The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Islamic Republic of Iran are two of the trickiest countries with which the United States now has to deal. I’ll begin by covering two commonly discussed points of comparison and then turn to what I think are as important, the differences, before concluding with a brief look at Sino-Iranian relations and a question for U.S. policy makers. As a preview, I will argue that Iran and China, notwithstanding their distinctive strategic approaches and very different levels of power, have overlapping interests and are likely increasingly to cooperate in ways that create challenges for the United States. This is because China is seeking to expand its “international mobilization capacity” and Iran is disposed to work with external actors to enhance its perceived strength.

Perhaps the most obvious point of comparison between China and Iran is that both are revolutionary regimes, although one is Shi’ite and the other began as Maoist and remains nominally Communist. A classical political science approach would suggest that we examine the two from a generational perspective. Iran, therefore, would be in the same category of “revolutionary regime” as China, but just behind the PRC, or, if you will, younger in terms of its stage in a revolutionary regime cycle, only having emerged or been born in 1979. In China’s case, there was huge tumult, from the end of the Civil War in 1949 through the Korean War and Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution, before Deng initiated the Reform and Opening period and welcomed trade and investment from the West. If the revolutionary regime perspective were illuminating, then, we could expect a kind of “calming down” effect, as a young Iranian revolutionary regime transitions into a more bureaucratized adolescence or even middle age.

This is connected with another common line of comparison that argues that in both the case of China and the case of Iran, engagement is the wisest course for the United States. Through engagement, it is argued, we can hasten the day when both powers act as “responsible stakeholders,” socializing the regimes through our interactions with them.

Would it be best for us to engage? Is Iran’s period of “calming down” just around the corner? Both perspectives are problematic. At the very least, proceeding on either basis should be done with an understanding of the very real, important differences between the Iranian and Chinese strategic traditions, and between the current geopolitical positions of Iran and China.

The differences between the Chinese and Iranian strategic traditions flow from the internal logics of their respective regimes—internal logics that seem to have staying power. To be sure, the leaders of both states share an overriding concern with domestic stability and the maintenance of their own authority. Both traditions also feature classic texts—the Sunzi Bingfa and other texts dating back to the Warring States period in China’s case, and medieval mirrors for princes in the Iranian case—that prescribe indirect approaches to conflict. These texts and the strategic traditions they reflect place a common emphasis on information, managing perceptions, and deception. Finally, both the Chinese and Iranian regimes may be characterized as legitimacy-deficient by comparison with Western liberal representative governments.

Nonetheless, important differences should not be overlooked. China’s strategic tradition is based on the perspectives of Daoism, bureaucratic Confucianism, the Mandate of Heaven, and Marxism, all of which point to a need to monitor global trends and try to be in synch with them. What stage of history are we in? or what is the trend of the time? The tradition teaches that when a regime appears to be out of step, seizing the initiative and acting boldly at such a decisive moment can not only head off disaster but guarantee victory. Therefore, China has often seen fit to initiate war, typically through surprise attacks. The Harvard political scientist Iain Johnston has pointed out that given China’s place in the international system, the PRC was especially likely to be involved in militarized interstate disputes in the latter half of the twentieth century. So there is an element of insecurity that leads China to be war-prone from our point of view. But, at the same time, compared with Iran, China has more ingrained institutions or trust among elites. A set of families qualified by wealth or scholarship or local status in a particular region form a fairly stable class of power-brokers invested in the maintenance of the current regime.

By comparison, the Iranian strategic outlook looks at once more mistrustful and more superstitious, and this inclines Tehran to rely on third-party actors or proxy forces to implement its strategic agenda. Like China’s, this agenda is founded on the need for regime survival, but what is interesting is what is considered necessary to ensure the regime and the measures that are deemed appropriate to take to that end.

Reflect briefly on recent Iranian history. Regimes came and went with some alacrity in the last century, and outside powers had a hand in their rise and fall. For instance, Reza Khan, the Shah’s father, ascended quickly but was then pushed aside by the British, who backed his son, the Shah, before he was overthrown by his own prime minister, Mossadegh. And then we played a role in ousting Mossadegh, only for our choice to be overthrown by Khomeini, in part, it was argued, because we failed to show enough support for him.

