The Biden administration would like to rejoin and revive the Iranian nuclear accord, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which the Obama administration and five other governments (the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China) agreed to with Tehran in 2015 but which the Trump administration withdrew the United States from in 2018. After the Trump administration made this move, Iran incrementally stopped complying with the terms of the JCPOA, but Tehran has indicated that it would also like to revive the agreement—if the United States ends the economic sanctions that the Trump administration imposed after its withdrawal. But the Biden administration is not willing to lift them all since many of these U.S. sanctions from the Trump era and before relate less to Washington’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear policy than its regional policies. These include Iranian involvement in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen as well as Tehran’s hostility toward some of America’s closest allies in the Middle East: Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain. The recent onset of Saudi-Iranian talks aimed at easing relations notwithstanding, Iran’s unwillingness to alter its aggressive regional policies has complicated the Biden administration’s efforts to revive the JCPOA. Indeed, critics of Biden’s effort to rejoin the JCPOA see the continuation of Iran’s regional policy as a reason to doubt Tehran’s commitment to abide by a revived nuclear accord, and so oppose the United States rejoining it.

How should the Biden administration proceed in this situation? Is there a way for Washington to induce Tehran to change its behavior in the Middle East in exchange for the United States agreeing to revive the JCPOA? Or should the United States not rejoin the JCPOA and maintain its harsh sanctions regime against Tehran so long as Iran pursues regional policies that the United States and its Middle Eastern allies find objectionable? Or should the United States agree to rejoin the JCPOA even if Iranian behavior—especially its support for the Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iraqi Shi’a militias, and the Houthis in Yemen—all continue?

How the Biden administration, Congress, and American policy analysts, in general, think about these questions should be informed about a similar situation that occurred during the 1970s when the United States was pursuing the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT) with the Soviet Union at the same time as Moscow and its allies were intervening militarily in the Third World. What happened in this previous situation, in which the pursuit of nuclear arms control was negatively affected by differences over regional policy, could be useful for helping set reasonable expectations for how American policies that did not work then probably will not work now—and so should be eschewed in favor of more productive ones.

Just as the United States has sought to wind down American-led interventions in the Middle East both before and after the signing of the JCPOA, the United States pursued strategic arms control with the Soviet Union beginning in the late 1960s when Washington first began attempting to extricate itself from Indochina. The SALT I treaty was signed in May 1972—less than a year before the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina in March 1973—something that Soviet support for North Vietnam had helped bring about. The involvement of the Soviet Union and its allies in various regional conflicts, though, contributed to doubts in the United States about whether Moscow could be trusted not just with regard to Third World regional conflicts, but its commitment to nuclear arms control. Still, progress on nuclear arms control continued despite Soviet involvement in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the 1975 Soviet-backed Cuban intervention in Angola, the 1977-78 Soviet-Cuban intervention in the Horn of Africa, and the 1978 Soviet-backed Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT II treaty in June 1979. But progress on Soviet-American arms control broke down completely when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 and President Carter withdrew the SALT II treaty from Senate consideration in January 1980.

As Raymond Garthoff described in Détente and Confrontation, his monumental 1,206-page account of these events, American and Soviet leaders had very different understandings of what the détente process would lead to. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, as Garthoff recounted, oversold détente, giving rise to American expectations that it would not just involve strategic arms control, but a more cooperative relationship generally, including in the Third World. Thus, when the Soviets and their allies intervened militarily in the Third World, this not only violated the American understanding of what détente was supposed to entail but also increased uneasiness about whether the Soviets could be trusted to honor strategic arms control agreements. Carter’s withdrawal of the SALT II treaty from Senate consideration (where its ratification would undoubtedly have been defeated) was seen by many in the United States as an appropriate reaction not just to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but all the interventions undertaken by the Soviets and their allies during the 1970s.

By contrast, the Soviets (as Garthoff also described) had a very different, and much narrower, understanding of détente. For Moscow, the overall Soviet-American relationship was competitive, but the two sides could cooperate in some areas when doing so was in their joint interests. The prevention of nuclear war through strategic arms control was just such a common interest. Competition, though, would continue in areas where their interests diverged. Indeed, with the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina and subsequent unwillingness to become militarily involved elsewhere in the Third World along with the rise of “progressive” forces throughout in many countries there, Washington could hardly expect Moscow not to press its advantage in areas that the United States was either withdrawing from or not willing to get involved in. Before Afghanistan, continued U.S. pursuit of strategic arms control after its withdrawal from Indochina as well as the military involvement of the USSR and its allies in the Middle East, Africa, and Indochina all pointed to an American acceptance of this logic no matter what the White House and Congress actually said. Thus, Moscow genuinely saw Carter’s withdrawal of the SALT II treaty from Senate consideration as irrational since progress on strategic arms control was in both American and Soviet interests despite the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. But once the Soviet-American strategic arms control process did break down, Moscow’s immediate reaction was not to end the Third World interventions that upset Washington so much but to continue them.

