after the United States because the United States had been the bulwark of this hated ruler that the revolution had overthrown. As part of that process, they took over the U.S. Embassy, about which there was a movie, Argo, which is a great movie by the way.

VI: It is, absolutely it is.

Steven Simon: They took embassy personnel hostage for 444 days. It destroyed the Carter administration on whose watch this happened. Carter tried to free the hostages and it turned into a military disaster. A tragic event that killed a number of Americans. It was quite humiliating for the United States. The U.S.-Iran relationship went, almost instantaneously, from being a close, government to government relationship, to something that was characterized by deep animosities, really, really deep.

The interesting thing about the history of the U.S.-Iranian relationship as it played out in the aftermath of the hostage-taking, and the accession to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, was that the U.S.-Iranian relationship became the mysterium tremendum of U.S. Middle East policy. Nobody could figure out how to get it right. Certainly, nobody on the Iranian side could figure out how to get it right. It was a really tough nut to crack. Each administration that followed would flip flop.

They'd come in wanting to really hurt the Iranians and then leave attempting to establish some reconciliation. Or they'd come in pursuing reconciliation and then leave determined to incite regime change. Reagan is a really good example of that. Reagan made a deal with the Iranians very early on that kept arms flowing to Iran for a full 18 months after the revolution, and in exchange for the release of the hostages upon his inauguration. He was determined to get things right with Iran but that proved, of course, to be very difficult. The Iranians were willing to release the hostages in return for those arms, and in return for that deal, because as you noted they were at the beginning of a brutal war with Iraq, that lasted nearly 10 years until August 1988. 

There was too much pushback within the American system to keep those arms flowing to Iran. The United States felt that, in this Iran-Iraq war context, its interests were best served by supporting Iraq and urging Iraqi victory. After some initial successes, the Iraqis lost a lot of ground, and the Iranians were occupying Iraqi territory. An Iraqi loss was perceived as a U.S. risk. Saddam Hussein, whom we all remember quite well, was running Iraq at that time and he had started that war against Iran.

VI: Saddam Hussein was not a military genius. It was an ill-fated war to begin with?

Steven Simon: It was. I think you get the prize for understatement of the year. Yes, he was not exactly a military genius with the results that you just indicated, which were not very good results for Iraq. By the time the Reagan administration was approaching the end of its first term, some people in the administration began thinking, "Hey, maybe we really shouldn't let Iran go down the tubes. Maybe it's not so smart to throw all our weight behind Iraq." Some pointed out that perhaps showing Iran a little bit of leg might get Iranian help to influence Lebanese terrorist groups that had seized American hostages in Lebanon. This argument seemed to appeal to Reagan and he ultimately approved secret arms sales to Iran.

VI: So Iran Contra?

Steven Simon: Yes. That was a plan that fell apart, that more than fell apart. It detonated in the administration's face, in the President's face, because there were profits that accrued to the United States from these arms sales, because the U.S. and Israel - which was also involved - charged the Iranians top dollar. There was money left over that was supposed to go, and to some extent did go, to private parties, but there was some that went to the Treasury. That was used to pay for assistance to the Contras. These were rebels fighting against the government of Nicaragua, the left leaning Sandinistas.

The problem with doing that was that such aid was prohibited by Congress. This turned what might have been a clever maneuver vis-a-vis Iran into a full-blown political disaster for the administration, which among other things, made it impossible to continue what had been going on between the U.S. and Iran behind the scenes. By the time that decade ended, the U.S. was actually at war with Iran in the Persian Gulf. There's a footnote to this that is important to remember, especially as we fast forward to the present.

The Iranians just about sank a U.S. frigate, the USS Samuel Roberts in the Gulf, and did other things that were clearly acts of aggression against the United States, and the U.S. naval forces patrolling in Gulf waters. When Reagan thought about retaliating, he was very careful to approve retaliatory attacks that were restricted to Gulf waters and which were relatively minor, certainly in retrospect. He desisted from any attacks on Iranian soil. This was a consistent feature of the Reagan administration. He's remembered as a real tough guy. When the Iranians attacked the United States in Lebanon , Reagan desisted from retaliation. There were no military responses to those devastating attacks directed at Iran.

VI: He just pulled out?

Steven Simon: Yes, he just said "Well, this isn't working out.  Really, we better just pull up stakes and move on.” This was after he declared U.S. intervention in Lebanon as a strategic national interest of the United States. I guess you can have a strategic interest one minute and then no strategic interest the next, depending upon what you have to pay to preserve that strategic interest in Lebanon and later on in the Persian Gulf. The cost was clearly too high in the view of the Reagan administration. When Reagan left office, we know, of course, that George H. W. Bush, who had been Reagan's vice president, was very preoccupied with the Middle East, but primarily with Iraq.

