Containing Iran

Abstract

This chapter details how, like Colonel Qaddafi's Libya and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Iran under clerical rule was widely thought to be a difficult target for a strategy based on containment. With every year that passed, Iran seemed to draw closer to becoming a nuclear power and therefore harder to deter and to contain, or so the conventional wisdom proclaimed. The chapter considers the political–military rivalry between the United States and Iran between 1991 (the first Persian Gulf War) and 2016 (when Iran accepted strict limits on its use of the nuclear fuel cycle to produce fissionable materials). If containment pessimists are correct about Iran being undeterrable and uncontainable, then many of the events recounted in the chapter probably should not have occurred. But they did occur, which suggests that a closer look at the historical record will likely reveal some additional interesting twists and turns.