December 27, 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shortly after his Inauguration, Joe Biden appointed Rob Malley to be his special envoy for\u00a0Iran<\/a>. Malley, who is fifty-eight, grew up in France and was in the same high-school class in Paris as Secretary of State Antony Blinken. He graduated from Yale and Harvard Law School, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron White. Ruth Bader Ginsburg officiated at his wedding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Malley has long experience with the Middle East. His father was a French journalist known for his support of anti-colonialist movements. Working on the National Security Council during the Clinton Administration, Malley participated in the Camp David peace talks. After they collapsed, in 2000, he broke with the conventional analysis that the summit had failed because of Yasir Arafat\u2019s intransigence. Malley published detailed insider accounts about how the Israelis shared the blame, for making proposals difficult for Arafat to accept. Critics declared Malley rabidly anti-Israel. Former colleagues publicly called the attacks on Malley \u201cunfair, inappropriate, and wrong.\u201d After Clinton left office, Malley worked on Iran at the International Crisis Group, which tracks global conflicts. As part of his job, he met with Iranian officials and travelled to Tehran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the Obama Administration, he was on the team that produced the Iran nuclear deal<\/a>, in 2015. The agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was the most significant nonproliferation pact in more than a quarter century. Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia were equal partners, but the United States had a virtual veto, and Iran knew it. During two years of tortuous talks, the Iranians often met the Americans in hotel hallways to thrash out issues. Malley, who deliberates with the intensity of a lawyer but is soft-spoken in person, was on a first-name basis with his Iranian counterparts. They exchanged family stories, cell-phone numbers, and e-mail addresses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The agreement survived for only two years. Influenced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and by Republican hawks, President Donald Trump abandoned the deal in 2018. He also imposed more than a thousand sanctions on Iran. They targeted the Supreme Leader, the Foreign Minister, judges, generals, scientists, banks, oil facilities, a shipping line, an airline, charities, and allies, such as the President of Venezuela, for doing business with Tehran. Trump also designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country\u2019s most powerful military branch, as a terrorist group\u2014an action that the U.S. had never taken against another nation\u2019s military, even the Nazi Wehrmacht.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the Trump years, Malley was appointed president of the International Crisis Group. He kept in touch with some of his Iranian contacts. But when he became Biden\u2019s envoy the Iranian diplomats he\u2019d known for decades refused to meet with him. During talks in Vienna this past spring, the Americans stayed at the Hotel Imperial. The Iranians were eight blocks away, at the InterContinental. Enrique Mora, a Spanish diplomat for the European Union, carried proposals back and forth. Delegations from the other five nations consulted at a third hotel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Malley compared proxy talks to a Woody Allen story, \u201cThe Gossage-Vardebedian Papers.\u201d In it, two men play chess by mail. A letter goes \u201cmissing.\u201d Moves are lost. Both players claim that they are winning. Infuriated, they stop playing before the game is finished. The Russian envoy, Mikhail Ulyanov, described the Vienna process as one of the strangest in modern diplomacy. \u201cThe aim isn\u2019t to update an agreement or elaborate a new one,\u201d he tweeted. \u201cThe goal is to restore a nearly ruined deal piece by piece. Was there a similar exercise in the history of international relations? I can not recollect anything like that. Can you?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bizarre diplomacy, Malley told me, took on unprecedented urgency in November. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen Iran\u2019s nuclear program expand, and we\u2019ve seen Tehran become more belligerent, more bellicose in its regional activities,\u201d he said. \u201cThey are miscalculating and playing with fire.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The stakes extend well beyond Iran. The world\u2019s nuclear order, already perilous, is now at risk of unravelling. Nuclear pacts hammered out in the last century are dated or fraying, as the U.S., Russia, and China modernize their arsenals. The Pentagon estimates that China could have at least a thousand bombs by 2030. The talks with Tehran are designed to prevent a tenth nation\u2014the latest was North Korea, in 2006\u2014from getting the bomb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Middle East, Israel has had a nuclear weapon since the late nineteen-sixties. Saudi officials have also threatened to pursue the bomb if Iran obtains one. \u201cThe Iranian nuclear crisis can\u2019t be viewed in a vacuum,\u201d Kelsey Davenport, of the Arms Control Association, told me. \u201cThe broader nuclear order is in chaos.