Iran’s salient historical experiences center on intervention by other powers and the upheaval that this has provoked—not only in recent decades but also longer ago, from the conquests by Arab and Turkic tribes to wars with Europeans and Russians in the 18th and 19th centuries. Of course, other countries have suffered external intervention in their internal affairs (as the Chinese would say), and been subject to Western colonialism. But in Iran’s case, these experiences proved especially resonant because they overlay much deeper, older Zoroastrian Persian and Shiite traditions of crediting unseen forces with agency and efficacy in earthly political matters.

Iran has its own history of not only blaming outside powers but also of entrusting proxies, or third-party forces, and working through them to achieve strategic aims. The regime can take credit, and benefit from plausible deniability in the event of failure, if enemies are attacked by third-party groups. And operating this way makes sense in light of the generally paranoid state of the leadership. Why are the leaders chronically concerned? It’s not just because some unseen celestial force could act to eliminate them. But, to modify the old saying, even paranoids have earthly enemies. In all the above cases of regime change with foreign involvement, local actors conspired or cooperated with the external powers. There is a chronic domestic loyalty problem in Iran.

Why might this be the case? As the economist Homa Katouzian has pointed out, Iran does not have a tradition of the rule of law or of any other stable institutional infrastructure within which stable classes are formed and individuals can engage in repeated interactions that create reputations, which require maintenance, so that honesty is rewarded. Therefore, alliances and power are fragile. Infighting prevails, as was demonstrated in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, and it is no accident that in Iranian literature, one’s closest relatives can cause the most damage through their betrayals. Accordingly, the tradition prescribes deception, the magnification of capabilities to create an appearance of strength, while preempting conspiracies and operating through third parties wherever possible. The expectation that others will deceive and conspire, meanwhile, reinforces the belief that political ascendancy is very fragile.

Given the relative fragility and insecurity of the Iranian regime, perhaps the most important China-Iran question for American policy makers to consider is how Iran figures in China’s calculus. Beijing, as a measurer of trends and an aspirant to superpower status, would like to improve what it calls its “international mobilization capacity,” according to the writings of senior Chinese Communist Party intellectuals. Given energy considerations, the Middle East is a region in which China has been seeking increased influence. The PRC has a history of supplying arms (missiles) and other kinds of technology to both Saudi Arabia and Iran, a way of improving ties, even rendering these states dependent on relations with China, which, in turn, depends on their energy supplies. The logic of my argument is that China might also aid Iran with its internal security. All of which suggests a final question for consideration: If we already speculate that nuclear weapons will embolden Iran and increase its coercive power, what ought we to expect from a nuclear Iran in receipt of Chinese aid and support?

Jacqueline Newmyer delivered these remarks at a symposium on “Iran: Threat, Challenge, or Opportunity?” convened by MESH at Harvard University on April 30.

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Gal Luft :: During the first term of the next president, some 68 million new cars will roll onto America’s roads. In China, the world’s fastest growing auto market, sales of new cars will surpass those in the United States as early as 2015, and in India millions of $3,000 Tata Nano cars will soon begin to flood the bustling streets of Calcutta and Mumbai. Most of these cars will have a street life of roughly 15 years and (barring action by those countries’ leadership) almost all of them will be able to run on nothing but petroleum, locking our future to OPEC and its whims for decades to come. In the words of the International Energy Agency: “We are ending up with 95 percent of the world relying for its economic well being on decisions made by five or six countries in the Middle East.”

Avoiding such an outcome should be a top priority for the next administration. Unfortunately, despite the broad agreement by both presidential candidates on the urgent need to reduce petroleum dependence, they both focus on solutions that are politically contentious (like domestic drilling and increasing mandatory fuel efficiency standards) and that are by and large tactical rather than strategic. The reality is that neither efforts to expand petroleum supply nor those to crimp petroleum demand will be enough to materially address America’s strategic vulnerability. Such solutions do not address the roots of our energy vulnerability: oil’s monopoly in the global transportation sector—almost all of the world’s cars, trucks, ships and planes can run on nothing but petroleum—and the stranglehold of OPEC over the consuming nations’ economies.

