Defiance in the Face of Pressure: Iranian Popular Support of its Nuclear Program

A recent poll suggests that the Iranian people want their nuclear program to continue, despite the economic pain that it brings.
In the current political climate, there is rarely a day when top Iranian politicians agree with one another on issues as important as the country’s foreign policy and national security. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spars violently with legislators on the parliament floor, and it is not uncommon for the parliamentarians themselves to scream at one another when they are in session.The acrimony has gotten so bad that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the final decisionmaker in Tehran, has had to interject himself into a fight that he would much rather stay clear from. “Today the world of Islam is faced with the plot of enemies...,” Khamenei warned in a speech last month. “We should not fuel the fire of discord by arousing shallow and vulgar feelings. This will burn the fate of nations.”The Iranian nuclear file, which the international community has tried to close for the past decade, is not immune from these internal clashes. It took the Supreme Leader only a few days to silence his foreign minister on rumors that Iran would be open to talking bilaterally with the United States about its nuclear program. Khamenei is in no mood to negotiate, while many of the bureaucrats in his government are beginning to realize that talking may be the only way—short of confrontation—to solve the problem and get Iran’s economy back to its potential.The United States has attempted to ignore all of the political squabbles in Iran by following a simple two-track strategy: crush the Iranian economy with ever increasing sanctions, and extend the hand of diplomacy when the Islamic Republic can no longer take the heat. The strategy, in theory, is a reasonable one; if a government is squeezed hard and money falls out of their pockets, then that government will eventually come to the realization that they need to change their behavior to stop the bleeding. With restrictions on practically every industry that earns Iran income (its oil sales have plummeted by 50 percent thanks to a European Union embargo of Iranian crude) the Obama administration is holding true to this policy.The question, then, is why Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his closest advisers have not blinked. Why, after losing billions of dollars every month to the international sanctions regime, is Iran holding firm to its nuclear commitment?Many analysts have cited the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary ideology and 30-year enmity of the United States as the primary reasons for their resistance. Yet the views of the Iranian people generally seem to be left out of the equation.However unpopular Iran’s nuclear growth is in much of the world, the fact of the matter is that a majority of Iranians are wholeheartedly behind their government’s push for an independent nuclear capability. A Gallup poll from December 2012 revealed that 63 percent of Iranians believe that their country should continue to improve its nuclear technology despite the economic pain that the program has brought them. Only 17 percent are concerned or hurting enough to shift course by stopping Tehran’s investment in the nuclear realm—a demonstration that popular Iranian attitudes may have something to do with the Ayatollah’s refusal to budge.The notion, however, that more Iranians than not are entirely willing to sacrifice more economically to develop the nation’s uranium enrichment capability should be a warning to anyone in the world who has been working to bring Tehran to its knees. The numbers suggest that Iran’s leaders, at least now, are not going to cave in and give the US, EU, and UN what they so desperately want: a complete dismantling of their indigenous nuclear program.If the average Iranian wants the government in Tehran to play hardball, negotiators from the west should expect Ayatollah Khamenei to do the same. The international community should be under no illusions that this week’s nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 will be smooth enough to break the impasse.Fortunately, it appears negotiators from the P5+1 understand that a new tact is needed to get the process off the ground. The latest round of diplomacy between Iran and the P5+1, which took place in Kazakhstan last February, produced a series of positive statements that have been all too rare in previous discussions. In a welcoming sign of flexibility and openness to new ideas, the United States and its allies in the United Nations Security Council drafted a new proposal that addresses some of the very concerns that Tehran has held all along; namely, that they will be allowed to keep their uranium enrichment facility near Qom.In previous offers, the P5+1 ordered the Iranians cease their production of 20 percent enriched uranium, send that stockpile overseas, and shut down the Fordow enrichment site permanently before the lifting of economic sanctions could even put on the table. Predictably, the Iranians immediately rejected those demands last year, all but assuring that negotiations would be killed off for the remainder of the year. The message to the P5+1 was as clear: Tehran will not proceed with diplomacy unless they too received confidence-building measures. The latest proposal, in which Iran would suspend operations at the Fordow plant in exchange for moderate sanctions relief, is a step in the right direction.The Iranian nuclear issue has been a top security priority for the international community for the past decade, and it will continue to languish on the agenda unless both sides show a willingness to take the other’s grievances seriously. Pressuring Iran with oil, banking, trade, and commerce sanctions has had a devastating impact on the Iranian economy, and may have persuaded the leaders in Tehran to try diplomacy one more time. But as the United States learned with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, economic sanctions alone are not a policy, but a means to an end. Striking a comprehensive agreement with Iran on its nuclear program will not be achieved through exclusively through economic pressure, nor will the use of military force scare Iran into giving up on its nuclear ambitions in the long-term.Diplomacy can be agonizing and ridden with pain, but when the right formula is exposed, it can also be enormously gratifying. The step-by-step approach that the P5+1 and Iran took last month is a promising start. But ultimately, the problem will only be resolved if all the parties are able to make compromises—however difficult those compromises will be politically.

Photo courtesy of wvs via Flickr.