\u201d The collapse of the talks with Iran\u2014Biden\u2019s first major diplomatic foray\u2014would have consequences worldwide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both Washington and Tehran are violating the deal. A year after Trump abandoned the accord and launched his \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d campaign, Tehran began breaching its obligations. It installed IR-6 centrifuges\u2014which are much faster than the IR-1s allowed by the deal\u2014and developed even more efficient models, including the IR-9. Centrifuges are tall tubes that enrich a gaseous form of uranium. They spin at supersonic speeds several thousand times faster than the force of gravity. Iran also increased enrichment from under four-per-cent purity\u2014the limit in the agreement, and a level used for peaceful nuclear energy or medical research\u2014to sixty per cent. \u201cOnly countries making bombs are reaching this level,\u201d Rafael Grossi, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in May. Weapons grade is ninety per cent, which, for Israeli officials, is a decisive juncture. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to reach a point where we will have to ask ourselves how Iran was allowed to enrich to ninety per cent,\u201d Zohar Palti, the former director of intelligence at Mossad, who is now at the Israeli Ministry of Defense, told me. The so-called \u201cbreakout\u201d time for Iran to produce enough fuel for a bomb has plummeted, from more than a year to as little as three weeks. \u201cIt\u2019s really short, and unacceptably short,\u201d a senior Administration official said. \u201cEvery day they spin centrifuges, and, for every day they stockpile uranium, the breakout time continues to shrink.\u201d Additional steps\u2014including weaponizing the enriched uranium, marrying it to a warhead, and then integrating it with a delivery system, such as a missile\u2014are required to field a bomb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Israel has tried to slow Iran\u2019s progress. In late 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the father of Iran\u2019s nuclear program, was assassinated as he drove with his wife and bodyguards to a weekend home. From more than a thousand miles away, the killer used artificial intelligence and a satellite connection to trigger a machine gun mounted on a parked pickup truck, spraying Fakhrizadeh with bullets. Tehran retaliated with a law that limited international inspections by blocking access to surveillance footage at nuclear sites. Experts fear that Iran may be considering a \u201csneak-out\u201d\u2014a covert path to a bomb. Tracking Iran\u2019s facilities has become like \u201cflying in a heavily clouded sky,\u201d Grossi said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first six rounds of diplomacy this spring, Malley told me, made \u201creal progress.\u201d In June, he presented a nuclear package that included ending most of Trump\u2019s sanctions. \u201cThe collective sense of everybody\u2014obviously the Europeans, the Russians and Chinese, but also the Iranian delegation at the time\u2014was that we could see the outlines of a deal,\u201d he said. \u201cIf each side was prepared to make the necessary compromises, we could get there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The talks paused that month, after Iran\u2019s Presidential election. Hassan Rouhani<\/a>, the previous President and a reformist, had won in 2013 and 2017 on a platform of engaging with the United States. But Trump\u2019s sanctions sabotaged the economic benefits promised by the nuclear accord, so in 2021 a majority of Iranians didn\u2019t bother to vote. Ebrahim Raisi, a rigid ideologue and the head of the judiciary, was elected. The U.S. had already sanctioned Raisi, noting his role on a \u201cdeath commission\u201d that ordered the execution, in 1988, of some five thousand dissidents. At his Inauguration, in August, Raisi pledged, \u201cAll the parameters of national power will be strengthened.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Malley had left his suits at the hotel in Vienna, expecting talks to resume before long. But five months passed, and Iran\u2019s nuclear program advanced further. Malley eventually had his suits shipped home. By the time diplomacy resumed, in late November, Malley told me, Iran\u2019s program had \u201cblown through\u201d the limits imposed by the J.C.P.O.A. \u201cAs they\u2019re making these advances, they are gradually emptying the deal of the nonproliferation benefits for which we bargained,\u201d he said. The Biden Administration has pushed back. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to agree to a worse deal because Iran has built up its nuclear program,\u201d Malley added. At some point soon, trying to revive the deal would \u201cbe tantamount to trying to revive a dead corpse.