As many people probably recall, the United States went to war against Iraq when it occupied Kuwait. The administration no longer had to worry about the Soviet Union because by that time it had collapsed. There was a feeling that the United States, as the sole remaining superpower, could and should intervene on behalf of what they called the New World Order, in which this sort of conduct would be discouraged - would not go unpunished. The United States attacked Iraq, threw it out of Kuwait and laid the basis for a policy that ultimately destroyed the Iraqi state and society.

People asked towards the end of that first Gulf War, which only lasted 100 hours - it was pretty fast -- "Why doesn't the United States, having cleared a way to Baghdad, just send its forces up there and get rid of Saddam?" The Bush administration decided not to do that, in part because they understood that if they got rid of Saddam and destroyed Iraq, then there would be no natural barrier to Iranian influence and presence in the rest of the Middle East.That big barrier to Iran was Saddam's Iraq. They were thinking strategically in terms that some people call “balancing.”

If you want stability you have to balance various powers against one another to have a kind of equilibrium. So the U.S. didn't go to Baghdad. It did, through sanctions and other means, lay the foundation, ultimately, for the strangulation of the Iraqi middle-class. They impoverished the country and so forth but without dislodging Saddam or being sure that Iraq had been disarmed of its weapons of mass destruction. At the end of the day that left really no choice, in the view of policymakers in the early 2000, but to invade Iraq and actually overthrow Saddam and try and refashion the country. When that happened under George H. W. Bush's son, George W. Bush, the worst fears of those who favored “balancing” were realized. Iraq was completely eliminated as a strategic adversary to Iran.

That liberated Iran to do a lot of things in the region. Therein lies the current cluster of dilemmas that the United States now faces when it looks at Iran. The United States empowered Iran by getting rid of Iraq as an adversary, and then, because the majority population in Iraq is Shiite and perceives a natural affinity to the Iranian state, Iran achieved a position of profound influence in Iraq. This really compounded the effect, the adverse strategic effects, of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and made them a lot worse from the view of Washington D.C.

It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime strategic blunders that countries make. That was ours. Ever since, the uncertainty about how to deal with the revolutionary Iran, that was also clear in the Reagan administration, became even more vexed as the United States had to find a way to, in a sense, protect its huge investment in Iraq, in terms of blood and treasure, even as that country was coming under the influence of Iran.

VI: This put Iran a unique position. The Bush administration’s reaction was to label Iran a charter member of the so-called Axis of Evil - a pariah state. But Iran was never an existential threat to the United States - clearly this was a hyperbolic position on the part of the U.S?

Steve Simon: I would agree. I think that's an accurate assessment. The axis of evil speech reflected the administration’s Manichean worldview.  Unfortunately, it short-circuited serious cooperation with Iran on stabilizing Afghanistan, which the US had just invaded. In 2003 Iran offered to talk about a range of issues with the US but got no reply. A spurned Iran needless to say could make a lot of trouble for the US, but it couldn’t really threaten U.S. strategic interests, except in one way. That's through the development and deployment of nuclear weapons. Here I have to divert for a side lecture. Since the Cold War, the danger of nuclear weapons has trumped regional security problems in the mindset of American policymakers. Regional security issues, they can be painful, they can be costly, but the results of these regional conflicts aren’t somehow going to existentially threaten the United States.

Nuclear weapons were in a different category. When the United States, in recent years, looked at Iran and the damage that Iran could do to American interests, they thought there were regional security issues that Iran's empowerment created. Iran is clearly an adversary and our allies in the Persian Gulf don’t really like the Iranians and vice versa - Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and so forth.

By the time Obama entered the picture, Washington policymakers concluded Iran only becomes a real problem for the US once it has nuclear weapons. Then it's in a position to think that it can control the Persian Gulf region, and also pose an existential threat to Israel, which is an American ally. The Obama administration in particular considered this. This isn't something that the George W. Bush administration could have thought about so much, because they were preoccupied with trying to control a disastrous situation in Iraq.

The Obama administration looked at this, took a classically American strategic view of the situation, and said, "These Iranians are real troublemakers, but what we're really worried about is this nuclear weapons problem. We're going to focus on that." The Obama administration got lucky, and it got lucky because there was an election that brought to the fore a new Iranian president who was both prepared to engage the United States, and other UN member states, on a nuclear deal. Moreover, he was in a position to sell that idea to skeptics in Tehran.

