Don’t bet that Iran will follow example set in fall of Soviet Union

The nuclear deal with Iran has been accompanied by a large amount of crystal ball gazing among its defenders and opponents as to how the legitimization of Tehran’s nuclear capacity will impact its behavior. Will the Iranian regime emerge from the deal as a responsible international actor—an outcome on which President Barack Obama himself is betting—or will it seek to rub salt into the wounds of its gullible Western interlocutors by fanning existing regional conflicts and launching new ones?

Predicting politics is a notoriously difficult business. Only the very brave or the extremely foolish approach it with any confidence. With history serving as a rough guide, it is tempting to err on the side of caution by not forecasting earth-shattering future developments. At the same time, caution closes off our willingness to imagine radical, unexpected potential outcomes—which is what happened with the Soviet Union, whose example has been much invoked in recent weeks. 

In 1980, when President Reagan entered the White House a few months after the invasion of Afghanistan triggered renewed fears of wider Soviet aggression, few thought that the USSR would cease to exist early on in the next decade; the prospect seemed so outlandish. At most, it was granted that the period of detente that began at the end of the 1960s had exposed Soviet society to a modest, if unprecedented, awareness of the advantages of Western democracy. “Soviet young people crave blue jeans and rock music, while their elders try to ape the latest Western fashions,” noted one contributor to the Foreign Affairs journal in 1980. “None of this promises a new Russian Revolution, but it does guarantee the growing significance of both consumerism and cynicism in Soviet life.”

Will the same fusion of “consumerism and cynicism”—hallmarks of Western life—lead Iran to become a more open society? Put another way, will the lifting of international sanctions mean that economic considerations, rather than ideological ones, are given priority when it comes to the Iranian regime’s foreign policy?