\u201d The U.S. and its allies might then \u201chave to address a runaway Iranian nuclear program.\u201d Without a return to the deal, a senior State Department official said, it is \u201cmore than plausible, possible, and maybe even probable\u201d that Iran will try to become a threshold nuclear state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The wild card is Israel. In September, at the U.N. General Assembly, the new Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett<\/a>, charged that Iran\u2019s nuclear program had \u201chit a watershed moment, and so has our tolerance. Words do not stop centrifuges from spinning.\u201d Israel is due to soon begin training for possible military strikes on Iran. During a visit to Washington in December, Defense Minister Benny Gantz urged the Biden Administration to hold joint military exercises with Israel. \u201cThe problem with Iran\u2019s nuclear program is that, for the time being, there is no diplomatic mechanism to make them stop,\u201d Palti told me. \u201cThere is no deterrent. Iran is no longer afraid. We need to give them the stop sign.\u201d U.S. officials counter that Israeli operations have often provoked Tehran and set back diplomacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iran can still reverse technological advances if a deal is reached. Its knowledge, however, is irreversible. \u201cIran\u2019s nuclear program hit new milestones over the past year,\u201d Kelsey Davenport said. \u201cAs it masters these new capabilities, it will change our understanding about how the country may pursue nuclear weapons down the road.\u201d Even if the Biden Administration does broker a return to the accord, Republicans have vowed to scuttle it. In October, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, tweeted, \u201cUnless any deal w\/ Iran is ratified by the Senate as a treaty\u2014which Biden knows will NOT happen\u2014it is a 100% certainty that any future Republican president will tear it up. Again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the nuclear talks foundered earlier this year, I flew to the Al Asad Airbase, in Iraq\u2019s remote western desert, with Kenneth (Frank) McKenzie, Jr., a Marine general from Alabama, who heads U.S. military operations across the Middle East and South Asia. It was part of an extended tour of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Qatar, and Lebanon. In the cavernous cabin of a C-17, he sat alone in a room-size container draped with an American flag. McKenzie\u2019s military experience with Iran has been perilous and bloody. When he was a young officer, two hundred and forty-one marines were killed in the 1983 suicide bombing of U.S. peacekeepers in Beirut. It was the largest loss of marine lives in a single day since the battle of Iwo Jima, in the Second World War. The Reagan Administration blamed Iran and its then nascent proxies in Hezbollah. Almost four decades later, McKenzie told me that Tehran\u2019s nuclear capabilities were far from the only danger it now poses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Under Trump, hostilities between the United States and Iran escalated. They peaked in 2020, when Trump ordered the assassination of General Qassem Suleimani<\/a>, the revered head of Iran\u2019s Quds Force, the \u00e9lite wing of the Revolutionary Guard. As Suleimani arrived in Baghdad to meet local allies, McKenzie called in an M-9 Reaper drone to fire four Hellfire missiles at the General\u2019s convoy. Suleimani and nine others were shredded. His severed hand was identified by the large red-stone ring often photographed on his wedding finger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Five days later, Iran fired eleven ballistic missiles\u2014each carrying at least a thousand-pound warhead\u2014at Al Asad Airbase. U.S. intelligence had tracked Iran\u2019s deployment of the missiles, giving the Americans a few hours to evacuate their warplanes and half of their personnel. Lieutenant Colonel Staci Coleman, the commander of an air expeditionary squad, had to decide which of her crew of a hundred and sixty should leave and who was \u201cemotionally equipped\u201d to stay. \u201cI was deciding who would live and who would die,\u201d she later told military investigators. \u201cI honestly thought anyone remaining behind would perish.\u201d Many of the service members leaving Al Asad anxiously hugged the ones staying. No American military personnel had been killed by an enemy air strike since 1953, during the Korean War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first salvo struck around 1 a.m.<\/em> Master Sergeant Janet Liliu recounted to investigators, \u201cWhat happened in the bunkers, well, no words can describe the atmosphere. I wasn\u2019t ready to die, but I tried to prepare myself with every announcement of an incoming missile.