President Hassan Rouhani is a leader who was much more accessible to the West than some of his predecessors. It shouldn't be lost on anyone that he was a core member of the regime, of the Iranian clerical regime - he was not some Age of Aquarius hippie, showing up with a joint and trying to make peace with the United States. But because of his deep links to the regime he was able to say, "Let's give this a chance because it will get us out from under sanctions and then we'll see what happens."

VI: And wasn’t integrating Iran more into the world community a major objective?

Steve Simon: Exactly, exactly. Rouhani articulated this objective in just those words.

The clerics and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gave Rouhani the room to work with the West on an agreement, which was ultimately achieved in 2015 - the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA, with the approval of the UN Security Council, the EU, and the United States, and Germany, which is of course part of the EU.

VI: During the Obama/McCain presidential campaign John McCain was surrounded by real hardliners against Iran, his campaign speeches often included a little jingle he liked: “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” Was pressure from these Iran hawks a motivation for the Obama administration to immediately get to work to improve relations with Iran and get an agreement that would control their nuclear ambitions?

Steven Simon: I wasn’t there the first year of the Obama administration. My instinct, though, is to say the Obama administration was always cognizant of opponents to its policy towards Iran. A long-standing view that you describe, I think quite deftly, among Conservatives and especially Neoconservatives, was that the U.S. was a great power. In fact, it had overwhelming power, and that it had not only the freedom but the duty to use that power to reshape the world in a favorable way. One step towards making the world a better place, in their view, would be to dislodge the Iranian regime, which they correctly assessed to be pretty bad in a number of ways.

Of course, the Iranian stance towards Israel is in some ways inexplicably hardline. Those who were seeking regime change in Iran, I don’t think were far off in the way they describe the regime or the faults that they saw in it. The question was, “Well, what do you do about that?” Again, their view was, “We have the power, we have the will. If we decide to do this, it’s something that can be done.” Of course, by the time Obama came in, that reasoning had been discredited in most quarters because, after all, that was the very reasoning that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

That turned out to be a comprehensive shambles. Many then looked at this regime-change paradigm as applied to Iran and said, “Well, where does that go? Iran is a much bigger country than Iraq, the population is much bigger. This is biting off more than the United States can chew. Let’s not go down that road.” I think by the time Obama came in, the regime change school of thought in Washington was at least temporarily tamed. They were somewhat domesticated, if I can put it that way, because of the prior example of Iraq, and the clear inability of the United States to handle the aftermath of that badly botched campaign.

No one doubted that a military campaign against Iran would be just as effective. Militarily, Iran is a peanut country. The U.S. is in a great position to make war against Iran, not just because of its own capacities, but because of the military base access that it enjoys in the region, and the allies that it has in the region. Iran would be more or less isolated. There were understandable reasons that the regime-change people would be so confident. Again, it all came down to the question of the aftermath. What became known as the, “What then?” question.

I don’t think Obama was so worried about it, but I think the administration certainly was determined to capitalize on its international goodwill to gin up some very serious multilateral sanctions against Iran. Multilateral equals effective because it blocks pathways Iran could exploit to end-run sanctions. The objective was to pressure Iran into engaging in negotiations on the nuclear issue. Again, they got lucky because Rouhani was elected, and I think one of the reasons Rouhani got elected was because Iranians were looking for a leader that would get them out from under the great burden of sanctions. 

The United States was able to win that victory in New York at the UN. It was just a relief that George W. Bush was no longer president. There was a desire to do anything Obama wanted to give him support. There was a honeymoon period, which the administration used effectively to ramp up sanctions. So an agreement was reached. This is practically a trope. It was a flawed agreement. But of course, any agreement is flawed, by definition, because agreements are reached through compromise. That is, each side gives up something it would have wanted to keep in order to get to “yes.” Their counterparts, their opposites on the other side of the table, know it’s not a perfect agreement but the stars were aligned for a workable agreement to be produced.

It was a textbook case of extremely complex diplomacy at work. Remember, the United States is dealing with at least a half a dozen other capitals in trying to forge a common negotiating position to table with the Iranians. You’re not only engaging in high stakes diplomacy with Iran, but you’re also in a very complex diplomatic game with your own allies, the people on your side of the table. To me, it's nothing short of miraculous that they actually came out with the JCPOA, with this agreement, and over the strong objections of a lot of Congressional commission representatives, senators, and representatives. Opponents of the Iran deal spent a huge amount of money in Washington to sway opinion on Capitol Hill. The administration  squeaked by with a narrow congressional approval of the JCPOA, which was in any case an executive agreement that didn’t require Congressional assent.  It wasn't a treaty, so it didn't have to go up to the Senate to be ratified. 