This cartel, which owns 78 percent of global reserves, produces today about as much oil as it did thirty years, despite the fact that the global economy and non-OPEC production have doubled over the same period. Policies that perpetuate the petroleum standard, doing nothing to address the lack of transportation fuel choice, would therefore guarantee a worsening future dependence on the oil cartel as the relative share of non-OPEC oil reserves and production further shrinks.

The new president should therefore declare a strategic goal to break the petroleum standard and replace it with an Open Fuel Standard. This would require that every automobile sold in the United States (and, by extension, throughout the world, since no automaker would give up on the U.S. market) must be able to run on non-petroleum fuels in addition to gasoline. Flexible fuel cars (which cost automakers $100 extra to make and can run on any combination of alcohol and gasoline), electric cars and plug-in hybrids cars (which enable us to use made-in-America electricity) are only some of the solutions at hand. Only through competition at the pump (and the socket) can we drive down the price of oil, reduce its strategic value and curb the transfer of wealth from oil importing countries to OPEC. To bring those solutions to the marketplace in mass would require some presidential signatures, and like everything in life there is some cost involved. But christening more aircraft carriers than would otherwise be needed isn’t cheap either.

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Jacqueline Newmyer :: The next president’s foreign policy should be attentive to the ways in which the balance of global economic and military power has tilted toward Asia. To the extent that the Bush administration has been preoccupied with Central Asia and the Middle East since 9/11, an eastward shift in the U.S.’s foreign policy focus may be warranted. That said, the new administration should keep three points in mind as it crafts a Middle East agenda:

1. As the United States draws down its forces in Iraq (while renewing attention to Afghanistan), other external powers with strategic interests in the region are likely to perceive a vacuum to fill. For instance, China can be expected to continue to expand its ties in the Middle East by means of investments and agreements in Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The United States may want to try to prevent any other single outside power from exercising undo influence. Options would include allowing India to develop better relations with Iran; encouraging Indian, Korean, and Japanese development of Iraq; and maintaining naval and air forces in the region.
2. The U.S.-India nuclear agreement is likely to have follow-on effects in the Gulf, where India has traditionally had strong ties. New Delhi will have incentives to transfer technology received from the United States. If American know-how is going to spread, it would be best for Washington to try to shape that process and build capital that might prove useful in the event of a future Middle East conflagration or crisis.
3. Whether John McCain or Barack Obama prevails, the United States will be led by a president with a compelling biography and personal appeal. Such a commander in chief creates a potential competitive advantage in executive diplomacy for the United States, relative to China and other Asian powers, in a region with a tradition of charismatic leadership and around the world. At least at the beginning of the first 100 days, the new occupant of the White House will project an image of U.S. strength, based on a record of self-sacrifice and resolve or a demonstration of the American electorate’s liberal tolerance and openness. Both kinds of strength have their uses in outreach to strategic interlocutors. After a campaign that seems poised to revolve around domestic issues, President McCain or Obama would do well to exploit this advantage by visiting allies with interests in the Middle East early in his term.

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Stephen Peter Rosen :: There are a number of ways in which we can think about the president’s agenda during his first 100 days. My suggestions reflect the belief that the new president will have essentially no staff in place, precious little knowledge of the ongoing work of the permanent bureaucracy, and not enough time to have developed a long term strategy. As a result, an agenda for the first 100 days should address an urgent problem in the international environment, and should make use of the president’s political capital at home in order to undertake necessary but difficult initiatives.

Most issues in the Middle East are not amenable to bold initiatives. The Arab-Israeli problem is not a problem, but a more or less permanent condition. Managing Iran will call for the slow and quiet development of American and allied military capabilities in the region, and new nuclear guarantees. Iraq and Afghanistan are problems for the long haul, both militarily and economically. Limiting the growth of Chinese influence in the region is a basic strategic goal, which presidential diplomacy can assist, as Jacqueline Newmyer points out.