\u201d The bombardment dragged on for hours; it was the largest ballistic-missile attack ever by any nation on American troops. No Americans died, but a hundred and ten suffered traumatic brain injuries. Trump dismissed the suffering at Al Asad. \u201cI heard they had headaches,\u201d he told reporters. Two years later, many of those at Al Asad are still experiencing profound memory, vision, and hearing losses. One died by suicide in October. Eighty have been awarded Purple Hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The lesson of Al Asad, McKenzie told me, is that Iran\u2019s missiles have become a more immediate threat than its nuclear program. For decades, Iran\u2019s rockets and missiles were wildly inaccurate. At Al Asad, \u201cthey hit pretty much where they wanted to hit,\u201d McKenzie said. Now they \u201ccan strike effectively across the breadth and depth of the Middle East. They could strike with accuracy, and they could strike with volume.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iran\u2019s advances have impressed both allies and enemies. After the 1979 revolution, the young theocracy purged the Shah\u2019s military and rebuilt it almost from scratch, despite waves of economic sanctions. Iran fought a ruinous eight-year war with Iraq in the nineteen-eighties that further depleted its armory. Its Air Force is still weak, its ships and tanks are mediocre, and its military is not capable of invading another country and holding territory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, the regime has concentrated on developing missiles with longer reach, precision accuracy, and greater destructive power. Iran is now one of the world\u2019s top missile producers. Its arsenal is the largest and most diverse in the Middle East, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported. \u201cIran has proven that it is using its ballistic-missile program as a means to coerce or intimidate its neighbors,\u201d Malley told me. Iran can fire more missiles than its adversaries\u2014including the United States and Israel\u2014can shoot down or destroy. Tehran has achieved what McKenzie calls \u201covermatch\u201d\u2014a level of capability in which a country has weaponry that makes it extremely difficult to check or defeat. \u201cIran\u2019s strategic capacity is now enormous,\u201d McKenzie said. \u201cThey\u2019ve got overmatch in the theatre\u2014the ability to overwhelm.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amir Ali Hajizadeh, a brigadier general and a former sniper who heads Iran\u2019s Aerospace Force, is known for incendiary bravado. In 2019, he boasted, \u201cEverybody should know that all American bases and their vessels in a distance of up to two thousand kilometres are within the range of our missiles. We have constantly prepared ourselves for a full-fledged war.\u201d Hajizadeh succeeded General Hassan Moghaddam, who founded Iran\u2019s missile and drone programs, and who died in 2011, with sixteen others, in a mysterious explosion. They had been working on a missile capable of hitting Israel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Israelis call Hajizadeh the new Suleimani. McKenzie called him reckless. In 2019, Hajizadeh\u2019s forces downed a U.S. reconnaissance drone over the Persian Gulf. He also orchestrated the missile strikes on Al Asad. Hours after that attack, his forces shot down a Ukrainian Boeing 737 passenger plane, with a hundred and seventy-six people on board, as it took off from Tehran\u2019s international airport. Everyone perished. For three days, Iran refused to accept blame until, under pressure, Hajizadeh went on television to admit it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iran now has the largest known underground complexes in the Middle East housing nuclear and missile programs. Most of the tunnels are in the west, facing Israel, or on the southern coast, across from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf sheikhdoms. This fall, satellite imagery tracked new underground construction near Bakhtaran, the most extensive complex. The tunnels, carved out of rock, descend more than sixteen hundred feet underground. Some complexes reportedly stretch for miles. Iran calls them \u201cmissile cities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2020, the Revolutionary Guard marked the anniversary of the U.S. Embassy takeover by releasing a video of Hajizadeh inspecting a subterranean missile arsenal. As suspenseful music plays in the background, he and two other Revolutionary Guard commanders march through a tunnel lined with rows of missiles stacked on top of one another. A recording of General Suleimani echoes in the background: \u201cYou start this war, but we create the end of it.