It was a good deal. It required among other things for Iran to get rid of its 20% enriched fuel, which was important because once you get to 20%, getting to weapons-grade is much easier and faster than getting from 0% to 20%. Generally speaking, research reactors are using fuel that's between 3% and 5% enriched, well below weapons-grade. The Iranians agreed to get rid of all that. The Russians took it off their hands. The Iranians agreed to aggressive inspections, very intrusive inspections, which was a big win.

These restrictions, including restrictions on the number of centrifuges that the Iranians could have running at any one time, were meant to last for 15 years and up. It is undeniably true that nothing in this agreement would prevent Iran from setting up secret installations to produce nuclear weapons, while everybody was scrutinizing their main infrastructure that was subject to the JCPOA and all those constraints. If the Iranians were going to cheat, then the United States was going to have to catch them cheating.

Every attempt that the Iranians have made to circumvent restrictions on their nuclear work has thus far been exposed. The United States and its allies were certainly not going to abandon a vast existing intelligence effort aimed at Iran to detect any sign that the Iranians were diverting fuel and creating a duplicate infrastructure -  which would, in any case, be difficult for them to do for a lot of reasons. It was a good agreement on balance.

VI: The United States and Israel have certainly shown that they could take care of Iranian centrifuges. A computer worm labeled Stuxnet is reported to have infected 200,000 Iranian computers and severely damaged any number of centrifuges.

Steve Simon: Yes, and newspapers I've seen have referred to an American program they believe was called Olympic Games. Reportedly, it was a joint program with Israel that inflicted serious damage on the Iranian program. 

VI: What about the mysterious explosions near Iranian nuclear facilities on July 2?

Steve Simon: It was a huge bomb that went off and about half of the facility was completely black and disintegrated. Of course, you know that underneath the intact roof that you're seeing from space the destruction is comprehensive because of fires and shock waves and so forth. All that delicate and complex instrumentation at that facility had to be destroyed. It can’t be stressed too strongly that the facts are unknown, there have been no claims of responsibility, and alternative explanations are plausible. I don't know how the Iranians will choose to respond assuming they believe they have been attacked.

VI: This might be a good point, Steve, to fast forward to where we are with the Trump administration and Iran. They have not been shy about expressing their opinion that Iran is the most dangerous terrorist state on the face of the earth, that their intent is regime change. Their policy of “maximum pressure” has ramped up an array of sanctions - financial sanctions, trade sanctions, oil sanctions, everything you can imagine the United States has thrown at Iran. When Trump ordered a drone strike that took out the revolutionary guard leader, General Qasem Soleimani, tensions between the two countries reached a new and precarious level.

In addition to these acute tensions with the U.S., the COVID-19 pandemic is causing great suffering among the Iranian people. How has all of this impacted Iran? Has it caused conflict between ruling factions? What is the balance of power between President Rouhani, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and the Revolutionary Guard/Quds Forces and other military units? 

Steven Simon: There are some people who claim to know what's going on politically within Tehran. I'm not really tuned into this. I think it's really difficult to say. Those who remember the Cold War and were in government then will tell you, it's just like it was when we were trying to figure out what was going on inside the Kremlin. It's secretive, it's closed off to Americans. The Israelis obviously have some pretty good human sources in Tehran. I'm sure that the United States gets some of the benefit of that intelligence, but what kind of access, in intelligence terms, the U.S. or Israel actually have to the inner decision-making circles to my mind is questionable.

I can only go so far down that road in talking about that kind of access. It seems to me right now that the clerical regime is pretty cohesive. There's a lot of unhappiness in the street about economic conditions. There's been much unhappiness expressed about the allocation of Iranian resources to supporting the Assad regime in Syria. There's been some demonstrable discontent in Iran about that.

The fact remains that the regime's security services are extremely robust. The cost of public opposition to the regime is at this point too great. It remains prohibitive and most people are understandably deterred from going out into the street.

When the Shah was overthrown, the army split from the Shah. Of course, that was the beginning of the end. It was also waffling on the Shah's part, a signal to his vulnerability and not just to his adversaries but to his supporters. When we look at Iran now, and one asks oneself, where are the army and the security services in this situation? The answer is that they seem to be with the system and really committed to it. They have essentially unconstrained power to counter anti-regime activity.