But the destabilization of Pakistan could occur quickly and might already be underway before the new president is sworn in. There is a generation of Pakistani Army officers who came of professional age in the 1990s, who remember the United States walking away from Afghanistan and abandoning Pakistan. They are reported to be more Islamist than their elders. The frontier province in the north of Pakistan is the current home of Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda is safe there from the Pakistani Army. No Pakistani officer, old or young, was willing to fire on Pakistani civilians in the rioting earlier this year. The expectation, valid for 60 years, that the Pakistani Army will be able to hold the country together, is no longer supportable.

The American president-elect should begin private discussions with India, Israel, and China about what those countries would do in the event of a civil war in Pakistan that splits the Pakistani Army. This discussion would focus on how to contain the effects of the war within Pakistan, and how to ensure control of Pakistani nuclear weapons. The president-elect must not only ask the American military to present their contingency plans for such an event, but become deeply involved in shaping them. Homeland security must prepare for Pakistani nuclear weapons that are suddenly not under verifiable control. History, recent and old, confirms that absent a process that educates both political leaders and military officers about their often conflicting perspectives and needs, military plans will fail.

This is a problem which can benefit from timely preparation, in the days before and during the first 100 days of the next president.

Peter Rodman, a member of MESH, passed away on Saturday. I met Peter in 1980 in Santa Monica. I was very junior, he had already worked at the highest levels in government, and was just back from a long trip. But he immediately joined into a serious conversation and worked to include me in it. This seriousness and decency would be visible to me for the next 25 years. In Washington, no matter how high he rose, or what difficulties he faced, he kept the human qualities that made him admirable. He will be sorely missed.

Remembrances are invited from colleagues.

Seymour Hersh has recently alleged that the United States government is engaged in clandestine activities to destabilize Iran through appeals to ethnic and religious minorities. We hope that he is mistaken, not because we oppose regime change in Iran but because the history of Iran teaches that governments rise and fall according to a logic very different from the familiar narrative of ethnic separatism.

Immediately after World War One, Iran experienced the rapid rise and equally rapid collapse of two mini-republics, one involving the Azeri ethnic group around Tabriz and the other in Iran’s Gilan province on the Caspian Sea. These mini-republics might be thought to reflect proto-national separatist movements, but that would be incorrect. They were directed by men who capitalized upon events—concessions to the British and unequal treaties—that mobilized broad anti-foreign sentiment in Iran and in their regions. Both mini-republics failed after a few months, when foreign support for them evaporated.

What these examples illustrate is the rapid rise and fall of governments in Iran. Reza Khan rose quickly to power in the 1920s as a foreign-trained military officer who was able to suppress internal rebellions, but he was exiled in World War Two. Prime Minister Mossadegh rejected the terms of oil contracts imposed by the British and mobilized broad sentiment in Iran in support of this effort, but he was then easily deposed by the United States. Reza Khan’s son was brought back to Iran and was installed as monarch, until he was displaced by the Khomeini revolution, when American support for the Shah was perceived in Iran to have weakened as a result of increased concerns with human rights. This historical record demonstrates the extraordinary fluidity of Iranian politics, in which mass sentiment, foreign support, and charismatic leadership can make regimes, but cannot sustain them.

What explains this fluidity? The Iranian sociologist Homa Katouzian has suggested that the absence of any independent property rights over land in Iran precluded the emergence of stable social structures independent of the state. Administrations exist, but not a stable governing system because Iran has never had an institutionalized legal system based on the support of groups with independent property rights. Such groups do not exist in Iran.

So particular administrations govern while they can capitalize on mass social sentiment—against foreign oppression, for example—but they have no grounds of support that transcends particular personalities or geopolitical circumstances. In Europe, a foundation of stable property based interests allowed for shared public action on behalf of working, middle, and upper classes. Iran has had no equivalent tradition of independent property rights that would nurture a system of laws to protect them, divorced from the identity of a particular ruler or rulings of an elite juridical class.

The characteristic political leader in Iran is thus the same as the characteristic hero of the Thousand and One Nights, the tales told to a Persian king, Shahryar, by his wife, Scheherazade. In those stories, a young, gifted man who comes from nowhere, with nothing, rises to wealth and power by chance, and is then cast down by betrayal. So, too, did the Shah, Khomeini, and even Ahmadinejad seemingly come from nowhere, and, by virtue of charisma or foreign support, gain power.

