Time is running out to crack down on Iran

Three American soldiers on the Syria-Jordan border were killed by Iranian drones on Sunday. Since October, Iranian drones and missiles have injured nearly two hundred American troops. The pipe dream that was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – the Iran deal – could not seem more distant.

The equation at the heart of the deal, more money for more Iranian concessions, vanished shortly after an agreement was concluded in 2015. In the years since, Iran’s funding to its regional proxies exploded, and its proxies’ attacks on Israel and the Gulf states continued unabated. The Houthis in Yemen, who emerged in earnest after the deal was struck, are now a global pest. Iran’s reformist movement, which the carrot of doux commerce was meant to empower, has been all but decimated. Iran’s nuclear program is more advanced than it has ever been. From the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, its proxies are harassing British ships and British allies. Globally, Iran threatens to use terror and assassination against British citizens. After nearly six years, British policy has barely moved an inch. It now needs to move a mile, and fast. 

The Middle East is aflame, but our heads apparently remain in the sand. Performative pseudo-sanctions are one thing. But on Wednesday, Lord Cameron (or perhaps his underlings in Whitehall) thought it appropriate to meet with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in Davos. Any ‘important messages’ Cameron passed along surely paled in comparison with the image of weakness he presented. Sure enough, within hours, the Iranian media spun the meeting as a perfect example of Western grovelling and feebleness. It is rather hard to disagree. One doubts that Amir-Abdollahian asked for the meeting, or that he will give much consideration to Cameron’s grumbling about Houthi missiles. But such foibles are downstream from the central problem, which is that we do not understand Iran and do not have an Iran policy.

As Saeid Golkar writes, Iran is a ‘captive society’. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is its principal captor. The best structural analogy for the IRGC is the SS. It is highly-indoctrinated, independent of the regular army, an elite social and political network, and swears loyalty to the Supreme Leader rather than the nation. Today, the IRGC controls two-thirds of Iran’s economy. Its proximity to the Supreme Leader gives its commanders an outsize influence in policymaking. Consequently, politicians who sought to rein in the IRGC’s sprawling remit have been banished from political life (or worse.) For forty years, the IRGC’s network has slammed shut every opening for glasnost or perestroika à l’iranienne. The reason why is in the name. 

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The proper name of the IRGC – sepah-e-pasdaran-e-enghelab-e-eslami – translates to ‘the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution’. Its job is written on the tin: to ensure that Iran remains an ‘Islamic Republic’ per the definition of its founder, Ruhollah Khomeini. Since its creation, its raison d’être has been to be ‘nezami’, ‘pro-regime’. It is there to stay. Iran will continue to support terrorists in the name of ‘resistance’. It will plot kidnappings and murders worldwide. It will maintain its commitment to fanatical anti-Westernism, in word and in deed. What we needed before October 7 is a strategy aimed at countering and containing the state that the IRGC commands. It is nothing short of extraordinary that we still lack one.  

In Policy Exchange’s paper The Iran Question and British Strategy, published early last year, we suggested implementing UN ‘snapback’ sanctions on Iran. Failure to do so, we wrote, would put Iran on an internationally-legitimised glide path towards advanced nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities. Had those recommendations been heeded, we would have been in a better position to handle the current crisis. The UN Resolution 2231 could have been used by the UK to trigger the ‘snapback’ of the sanctions suspended by the original deal, formally killing the JCPOA. This did not happen: the UN embargo on Iranian missile testing and arms embargoes expired last October. Iranian drones already bomb Ukrainian infrastructure with our effective condonation. Now, Iranian missiles are flying all over the region: several dozen missiles were fired Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria over two-day span. Iranian ballistic missiles are flung at ships from Yemen on a daily basis. 

Snapback is just one example of where an obvious cost-free step could have been taken. We also pointed out the risk of ‘serious disruption to international commerce’ from Yemen, noting that the UK’s military capabilities in the region were not ready to handle a regional crisis and that our enemies know it. We highlighted that the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence had not reviewed its Middle East evacuation procedures, even after the humiliating evacuation of Kabul. We recommended that the UK expedite the sale of military equipment to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as a diplomatic incentive and to prepare them for a possible contingency in Yemen. We arrived at these conclusions from a clear-eyed look at the region. That none of these measures were taken onboard sooner is a damning indictment of the blob’s creativity deficit. 

The ‘blob’ and its intellectual enablers continue to call for de-escalation, as they have for years. The appeasement camp – what else to call it? – continues to fear that a comprehensive strategy could ‘light the region on fire.’ They have long been the sort to fiddle while Rome burned, but now it is literally the case.

Time is on Tehran’s side. Despite rampant inflation in Iran, the IRGC’s budget was buffered for a third consecutive year. It will likely be expanded again in March. The IRGC remains embedded in the command structures of every regional militia, from Yemen to Lebanon to Iraq. Iran is still the principal source of funding and knowledge for all the West’s local antagonists. Iran’s stockpile of highly-enriched uranium is expanding, as is its store of advanced centrifuges. Worse still, our partners in the Gulf have effectively fallen in line with the Iranian narrative that a ceasefire in Gaza – in other words, leaving Hamas intact – is the only way to forestall a ‘worse disaster’. It is hard to blame them, though. If anything, a policy of effective capitulation is something they learned from us. 

For years, Tehran’s atomic scarecrow distracted the world from both its foreign policy, which violently disturbs the peace across the Middle East; and from its domestic policy which, as the events of recent months have shown, violently robs Iranians of their basic freedoms. The consequences of our inaction and inertia are plain to see. It is already too late to avert a looming storm or to brace ourselves for one. The storm has already arrived. But if we do not adapt soon, our interests will be washed away with it. 

Jay Mens is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange and Ernest May Fellow for History and Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He is the co-author of the Policy Exchange report ‘The Iran Question and British Strategy’