VI: When you say the Iranian military is with the system, aren’t they the actual system? Aren't they the ones actually in charge, and Rouhani and other political elements the ones that are marginalized? Or is it a power-sharing situation in a way that we don't really understand, or can’t see?

Steven Simon: I think it's really the latter. I think you're onto something. We tend to look at these things as a sporting event. Opposing teams, one side's up, one side's down.

The Iranian decision-making elite, and those whose support is sought for consensual purposes behind or in support of policy choices made in Tehran, constitute a large, informal social network. In a way, it's like the way the United States was not all that long ago, where all those involved in the upper echelons have gone to the same schools. They're party to the same religious affiliations and beliefs. There's intermarriage. It's a pretty cohesive group, but there shouldn't be any question that there are differences of views within the group.

On some issues, some factions will have greater influence than on other issues. It depends on the stakes that each individual faction perceives in any one of these policy challenges that the regime is facing overall. I'm not inclined to see things in this perhaps more simplistic way. I'm more inclined to your last explanation, which is that the system is really more cohesive with a lot of give and take within the system depending on the issue. For example, if you look at Syria policy, which is firmly in the hands of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, they have a preponderant interest in that issue. They have the most skin in the game in that issue, and therefore their opinion on that issue will carry greater weight than the opinion of others.

There are other issue areas where the balance is going to look different between factions. I guess I'm not disposed to think of the regime being somehow weakened by internecine tensions. I think it's more resilient than you would suggest. I think that they're in a fairly good position to continue to resist U.S. efforts to create the collective anarchic conditions in Iran that would precipitate the overthrow of the regime or at least a strong challenge to it. The pact that the Iranians and the Chinese are edging toward is a good example of alternatives available.

VI: My next question was in fact about this pending agreement between China and Iran.The draft text of this agreement was leaked to The New York Times and has drawn considerable attention. I think the opening statement is worth reading. It says:

"Two ancient Asian cultures, two partners in the sectors of trade, economy, politics, culture, and security with similar outlook and many mutual bilateral and multilateral interests will consider one another's strategic partners." 

China can be a vital lifeline for Iran. Won’t a strategic partnership between the two countries put the United States totally on the defensive since such an agreement could undermine everything the United States is trying to do with their maximum pressure and austere sanctions policies?

Steve Simon: There's not much I can say to add to the scenario you just spelled out. I think you're spot on. The United States, generally, when it develops foreign policies - and I think this is a problem regardless of the party in power - has a tendency to make policy without really thinking it through, or without thinking through what the other guy is going to do. There's this idea, to apply “maximum pressure," and that the Iranians will comply, by allowing themselves to be crushed by it, for the regime to be swept away in revolutionary ways.

VI: Job done, right? Mission accomplished.

Steve Simon: That's it. Nobody seems to say, we're going to do this maximum pressure thing but what are the Iranians going to do? What are their options once we do this? On the outside, scholars and commentators have pointed out from the very beginning that, obviously this is going to force Iran into China’s arms because you don't have to be Iranian to figure out that that's your best option under the circumstances. If you're in a government bubble, you just tend to think that whatever policy you've come up with is somehow a magic bullet that will provide the ultimate resolution to a long-standing conflict.

It will bring your enemy to his knees. It doesn't really work like that. The fact that the United States has pursued such a confrontational approach to China since really the beginning of the administration - I think the New York Times described the U.S-. Chinese relationship as being in 'freefall' - there's no line of communication between the United States and China whereby the United States might influence Chinese decisionmaking vis-a-vis Iran. 

What makes it especially awkward is that the United States withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear deal with Iran. It announced the withdrawal and then it just withdrew, but China remains a signatory to it. As far as China is concerned, Iran is still in compliance with the agreement, so U.S. sanctions are unjustified. They're insupportable. From an international legal perspective, the Chinese seem essentially to be fireproofed. They have the high ground.

The Chinese leadership have absolutely no incentive vis-à-vis the United States to do anything but to kick Washington in the shins. I think Iran will figure out a way to stay afloat. Surely, they're looking at the public opinion survey data in the United States now, which seems to indicate that Trump is a weaker candidate for re-election than certainly he was earlier in the year.

VI: There may be a regime change but not in Iran?

Steve Simon: Correct. If you're Iranian, what are you going to do? You're going to wait it out.