If this view of Iranian politics is correct, we should not expect class-based social revolution, religious opposition, or ethnic opposition to topple the existing regime. The reign of Ahmadinejad was originally propelled by a reputation for probity and a populist appeal that have been eroded now that they have not materialized into benefits for the people. While this makes his administration a failure, the shared civic interests and independent political institutions that might transform disaffection into coherent political action does not yet exist. Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad’s nuclear endeavors and diplomatic offensives constitute a way for him to replenish his legitimacy.

Political change should only be expected, therefore, when some widely visible event causes social sentiment to coalesce into opposition to a regime that has come to be perceived as weak. The fact that the regime is corrupt means little—all governments are expected to steal and to be indifferent to the welfare of the people. But visibly outrageous behavior (for instance, flagrant affronts to religious principles) create a climate in which a new charismatic figure may emerge to rally an alienated populace. Leading indicators of this possibility would include social behavior that is universally considered deviant—for instance, reported sexual abuse by clerics and an increasing incidence of prostitution by married women whose husbands are aware of and condone the activity, according to Iranian academics.

However, social outrage is likely to flare and fade unless focused by a charismatic figure. Such a figure will not be associated with the current establishment but will have to have engaged in activities that demonstrate a commitment to the good of the nation and personal rectitude that have brought him to the attention of the Iranian population. Therefore, we should be looking for mayors of major cities (as Ahmadinejad once was), mid-level military commanders with histories of success (as was the case with Reza Khan), and clerics with reputations for piety. Most currently discussed potential rivals of Ahmadinejad do not fit these criteria because they are already tainted by scandal or association with the regime.

Does this mean that American military or covert action against the government of Iran will mobilize support for Ahmadinejad or indicate the weakness of the regime? That depends on the character of the action. Military strikes against Iranian nuclear installations will be perceived as foreign humiliation and may lead to internal opposition to the government, but in the name of stronger resistance to foreign domination. Actions that are not clearly tied to foreign governments and that lead to increasingly ineffective police and military control over society will contribute to the perception that the regime is weak. But, again, a dramatic event will be necessary to catapult a charismatic leader into power. This leader will almost certainly not be visibly pro-American. He is more likely to adopt highly nationalist rhetoric. That said, he will have opportunity and incentive to make a new start with the Iranian people, and improved economic and political relations with the West will be a part of what he has to offer Iran.

Illustration: Unfinished statue of Reza Shah, Saadabad Palace, Iran.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

The extension of American nuclear guarantees in the Middle East has been posed as a question of American guarantees to Israel. This is understandable given the intense hostility to Israel expressed by the Iranian regime. However, there is a broader objective that may be served by U.S. nuclear guarantees in the region. If the United States is not able to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran, its goal must be to prevent this development from destabilizing the region as a whole, and to prevent Iran from gaining any political advantage from its new capabilities. These twin aims are served by the extension of the American deterrent umbrella to a full range of U.S. allies.

The question of how Iran will use its new strategic capabilities, or how Iran’s behavior will be affected by the possession of a nuclear arsenal, has already elicited a range of expert opinions. At one end of the spectrum is the view that Iran’s religious elites would order an offensive nuclear attack against the United States or U.S. forces or Israel, despite the certainty of suffering a catastrophic response, because they would be willing to die to eliminate Iran’s infidel enemies. (Some critics of the Bush administration accuse it of adopting this eschatological understanding of Iran’s strategic calculus.) It is difficult to envision any effective U.S. deterrent to a nuclear Iran if this view is accurate.

At the other end of the spectrum is a view that a nuclear-armed Iran would not behave much differently from how Iran behaves now. This might be reassuring or distressing, depending on one’s view of Iran’s current foreign policy aims, and how Iran might seek to advance them under a nuclear umbrella.

Closer to that end of the spectrum, one can envision two possible courses of action by a nuclear-armed Iran that would be of concern to the United States, because they extrapolate current Iranian policies already designed to intimidate and weaken U.S. allies and protégés.