Similarly, different administrations in Washington, on the one hand, and Tehran, on the other, have had different expectations about what the JCPOA would lead to. President Barack Obama in particular held out hope that progress on the Iranian nuclear accord would lead to a better Iranian-American relationship that would include trade, investment, and cultural and scientific exchanges. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA not just because he could not believe Iran was abiding by its terms, but because he wanted a “better deal” that included changed Iranian behavior in the region. And as John Bolton related (with disgust) in his memoir about serving as Trump’s national security advisor, Trump also believed that he could make this “better deal” with Iran.

By contrast, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei did not view the JCPOA as a prelude to an Iranian-American rapprochement, but in much narrower terms as an agreement involving a simple trade-off between Iran agreeing to forego nuclear weapons in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. While more moderate Iranian leaders such as President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif may have hoped for a broader Iranian-American rapprochement, Khamenei, the influential Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and its expeditionary arm, the Qods Force, were not willing to forego involvement in regional conflicts—especially when they saw the United States as withdrawing from the region both under Obama and Trump. And just like the Soviets after the breakdown of the strategic arms control process, the Iranian reaction to Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018 was not to reduce its involvement in regional conflict but to continue it.

Despite this, there are those in Washington who hold out hope that the United States can link its agreement to rejoining the JCPOA to Iran modifying its behavior toward America’s Middle Eastern allies as well as reducing or even ending its involvement in the region’s conflicts. Their confidence in this possibility may derive in part from earlier experience with the Soviet Union—through this time from its behavior in the latter part of the 1980s and not the 1970s. While Brezhnev may have thought that he could pursue strategic arms control with the United States while intervening militarily along with its Marxist allies in the Third World during the 1970s, by the late 1980s Gorbachev understood that these two policies were in conflict. Mikhail Gorbachev had an ambitious economic reform program for which he saw an overall détente with the West (not just strategic arms control agreements) as being necessary for its success. He also saw the interventions in the Third World being undertaken by Moscow and its allies both as hindering the achievement of détente with the West and as unsuccessful ventures needlessly diverting scarce Soviet resources away from his priorities. And so—much to Washington’s delight—Gorbachev decided to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan and step back from the Third World (as well as Eastern Europe in 1989) in order to pursue what was to him the more important domestic reform effort needed to strengthen the Soviet Union in the long run, which also required détente with the West.

Although this precedent was not specifically invoked, the Trump administration appeared to hope that its “maximum pressure” campaign would lead to Tehran making choices similar to Gorbachev’s. The maximum pressure campaign, its advocates calculated, would lead to an economic collapse that would threaten the survival of the Islamic Republic’s leadership. Either the ayatollahs would sacrifice their foreign adventures for the sanctions relief needed just to retain power, or the Islamic Republic would actually fall and be replaced by a more rational regime recognizing how cooperating with the United States was in its best interests. Despite the Biden administration’s desire to revive the JCPOA, its unwillingness to drop sanctions related to Iran’s regional activity indicates that it too seeks to modify Tehran’s behavior in this realm. Trump, though, did not succeed in modifying Iran’s regional behavior, and Biden does not seem likely to either. This is because the situation Gorbachev faced that led him to see retreating from regional conflicts in the Third World as being in Moscow’s interests is very different from the one that Tehran now faces, thus leading Tehran to make a very different calculation about whether to continue or end its interventionism in the Middle East.

There are those in Washington who may believe that it was American containment and Western economic sanctions that drove Gorbachev to change Moscow’s foreign policy. These may have played a role, but Gorbachev—just like Brezhnev’s short-time successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, and even Gorbachev himself initially—could have continued Brezhnev’s interventionism in the Third World indefinitely. This was certainly Washington’s expectation from him at first. What drove Gorbachev to change course, though, was not so much Western pressure as his own grandiose ambition to revive the Soviet Union. Further, he did not undertake this project because he was a born-again democrat or capitalist, but because he saw it as necessary in order to make the Soviet Union stronger in a world where it was falling behind.

Furthermore, at that point in time, Gorbachev’s hope of attracting foreign investment and trade meant that he had to seek it from the West. China was not the wealthy country it is today. Except for Kuwait, America’s wealthy Gulf Arab allies only began the process of normalizing relations with Moscow during the Gorbachev years and were not then willing to invest in the Soviet economy. And the USSR’s allies were not the kind that provided resources to Moscow but drained them away from it instead. Gorbachev’s decision to alter Soviet foreign policy by doing what was needed to improve relations with the West in order to pursue his ambitious domestic goals, then, was rational. Unfortunately for him, his domestic reform plans were not rational, and instead of strengthening the Soviet Union, they contributed to its downfall.