VI: Certainly, China is not a bad option for Iran. They also have other friends in their neighborhood - the Pakistanis and the Iranians have always had a good relationship. Turkey and Iran are on reasonable terms. The Europeans too, want the JCPOA to succeed. Isn’t the one seemingly isolated in all this the United States?

Steven Simon: Increasingly so. The thing about sanctions though, is that they are really not to be underestimated. in terms of their ability to achieve their objective - if you’re the US and your objective is to wreck your enemy’s economy and inflict great pain on its population. They can be very effective in indirect ways. For example, the new round of sanctions against Iran are extraterritorial. They are called secondary sanctions, which means that if you're a European firm, and you want to do business with Iran, you could wind up being cut off from check clearing and your ability to do business with the United States.

VI: Because the United States controls the international financial system, dollar hegemony?

Steven Simon: Exactly. On the one hand, you really make it difficult for European governments to follow their instincts on this issue and simply side with Iran, and do as the Chinese have done, which is to say, "Look, United States, you're wrong about this. We think your sanctions are invalid, given the agreement that we have with Iran so we're going to trade with them." They can't do that because Europe and the United States are umbilically tied in terms of trade. To protect their own business communities, these governments have essentially to kowtow to the United States on Iran. The longer-run issue here for the United States is, will this ultimately endanger the dollar as a reserve currency?

VI: Which the Russians and the Chinese are really anxious to replace?

Steve Simon: That they are. Bitcoin sounds almost science fictionist, but that is a path to sidelining the U.S. as the center of the international financial system.

VI. Looking forward, if Biden does win in November his administration will have to cope with Trump’s legacy. Many in the new Biden team will be the ones that gave us the JCPOA. Can they hope to revive the existing agreement or will a new round of negotiations with Tehran be necessary?

Steve Simon: I think option two is probably the one more likely to eventuate. I think it's going to be really tough. Let me explain what I mean by that. It's not as though, in the United States, absence from the agreement has made hearts grow fonder of it. To simply re-enter the agreement with Iran -- given Iran's support for Assad in Syria and other things Iran is doing – let’s say that it will be tricky for a new administration simply to turn the clock back. 

The best I think they'll be able to do, as things stand now, is to say to the Iranians, "We're going to walk back some of the additional sanctions. While we and you, and perhaps other parties, negotiate a revised JCPOA that takes into account regional security issues, on the one hand, and missile proliferation on the other." That is an agreement that would seek to impose limits on Iranian fabrication of ballistic missiles, which would after all be the delivery mechanisms for a nuclear bomb that they might ultimately make. Whether the Iranians bite is anybody's guess but that gets to the question of, so what happens between now and then.

The Iranians could conclude, "We have a new president here. A person we can do business with so let's make it easy for him and sweeten the pot a little and make some concessions upfront rhetorical or otherwise, that clear away some of the U.S. domestic political obstacles to a Biden administration reopening negotiations." They could do that, and that would make a big difference. If they could cease and desist for the next six months in carrying out operations against Israel from Syrian territory, they could declare a unilateral moratorium, or at least just practice one, on the transfer of advanced weapons to Lebanese Hezbollah.

There are things Iran could do that would make it a lot easier for a Biden administration to reconvene and facilitate the creation of a new agreement that extends the gains of the original agreement while doing some other things that would make the West happy. Of course, once the United States goes in and asks for more stuff, the door is necessarily open to the Iranians coming in and asking for more stuff. How the Biden administration would approach that is anybody's guess. I'm sure they're thinking about this pretty hard.

VI: We will have to wait and see. As you say tensions are high with Iran and with the Chinese now in the picture, a number of scenarios are possible. The next few months will be interesting for sure.

Steve Simon: Indeed. We should have a conversation down the road.

VI: Let's reconvene in December and discuss which way the U.S. will be going - with either a new administration organizing to take over, or the Trump administration with a reelection mandate furthering its agenda.

Steven Simon is senior research analyst at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and professor in the practice of international relations at Colby College. He served on the National Security Council staff in the Clinton and Obama administrations and has held several senior positions at the Department of State. Outside of government, he was a principal and senior advisor to Good Harbor LLC in Abu Dhabi and director of the Middle East office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in Manama. He previously managed security-related projects at the RAND Corporation and was the Hasib Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has taught at Princeton, Dartmouth, and Amherst and has held fellowships at Brown, Oxford, and the American Academy in Berlin. He has authored several books on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. His new book, The Long Goodbye: The United States and the Middle East from the Islamic Revolution to the Arab Spring is forthcoming.