1. Gulf coercion. Projecting out from current Iranian efforts to maximize revenues from natural resources, Iran may try to use nuclear threats to coerce the non-nuclear oil-producing states of the Persian Gulf into transferring oil-producing territories, oil revenues, or maritime rights to Iran. Those nuclear threats might involve mobilization of nuclear forces, demonstrative test launches of missiles into disputed areas, military violations of the air and sea frontiers of Arab Gulf states, and nuclear weapons tests, in ways analogous to the behavior of the Soviet Union in the 1956 Suez crisis.

It is difficult to imagine how the Arab Gulf states could independently resist coercion by a nuclear-armed Iran. But the United States has a clear interest in neutralizing the impact of such Iranian efforts. American nuclear guarantees to its non-nuclear allies in the region, perhaps supported by the deployment of American submarines armed with nuclear cruise and ballistic missiles, could serve this interest. This class of guarantees could include Israel, but need not, since Israel has a perfectly adequate nuclear deterrent force of its own.

2. Proliferating to proxies. Iran may transfer nuclear weapons technology to proxy groups. Every state except India that has developed nuclear weapons technology has transferred valuable know-how to others. The United States shared technology with the United Kingdom; France shared reactor technology with Israel; Israel shared technology with Taiwan and probably with South Africa; China shared warhead technology with Pakistan, and so on. Iran would not be doing anything unprecedented if it clandestinely transferred nuclear weapons technology, not bombs, to others. This might, however, result in nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Syria and then Hezbollah. (In the past, Iran and Syria transferred missiles of a kind never before deployed by a sub-state actor, into the hands of Hezbollah.) An anonymous terrorist use of a nuclear weapon against Israel, perhaps detonated on a ship off shore from Israel, is, therefore, a real worry.

Israel recognizes this potential, and sees the credibility of its deterrent as being eroded by the difficulty of establishing responsibility for such an attack in ways that would seem undeniable to world opinion. This uncertainty increases the likelihood that Israel might act unilaterally to reduce the danger posed to it by Iran’s arsenal. A strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would risk inflaming the whole region and would be seen by Jerusalem as providing, at best, temporary relief. But it is not clear what other choice Israel would have.

Israel’s compulsion toward a unilateral attack that could destabilize the region might be mitigated by a U.S. statement that it regarded a terrorist nuclear explosion directed against any American ally in the Middle East as an Iranian attack on the United States, to be met by the full force of an American nuclear response. To be sure, such a guarantee might lead Israel to take greater military risks in dealing with Iran. Such a guarantee, then, would have to be part of a formal alliance and a quid pro quo in which Israel did agree to coordinate its actions with the United States.

Israel might refuse such a deal. But the offer would not be unreasonable. It would follow the precedent of earlier efforts of the United States in the 1950s and ’60s to coordinate nuclear deterrent doctrines with NATO, and it might be the basis of a new international doctrine for dealing with terrorist nuclear threats.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

The Chinese national oil company Sinopec has signed a contract to develop Iran’s Yadavaran oil field, according to articles in today’s Financial Times and International Herald Tribune. From Iran’s point of view, the deal is a triumph. It exposes the inability of the United States to build a global coalition to impose economic sanctions on Iran.

By the terms of the contract, Sinopec will have to subcontract with Iranian firms, which will as a consequence, at least in theory, acquire much-needed expertise. But the PRC’s record in Africa and other areas of overseas investment suggests that the Chinese will be quicker to use Iranian firms for manual labor than for sophisticated processes that would involve technology transfer.

From China’s point of view, the award constitutes another step in Beijing’s effort to secure energy supplies from the ground up, supplies that the PRC is acquiring the means to protect en route to the mainland through its program of military modernization. The contract may also be seen as progress in China’s campaign to secure influence in the Middle East at the expense of the United States. The deal, coming on the heels of last week’s NIE downplaying the imminence of an Iranian nuclear weapon (see Steve Rosen’s post on the subject), promises to complicate U.S. efforts to secure Chinese support for economic sanctions should evidence emerge that the Iranians have re-started their weapons program.

Issues left outstanding in this initial contract need to be resolved, including the distribution of oil recovered in the second phase of production. The relationship between the Iranians and the Chinese could sour as Sinopec enters into development of Yadavaran. But at this point, the thought is small comfort.