\u201d An underground railroad ferries Emad missiles for rapid successive launches. Emads have a range of a thousand miles and can carry a conventional or a nuclear warhead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iran\u2019s missile program \u201cis much more advanced than Pakistan\u2019s,\u201d Uzi Rubin, the first head of Israel\u2019s Missile Defense Organization, told me. Experts compare Iran with North Korea, which helped seed Tehran\u2019s program in the nineteen-eighties. Some of Iran\u2019s missiles are superior to Pyongyang\u2019s, Jeffrey Lewis, of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, told me. Experts believe that North Korea may now be importing Iranian missile technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Islamic Republic has thousands of ballistic missiles, according to U.S. intelligence assessments. They can reach as far as thirteen hundred miles in any direction\u2014deep into India and China to the east; high into Russia to the north; to Greece and other parts of Europe to the west; and as far south as Ethiopia, in the Horn of Africa. About a hundred missiles could reach Israel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iran also has hundreds of cruise missiles that can be fired from land or ships, fly at low altitude, and attack from multiple directions. They are harder for radar or satellites to detect, because, unlike ballistic missiles, their motors do not burn brightly on ignition. Cruise missiles have altered the balance of power across the Persian Gulf. In 2019, Iran unleashed cruise missiles and drones on two oil installations in Saudi Arabia, temporarily cutting off half of the oil production in the world\u2019s largest supplier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Biden Administration has hoped to use progress on the nuclear deal to eventually broaden diplomacy and include Iran\u2019s neighbors in talks on reducing regional tensions. \u201cEven if we can revive the J.C.P.O.A., those problems are going to continue to poison the region and risk destabilizing it,\u201d Malley told me. \u201cIf they continue, the response will be robust.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It may be too late. Tehran has shown no willingness to barter over its missiles as it has with its nuclear program. \u201cOnce you have spent the money to build the facilities and train people and deliver missiles to the military units that were built around these missiles, you have an enormous constituency that wants to keep them,\u201d Jeffrey Lewis said. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any hope of limiting Iran\u2019s missile program.\u201d President Raisi told reporters after his election, \u201cRegional issues or the missile issue are non-negotiable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n From Al Asad, I flew with McKenzie to Syria in a convoy of Osprey helicopter gunships. Airmen were positioned at machine guns from an open ramp in the rear as we crossed the border. Our first stop was at Green Village, a former compound for oil-field workers on the Euphrates River. I was last there in 2019, for the final military campaign against the Islamic State. A small contingent of U.S. forces has been deployed in northeast Syria since late 2015 to aid and advise a Kurdish-led militia fighting isis<\/em>. Officially, their mission is to contain isis<\/em> remnants. Unofficially, they are also supposed to prevent Iran from gaining access to strategic border crossings from Iraq.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Abu Kamal, a once sleepy desert outpost, is sixty miles southeast of Green Village. isis<\/em> jihadis seized it in 2014, and it became their main border-crossing point between Syria and Iraq. In 2017, three Iranian-backed Shiite militias and the Syrian Army captured it. Iran\u2019s proxies have since absorbed\u2014politically and militarily\u2014much of the territory ruled by the Islamic State, including areas liberated by the Iraqi Army and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. \u201cThe best thing that ever happened to Iran was the U.S. coalition taking out isis<\/em>,\u201d a senior American military official told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iran now uses Abu Kamal as a strategic hub for smuggling missiles and technology to its militia surrogates. The mat\u00e9riel includes kits used to upgrade rockets. By adding G.P.S. navigation, so-called \u201cdumb\u201d rockets, which are hard to control and rarely hit the target, can be converted into guided missiles that have a longer range and greater accuracy. The U.S. and the region \u201care worried by the degree to which Iran has been providing, sharing sophisticated weapons to its proxies,\u201d Malley told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Under Suleimani, Iran expanded its \u201caxis of resistance\u201d with six core militias, including Hezbollah, in Lebanon; the Houthis, in Yemen; and Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in the Palestinian territories. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, the resistance coalition carried out amateurish, albeit deadly, operations, such as suicide bombings and hostage seizures. Its forces today are co\u00f6rdinated and well armed, and project power region-wide. \u201cMost countries look at what\u2019s available and try to establish partnerships with what\u2019s there. Iran created a network of regional proxies from scratch\u2014its own alliance system,\u201d Michael Eisenstadt, at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. \u201cIt\u2019s the most cohesive alliance system in the region.