But if it was a poorly designed domestic reform project that undermined Gorbachev, neither Khamenei nor any hardliner who will probably succeed him is likely to undertake a similar project. Indeed, as the Iranian writer Akbar Ganji noted, Khamenei is determined not to make the same mistakes that Gorbachev did. Instead, he admires Vladimir Putin and shares with him the fear of American-inspired “color revolutions” aimed at overthrowing their regimes. Khamenei, then, is too distrustful of American intentions to turn to the United States for anything beyond sanctions relief in exchange for abiding by the JCPOA. And unlike the USSR under Gorbachev, Iran has other options for economic partners besides the West. In March 2021, China agreed to invest $400 billion in Iran over a twenty-five-year period. China along with others have also been buying Iranian oil for many years now in defiance of American-backed sanctions. Iran has also been able to evade sanctions with the help of several countries, including Turkey, Iraq, the Kurdish Regional Government, the UAE, Oman, Malaysia, and Russia. Thus, while Gorbachev’s ambitious domestic goals and the lack of viable partners besides the West for implementing them encouraged him to withdraw from the Third World, Khamenei neither seeks ambitious domestic reform efforts nor is unable to find economic partners outside the West that might induce him to change his policy toward the Middle East.

The situation that Tehran now sees itself in vis-à-vis the United States, then, is more similar to the one that Brezhnev saw the USSR as being in during the 1970s: an America that is pulling out of unsuccessful military ventures wants not just a nuclear arms accord with its adversary, but for that adversary to refrain from pressing its advantages in the places that Washington does not want to be involved in. Like the Soviets in the 1970s, the Iranians now do not see the United States as being either willing or able to enforce such terms—and so Tehran sees no reason to accept them. Washington, of course, seems to think that its ability to either increase or decrease the economic sanctions that have been imposed on Iran should provide Tehran with sufficient incentive to change its regional behavior or suffer inordinately if it does not. But even though Tehran would like sanctions relief, the Supreme Leader Khamenei along with the Revolutionary Guards have demonstrated that they are determined to continue Iran’s regional policies even if this means that sanctions continue. Indeed, Iranian conservatives may actually find the continuation of American-backed sanctions useful not only for justifying the continuation of their own undemocratic rule, but also in the hope of exploiting the unpopularity of Washington’s secondary sanctions on other countries limiting their desire to trade with Iran. Many of America’s allies in Europe and Asia have bought Iranian petroleum in the past and would continue to do so except for increasingly aggressive U.S. secondary sanctions, which they resent.

Maybe one day Iran will have a new leader, or even a new government, that—like Gorbachev—prioritizes domestic economic development and sees hostility toward America’s Middle East allies as well as deep involvement in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen as counterproductive to this ambition. The United States, though, is unlikely to be able to hasten that day through maintaining strict sanctions on Iran and trying to force others to abide by them too—especially since there are already so many willing to help Tehran evade them. Nor does Washington appear to be in a position either to force or persuade Tehran to change the regional policies that America and its allies do not like.

Washington, then, must carefully calculate how best to navigate the current nuclear arms control/regional conflict nexus with Iran. Attempting to link a U.S. return to the JCPOA to changed Iranian behavior in the Middle East could backfire not only through failing to change Tehran’s regional policies, but by making it more likely Iran will actually acquire nuclear weapons. Much of the discourse about the Iranian nuclear accord in Washington as well as in the capitals of America’s Middle East allies treats an American return to the JCPOA as somehow being a concession to Tehran. But policymakers in Washington and elsewhere need to ask themselves these questions: First, is Iran more likely to obtain nuclear weapons if it is abiding by the JCPOA and subject to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), or if the JCPOA breaks down altogether and there are no IAEA inspections or other constraints on Iran’s obtaining them? And second, is Iran’s regional behavior likely to be more of a threat now when Iran does not possess nuclear weapons or in the future if it does acquire them?

It should be patently obvious just from posing these questions that the United States and its allies are far better off with the JCPOA than without it—especially since reviving the JCPOA does not prevent the United States and its allies from acting to counter Iran’s regional policies that they find threatening. As others have done, the United States can also cooperate with an adversary in areas where it has an interest in doing so while competing with it in others where their interests are opposed.

Mark N. Katz is a professor of government and politics at the George Mason University School of Policy and Government, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Image: Wikipedia.