PRESIDENT REAGAN’S PRESSURE WITHOUT HIS STRATEGY
Dr. Miklos K. Radvanyi
President Donald J. Trump’s war against the Islamic Republic of Iran increasingly invites comparison with President Ronald W. Reagan’s global diplomacy against the Soviet Union. The comparison is not without logic. The latter outrightly rejected the prevailing assumption that the cannibalistic nature of Soviet Socialism cum Communism could be moderated through economic inducements, or overwhelming political appeasement. The former’s opinion also begins with a similarly correct insight. The Islamic Republic of Iran has repeatedly treated Western appeasement as weakness. It has relentlessly pursued nuclear capabilities, developed ballistic missiles, financed terrorist organizations, attacked American interests through proxies, threatened a key ally the State of Israel, destabilized Arab states, and attempted to turn the Strait of Hormuz into an instrument of geostrategic extortion. President Trump has also refused to grant Tehran strategic immunity. Before him, successive American administrations frequently responded by addressing each hostile manifestation separately. The nuclear aspiration was isolated from terrorism, terrorism from missiles, missiles from regional expansion, and regional expansion from the ideological nature of the Mullahcracy. This irrational fragmentation allowed Tehran to negotiate over one issue, while advancing on all others. Moreover, both believed that peace could be secured only after the adversary understood that aggression would bring intolerable costs.
Yet, there is also a decisive difference. President Reagan did not merely pressure the Soviet Union. He constructed a comprehensive strategy for defeating Soviet expansionism, exposing communist illegitimacy, encouraging internal transformation, and negotiating from a position of strength. President Trump has adopted much of the former’s coercive power, but he has not yet supplied the strategic architecture necessary to convert pressure upon Tehran into a durable victory.
President Reagan entered office when much of the Western establishment regarded the Soviet Union as permanent, perhaps even advancing, superpower. The Kremlin had invaded Afghanistan, expanded its influence across the developing world, and achieved alarming military strength. The conventional response was containment moderated by detente: manage the Soviet threat, negotiate limited accommodations, and avoid testing the stability of the Communist Empire. President Reagan rejected this fatalism. He recognized that Soviet military power concealed profound economic, technological, national, and ideological weaknesses. The Soviet Union could manufacture missiles, but could not provide its people with prosperity, freedom, or truthful information. Its empire depended upon coercion; its economy dependent upon inefficiency; and its ideology survived largely because alternatives were suppressed. President Reagan’s objective was, therefore, not simply to outspend Moscow, or frighten it into another arms-control agreement. His administration sought to make Soviet imperial competition unsustainable. The American military buildup, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe, support for anti-Communist resistance movements, restrictions on Western technology, economic pressure, public diplomacy, and assistance to dissidents were not isolated initiatives. They were well defined parts of a unified strategy. National Security Directive 75, issued in 1983, identified three fundamental purposes: containing and reversing Soviet expansion, encouraging internal changes that would make the Soviet system less threatening, and negotiating agreements based upon reciprocity, and American interests. Pressure and diplomacy were thus complementary rather than contradictory.
President Trump’s approach to the Islamic Republic of Iran begins with a similar correct insight. His willingness to use force has shattered the comforting Iranian assumption that fear of escalation would indefinitely protect the Mullahcracy. This is the strongest Reaganesque element in President Trump’s policy. Deterrence requires more than declarations. Threats become credible only when an adversary sees both the capacity and the willingness to carry them out. President Reagan restored credibility after an uncertainty of the 1970s; President Trump has attempted to restore it after years in which Tehran often employed proxies as well as terrorism without facing proportional consequences. Yet, coercion is an instrument, not an end-state. Here President Trump’s strategy remains dangerously incomplete. What precisely does the United States of America demand from the Republic of Iran? Is the objective a verifiable nuclear agreement, the permanent destruction of Iranian nuclear capabilities, an end the ballistic-missile development, the dismantling of the Mullahcracy’s terrorist network, freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, or the overthrow of the tyranny of the Velayat-e Faqih?
Clearly, these goals overlap, but they are not interchangeable. Tehran might accept temporary nuclear restrictions, while preserving its missiles and proxies. It might abandon certain regional operations, while retaining the ability to rebuild its nuclear program. A weakened clerical regime could become more cautious – or more desperate and brutal. Regime change would create still another set of responsibilities concerning the Mullahcracy’s political transition, territorial integrity, minorities, military institutions, and relations with its neighbors.
President Reagan understood that the struggle concerned the character of the Soviet system itself. He distinguished between communist rulers and the populations they oppressed. His denunciation of the “Evil Empire” was accompanied by an affirmative moral proposition: Russians and the captive nations of Eastern Europe possessed the right of political freedom, national independence, and human dignity. President Trump condemned the Mullahcracy’s tyranny and occasionally encouraged the Iranian people to resist it. But his administration has not developed an equally coherent doctrine for Iran’s political future. It has not explained how minorities, democratic opposition groups, monarchists, secular nationalists, workers, women, students, and disaffected members of the state apparatus might be brought into a credible transition. Nor has it clearly stated which existing Iranian institutions would have to disappear and which might be preserved to prevent anarchy.
This omission is not academic. Economic pain does not automatically produce political moderation. The Soviet leadership belatedly recognized that reforms might be necessary to preserve Communist tyranny. The Iranian Mullahcracy and its Revolutionary Guard Corps may reach the opposite conclusion. They may believe that any compromise threatens their personal survival more directly than war, poverty, or national ruin. What is irrational for the Mullahcracy may remain rational for those who rule it.
President Reagan also understood that alliances were force multipliers. Despite bitter disagreements over missiles, sanctions, and Soviet energy projects, he maintained the essential unity of NATO. This gave American pressure military credibility and political legitimacy. President Trump possesses indispensable partnerships with the State of Israel and several Arab states, but the wider coalition is less coherent. Europe remains hesitant, while the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China provide Tehran with diplomatic, commercial, and strategic escape routes. Unless those routes are constricted, pressure may impoverish the Islamic Republic of Iran without compelling its Mullahcracy to surrender their core ambitions. Therefore, President Trump faces the central question that President Reagan answered: What political choice must the adversary be forced to make?
President Reagan confronted the Kremlin with a choice between maintaining an unaffordable empire and preserving the Soviet state. President Trump must confront Tehran with an equally unmistakable choice between revolutionary imperialism and Iran’s survival as a functioning state. He must define the concessions that would end American pressure, establish credible mechanisms for verification, offer the Iranian people a political alternative, and explain what will follow if the clerical establishment chooses destruction rather than transformation. President Trump has demonstrated that the United states of America can destroy Iran. The remaining task is to prove that his administration can translate destruction into strategy.
President Reagan did not prevail because he was simply tougher than his predecessors. He prevailed because military strength, economic pressure, ideological clarity, alliance solidarity, and diplomacy served a common political purpose. He forced the Kremlin into a competition that exposed and intensified its fatal contradictions. President Trump assembled many of the same instruments against the Islamic Republic of Iran. He now needs the strategic coherence that made them decisive under President Reagan. Otherwise, he may win every confrontation, destroy all facilities, bankrupt the Iranian economy – and still leave the fundamental problem unresolved.
President Reagan used pressure to force the Kremlin into a choice that the Soviet Union could not survive. President Trump is using pressure to force the Mullahcracy into a decision it has repeatedly refused to make. Whether his campaign becomes a Reaganesque triumph or another unfinished Middle Eastern war will depend upon whether he can transform overwhelming force into a clearly defined and durable political victory.