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The United States military is still vastly more powerful than anything built or imagined in Iran. Yet Iran has proved to be an increasingly shrewd rival. It has trained a generation of foreign engineers and scientists to assemble weaponry. It has dispatched stateless dhows loaded with missile parts for Houthi rebels, who have fired missiles at military and civilian targets in Saudi Arabia. It has provided the older \u201cdumb\u201d rocket technology to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The majority of the \u201cprecision project\u201d kits crossing at Abu Kamal go to Lebanon, where Hezbollah upgrades its short-range rockets and missiles to hit more accurately and to penetrate more deeply inside Israel. Hezbollah is now estimated to have at least fourteen thousand missiles and more than a hundred thousand rockets, most courtesy of Iran. \u201cThey have the ability to strike very precisely into Israel in a way they\u2019ve not enjoyed in the past,\u201d McKenzie told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The difference between Iran\u2019s reach in 2016 and in 2021 is \u201csimply remarkable,\u201d a senior naval intelligence officer told me. Distributing missile technology is strategically cost-efficient. Missiles are a small fraction of the price of the defense systems needed to protect against them. Iran spends between two and three billion dollars a year to support the resistance coalition, according to the State Department. Yet its defense budget is also a fraction of what Saudi Arabia, an important U.S. ally, spends annually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iran now has enormous reach in several directions from afar. \u201cIf you can imagine a ring anywhere in Iraq that goes out, let\u2019s say, seven hundred kilometres, draw your circle,\u201d a senior intelligence official with Central Command explained. \u201cDo the same thing in Yemen. Draw your circle. You quickly see the range and capability that Iran has provided. You can push it all the way to Syria, because, if they have it in Iraq, they probably have the ability also in Syria. What\u2019s important,\u201d he added, \u201cis that the rings are now interlocking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iran is gambling that it can harass the United States into eventually withdrawing from the entire Middle East, as it did from Afghanistan. Its actions across the region will have to be addressed in the not too distant future, Malley said. \u201cIf not, it will be a perpetual diversion from the U.S. shift to China,\u201d and \u201ca cauldron always being one step or misstep away from a much more dangerous conflagration.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seven American Presidents have failed to contain Iran\u2019s political influence and military leverage. Distrust has only deepened since Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy four decades ago and held fifty-two Americans for fourteen months. \u201cEach side sees the other as so devious, malign, and mendacious,\u201d John Limbert, a former hostage, told me. \u201cAny proposal from the other\u2014especially one presented as a concession\u2014becomes another means to cheat and deceive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather than back down under Trump\u2019s pressure, Tehran accelerated its nuclear and missile programs. Options, such as sanctions, are exhausted, the senior State Department official said. \u201cThat has clearly not produced the result that we all would have wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Besides diplomacy, President Biden has few preventive tools, and military action is not an attractive or effective long-term option. Five weeks after he took office, the U.S. tried to disrupt a nexus of Iranian proliferation. Two American F-15s dropped seven five-hundred-pound bombs on Abu Kamal. The air strike was in retaliation for a rocket attack, by an Iranian proxy, on a military base used by American forces in Iraq. The American bombs had little impact. \u201cWithout being able to crater the place, you\u2019re not going to stop the flow,\u201d the senior intelligence official with Central Command told me. \u201cIn fact, I think they were back up and running pretty quickly.\u201d Israel has launched dozens of air strikes in or near Abu Kamal and hundreds more on Iranian targets in Syria. Weaponry still flows across the border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Biden has also tried intimidation. In October, an American B-1B bomber flew from South Dakota to the periphery of Iran. Fighter jets from Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain escorted it across the Middle East. Since November, 2020, the United States has dispatched seven missions of B-52 bombers\u2014nicknamed buff<\/em>s, or \u201cbig ugly fat fuckers,\u201d for their size and shape\u2014around Iran. Even senior officials wonder about the efficacy of such tactics. The naval intelligence officer said, \u201cI think to disrupt is easy, but sustained pressure to change behavior? That requires a decision to develop some capability on the ground in areas that, I think we\u2019ve said, we\u2019re just not that interested in, from a national-priority perspective.