On Iran, U.S. Torn Between Supporting Israel and Fighting IS

By Steven Metz

March 6, 2015

A pro-Israel demonstrator waves flags near the Capitol in Washington, D.C., March 3, 2015 (AP photo by Cliff Owen). 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the U.S. Congress this week slammed U.S. President Barack Obama’s quest for a nuclear agreement with Iran, unleashing a political firestorm in Washington. While the speech did not compel anyone to shift their position on the Obama policy, it dramatically amplified the debate, with each side fully convinced that Netanyahu made his case or failed to do so.

That the United States has been unable to manage its conflict with Iran, or even implement a coherent policy, reflects the intricate complexity of the issue—with its multiple components, clashing priorities and impassioned domestic political elements. It is the most politically challenging national security issue that the U.S. faces today.

The most pressing component of the conflict—at least this week—is Iran’s nuclear program. It’s not hard to understand Tehran’s desire for nuclear weapons. The Islamic Republic is well aware that regimes without nuclear weapons, like Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, fell to U.S. military intervention, while those with nuclear weapons, like North Korea, have not. For Iran, the U.S. poses an existential threat.

Given this, it might seem that the most effective American approach would be to reprise the Cold War, combining deterrence with reassurance. But that technique is made more difficult, perhaps impossible, by Israel’s very different perception of the Iranian threat and the American people’s commitment to Israel’s security. Netanyahu has done a masterful job of convincing his American allies that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose an unacceptable threat to Israel, relying when necessary on evocations of the Holocaust.

This has found a receptive audience in the U.S., in large part because of Iran’s inflammatory rhetoric, support for terrorism and backing of unsavory clients like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. While the U.S. was able to undertake arms control with the Soviet Union by detaching Moscow’s sponsorship of revolutionary insurgency from the superpower nuclear relationship, Israel’s involvement makes the U.S. conflict with Iran a three-player game. And the conflict is so deeply imbued with emotion and fear that Netanyahu doesn’t have to explain exactly why a nuclear-armed Iran would pose an “existential” threat given Israel’s own extensive, if officially unacknowledged, nuclear arsenal. Mental images and historical allusions are enough.

Whether out of insecurity, pure ambition or a sincere desire to support fellow Shiites, Iran pursues expanded regional influence, relying on the Assad regime and a cast of other predominantly Shiite movements, most importantly Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iraq’s majority Shiite government and Shiites in the Gulf nations, especially Bahrain and Yemen. Whatever the motive, this quest to reorder the region creates fear not only in Israel but also in nearby Sunni-dominated Arab states.

Taken in isolation, this suggests that political, economic and military pressure on Iran form the only viable policy. But now Iran has become a crucial actor in the fight against the so-called Islamic State (IS). Tehran has taken charge of Iraq’s defense and prevented Baghdad from falling to the extremists last summer. Shiite militias, generally with close ties to Iran, make up most of the Iraqi forces attempting to recapture key cities like Tikrit and Mosul from IS. As things stand now, the defeat of IS will solidify Iran’s influence over Iraq.

Then there are the domestic considerations on all three sides. As the Iranian regime faces mounting internal discontent, it fans fear of intervention to distract attention from its many failings. Its virulently hostile rhetoric and support for proxies and terrorism are precisely the things that lead Israel, the Gulf states and many Americans to conclude that Iran cannot be reasoned with or enticed into cooperation. Netanyahu, in turn, uses Iran’s hostility to distract his domestic constituents from Israel’s economic problems. 

In the U.S., Obama’s Republican opponents use the conflict with Iran as a political sledgehammer, narrowing the administration’s diplomatic operating space while not offering a real alternative strategy with much chance of success. The end result is that all sides demonize each other to keep the conflict ossified.

Neither Netanyahu nor IS can be ignored. The Israeli prime minister, like any skilled elected leader who needs another nation to advance his policy objectives, uses his American support network to make sure he is heard. At the same time, IS uses highly publicized atrocities to fuel American fears. That is the rub: It would be much easier for the U.S. if it could disregard either Israel’s concerns about the Iranian nuclear program or the fear of further expansion by IS, given that one of these calls for pressure on Iran and the other for cooperation with it. It would also be easier if Iran could back off of its hostile rhetoric and attempts to rearrange the political order of its region. But Iran can’t or won’t, whether out of habit or because the regime truly believes that its legitimacy and hold on power depend on sustaining outward hostility and fear of intervention.

Iran does not appear able to set a clear priority among its goals, whether preventing external intervention, supporting fellow Shiites, engineering a revolutionary transformation of its region, simply holding power or satisfying the growing demands of young Iranians. But neither can the U.S. establish a clear priority among its often conflicting objectives: supporting Israel and the region’s Arab states against Iran, defeating IS, limiting nuclear proliferation and, perhaps most challenging of all, lowering the costs and risks of involvement in the region.

There is an old saying that “the devil is in the details.” In the case of America’s conflict with Iran, the devil is in the interlocking and often centrifugal complexities. Unpacking the conflict and approaching its components in isolation would be more effective, but is politically impossible. The interconnections are too strong. No matter what happens during the final two years of the Obama administration, the next president will face the same Gordian knot from the moment he or she moves into the White House.

Steven Metz is director of research at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute and the author of “Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy.” His weekly WPR column, Strategic Horizons, appears every Friday. You can follow him on Twitter @steven_metz. All ideas in this essay are strictly his own and do not represent the official position of the U.S. Army or U.S. Army War College.