There are several reasons to applaud – warily, provisionally – the first steps Iran, the United States and other world powers have taken toward a deal to prevent a Persian bomb. One reason for cheer is that the interim agreement has brought together the hard-liners, theirs and ours, in reciprocal dismay. When John Bolton, the most enthusiastic armchair warrior of the George W. Bush brigade, and Mohammad Reza Naqdi, the head of Iran’s brutal Basij paramilitary, are both unhappy, you’ve probably done something right.

In the neocon bunkers of Washington, our hawks are distressed that the six-month deal, which includes broad goals for a long-range agreement, relaxes some of the economic sanctions that brought Iran to the bargaining table in the first place; in Tehran, the hard cases are furious that the most onerous sanctions on banking and oil exports remain in place. Iran’s hardliners hate the enrichment limits and stepped-up inspections aimed at freezing production of nuclear fuel while talks continue; our hard-liners are furious that we’ve agreed to accept any fuel enrichment at all.



The interim deal is modest, not much more than a token of mutual willingness to try. The goal is to navigate between two dreadful options: a nuclear-armed Iran, and a disastrous war to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. Realistically, we cannot expect to achieve total confidence that Iran will never make a nuclear weapon, but we can assure that we would have ample advance warning of a dash to weaponize. Given the deep mutual suspicion and Iran’s history of subterfuge and mendacity, it must be a bargain based on mistrust, and thus invasive in its verification measures.

Proclaiming success or failure at this point is the diplomatic equivalent of a food critic awarding a restaurant its stars after glancing at the menu. (The best detailed breakdown of what the agreement does and doesn’t do is by Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert who posts on the valuable “Iran Matters” website at Harvard.)

But it is worth dwelling a bit on the hawks in both countries, because the trick in the months to come will be to keep the extremists unhappy without letting them sabotage the whole project.

Iran’s rejectionists and our own have much in common. Both see the West and Iran engaged in an existential struggle, immune to diplomacy. Iran’s hardliners believe that America’s real, unstated goal is the overthrow of Iran’s theocratic regime; America’s hardliners make no secret that this is precisely what they want. Both, therefore, equate compromise with surrender. (The obligatory American right-wing talking point – here, here, here, here, here, here and just about everywhere – is that the Iran agreement is a sellout comparable to the appeasement of Hitler in Munich in 1938: no, make that worse than Munich.)

Both believe America’s role in the Middle East revolves in large measure around Israel. To the Iranian hard core, Israel is a nuclear-armed interloper and America’s conjoined infidel twin; to their American counterparts Israel’s values and interests are inextricable from our own, and Benjamin Netanyahu is a more trustworthy defender of our security than Barack Obama.

Hardliners in both countries are fighting a rearguard action in their own countries. In the U.S., the hawks fear they are losing sway to a conflict-averse president who has the support (at least on the issue of attacking Iran, if not on much else) of a war-weary public. In Iran the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guard face the mounting frustration of a largely young, economically punished population – a volatile discontent that was expressed in the streets in 2009 and at the ballot box this year.

Yet in both countries, the hawks have disproportionate influence – in Washington, because no public figure wants to be seen as soft on Iran, in Tehran because the Supreme Leader himself, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is deeply suspicious of any rapprochement with a West he views as morally corrupt.

The Iranian and American hard-liners need each other to sustain their particular narratives of how the world works.

The thugs of Iran need the Great Satan to justify their theocratic regime. “Who is Khamenei’s base?” asks Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It’s people who have been attending Friday prayers for the last three decades crying ‘Death to America.’”

America’s hawks, in turn, would suffer a serious blow to their bellicose notion of America’s role if the evilest spoke in the Axis of Evil turned out to be amenable to diplomacy.

And so a failure of negotiations would delight both of them – American hawks because Israel could get on with the business of bombing, Iranian hawks because there’s nothing like an attack by the infidels to unify a fractious public behind an authoritarian regime.

For the moment, our hard-liners pose a greater problem than Iran’s. The moves on Capitol Hill to impose new sanctions before the interim deal even takes effect may pass for tough-mindedness, but they are effectively sabotage. They would undermine President Rouhani’s precarious position at home. Paradoxically, they could also endanger the cooperation Obama has painstakingly earned from the other nuclear powers, and lead to the collapse of the global sanctions. We would lose a united front (which includes China and Russia) against the nuclearization of Iran, and demonstrate that Iranian hardliners are right about what really motivates Washington.

In the guise of pressing for the best possible deal, we reward those who want no deal at all. The danger if our hard-liners scuttle a compromise, Sadjadpour points out, is that Iran’s hard-liners will be able to argue, “We didn’t get anything by offering to put our foot on the brakes. So let’s put our foot on the gas.”