\u201d U.S. officials concede that the flights do more to reassure allies in the region than to scare Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tehran seems undaunted. In October, it launched a drone attack on Al-Tanf, a military outpost in Syria where two hundred Americans have been based. Al-Tanf\u2019s wider strategic value is its position on the vital highway between Baghdad and Damascus\u2014and the route to Lebanon and the Mediterranean. Unofficially, the U.S. goal is again to hinder the transfer of Iranian weapons and influence. A Hezbollah news site described the Iranian attack on Al-Tanf as \u201ca new phase in the confrontation\u201d to force America out of the Middle East.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iran\u2019s surrogates in Iraq have taken on bigger targets, too. On November 7th, three quadcopter drones attacked the home of the Iraqi Prime Minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi. Several guards were injured. The strike followed a parliamentary election in October, when Iranian-backed parties lost dozens of seats and claimed voter fraud. In a television interview, McKenzie accused Iran\u2019s allies of \u201ccriminal\u201d acts against a head of state. \u201cWhat we have seen are groups linked to Iran that see that they cannot legally cling to power, and now they are resorting to violence to achieve their goals,\u201d he said. The attack was initially tied to two Shiite militias\u2014Kata\u2019ib Hezbollah and Asa\u2019ib Ahl al Haq. Both have engaged in weapons transfers at Abu Kamal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In September, I met twice with the new Iranian Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, when he attended the U.N. General Assembly in New York. For years, he was considered Suleimani\u2019s man in the Foreign Ministry. He noted that the United States had walked away from the nuclear agreement and imposed massive sanctions. \u201cIf the wall of mistrust can be reduced, then there may be some commonalities, but it\u2019s such a high wall,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen we\u2019re forbidden to access our own money for life-saving vaccines, can there be even a trace of trust between the two countries?\u201d To prove American good will, Amir-Abdollahian said, Biden must first lift sanctions and help free billions of dollars of Iranian assets frozen in other countries, such as South Korea. \u201cIf we reach an agreement, it can be used to make further progress,\u201d he said. \u201cIf it fails, we have already said that we do not tie the future of the country to the J.C.P.O.A.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Malley proposed that the two countries agree to return simultaneously to the accord, and then decide on a sequence of steps. The Administration does not want to reward Iran without proof that it is reversing its nuclear advances, reverting to older centrifuges, reducing its uranium stockpile, and allowing full inspections. Working with five world powers, the U.S. may somehow manage to restore the nuclear deal. Iran does face unprecedented challenges at home and from the outside world. The original revolutionaries are dying out, and their grandchildren are more into social media than ideology. In 2021, sporadic protests erupted as more than three hundred cities dealt with shortages of water and electricity; demonstrators also took to the streets to complain about low or unpaid wages. But if diplomacy stalls and Iran continues to accelerate its nuclear program, the senior Administration official warned, the U.S. could face a nuclear crisis in the first quarter of 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n McKenzie has analyzed how a conflict with Iran might play out. \u201cIf they attack out of the blue, it would be a bloody war,\u201d he told me. \u201cWe would be hurt very badly. We would win in the long run. But it would take a year.\u201d Or potentially more, as the United States has learned in Afghanistan and Iraq. And a full-scale military campaign by Israel or the U.S. would almost certainly trigger a regional war on multiple fronts. Iran is better armed and its military and political powerbrokers more hard-line than at any time in its modern history. The nuclear deal could be just the beginning\u2014and the easier part of the Iran challenge for an eighth American President. \u2666Published in the print edition of the January 3 & 10, 2022<\/a>, issue, with the headline \u201cOvermatch.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a>Robin Wright<\/a>, a contributing writer and columnist, has written for The New Yorker since 1988. <\/p>\n![\"Couple](\"https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/cartoons\/61c52f9cd763d4cc4e15b60b\/master\/w_1600%2Cc_limit\/220103_a25744.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Woman](\"https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/cartoons\/61c52f9ce75264a7841ecd9f\/master\/w_1600%2Cc_limit\/220103_a25817.jpg\")
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