BRUSSEL S FORU M PAPER SER IE S

Of Ayatollahs and Jacobins

Re-balancing after the rise of
revolutionary powers—a historical lesson
for transatlantic policy toward Iran

David Ignatius
Associate Editor and Columnist
The Washington Post
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 Of Ayatollahs and Jacobins
Re-balancing after the rise of revolutionary powers—
a historical lesson for transatlantic policy toward Iran

Brussels Forum Paper Series

March 2008

David Ignatius
Associate Editor and Columnist
The Washington Post
When former U.S. Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger submitted his doctoral dissertation to
Harvard University in May 1954, he pondered
a problem that has an unlikely resonance
more than 50 years later: How can a stable
and legitimate security system be established
following the rise of a revolutionary state that
has disrupted the previous balance of power? In
this dissertation—published later under the title:
A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and
the Problem of Peace, 1812–1822 — Kissinger
examined the construction of a new security order
in Europe after violent disruptions of the French
Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic wars.
The hero of Kissinger’s tale was the Austrian
chancellor, Count Clemens von Metternich, who
skillfully (and sometimes deviously) engineered
the Congress of Vienna in 1815 that created a
new European security architecture that kept
the peace, more or less without interruption, for
nearly a century. Kissinger quotes Metternich’s own
assessment of this transition from the tumult of
revolutionary Europe to an orderly continent where
stable relations between states were once more
the norm: “We have relapsed again into an epoch
where a thousand small calculations and petty
opinions form the history of the day. The sea is still
tumultuous at times, but only from passing storms.”
At the time of Kissinger’s writing, the analogy
he had in mind for this 19th century diplomatic
history was the confrontation between the United
States and an expansionist, Napoleonic Soviet
Union—in what he called “an age faced with
the threat of thermonuclear extinction.” But we
can apply a similar analysis to the great security
challenge of the first decade of the 21st century—
the instability in the Middle East posed by a state
born in revolution, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I will argue in this paper that the Iranian revolution
of 1979 can be compared to the French revolution
of 1789 in its destabilizing effects—and in the
need it created for a new balance of power.
Each event set loose powerful shock waves that
undermined the stability of neighboring states,
and indeed, challenged their very legitimacy. Each
inaugurated an era in which mobilization of the
masses, through emotional, ideological, or religious
appeals, had a transforming effect on their regions.
Each introduced a revolutionary challenge to
the prevailing balance in regional security. Each
launched other revolutionary movements that,
though they appeared to be competitors, were really
aftershocks—the rise of Prussia was arguably such
an event in Europe and the rise of Al-Qaeda was
certainly such an event in the Islamic Middle East.
And each prompted what might be called “wars
of containment”—attempts by the neighboring
status quo powers to contain the revolutions’
disruptive impact outside their home borders.
These comparisons are obviously not precise—the
growth of the Prussian state and the emergence of
Al-Qaeda terrorism are radically different events.
But each phenomenon was linked to the disruption
of the status quo by a revolutionary power.
In A World Restored, Kissinger offered a description
of a revolutionary power that is hauntingly
appropriate for contemporary Iran. “Whenever
there exists a power which considers the
international order or the manner of legitimizing
it oppressive, relations between it and other
powers will be revolutionary,” Kissinger wrote. He
warned that status quo powers make the mistake
of assuming the revolutionary power can be easily
contained or bought off: “Lulled by a period of
stability which had seemed permanent, they find it
nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion
of the revolutionary power that it means to smash
the existing framework. The defenders of the
status quo therefore tend to begin by treating the
revolutionary power as if its protestations were
merely fanciful; as if it really accepted the existing
Of Ayatollahs and Jacobins 3
 legitimacy but overstated its case for bargaining
purposes; as if it were motivated by specific
grievances to be assuaged by limited concessions.”
The requirement for successful statesmanship
in dealing with a revolutionary power, Kissinger
argued, was realism about the danger it poses
The requirement to stability: “It is the essence of a revolutionary
for successful power that it possesses the courage of its
convictions, that it is willing, indeed eager, to
statesmanship
push its principles to their ultimate conclusion.”
in dealing with
Certainly, that description applies to Iran. It has
a revolutionary sought to project its revolution through radical
power, Kissinger
organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas that seek
argued, was to overturn the status quo. And according to the
realism about the recent U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE),
danger it poses the country has embarked on a program to build
to stability. nuclear weapons—a program the NIE posits was
shelved, perhaps temporarily, in 2003. Once we
have stripped away any remaining illusions or
wishful thinking about the nature of the Iranian
regime, what are the lessons of Kissinger’s analytical
approach for establishing a new security system
in the Persian Gulf that accommodates the reality
of post-revolutionary Iran without allowing
that nation to further destabilize the region?
As we think about revolutionary powers, it’s useful
to recall the force of the bomb that exploded
in Europe’s midst in 1789. Kissinger notes the
comment of Talleyrand that “nobody who lived
after the French Revolution would ever know how
sweet and gentle life could be.” The established
order of the world was overturned, to the point that
French revolutionaries insisted that history had
begun anew, with a post-revolutionary Year I. In a
Europe still ruled by monarchs and noblemen, the
bloody attacks on the aristocracy by Robespierre’s
Committee of Public Safety confirmed the worst
fears of what this revolution might bring.
Simon Schama describes in his history of the
revolution, Citizens, the ruthlessness of this
4 The German Marshall Fund of the United States
organized vengeance: “The Terror went into action
with impressive bureaucratic efficiency. House
searches, usually made at night, were extensive
and unsparing. All citizens were required to
attach to their front doors a notice identifying
all residents who lived inside. Entertaining
anyone not on that list, even for a single night,
was a serious crime.” Schama notes that one of
the standard crimes of the Year II was writing
or saying “merde a la republique,” or “shit on
the republic.” By 1794, there was an organized
revolutionary underground of 6,800 Jacobin
clubs with about 550,000 members. The bloody-
mindedness of this new France is summed up in
a quotation Schama draws from Madame Roland:
“Il faut du sang pour cimenter la revolution,” or
“blood is necessary to cement the revolution.”
The destabilizing impact of the revolution was
acute, for France’s neighbors and even for a
faraway nation with its own recent revolutionary
history. Historian Jay Winik, in his recent
study The Great Upheaval, quotes a frantic
warning from Gouverneur Morris to George
Washington: “The French disease of Revolt is
spreading.” So appreciative was Washington of
the ancient regime that he displayed a portrait
of Louis XVI in his office, Winik notes.
The fear and loathing that revolutionary France
inspired across Europe is vividly described by
Alexis de Toqueville in a passage from The Old
Order and the French Revolution: “The attitude
of the outside world toward it gradually changed,
as it revealed its aspect as a grim, terrific force of
nature, a newfangled monster, red of tooth and
claw; when, after abolished political institutions,
it tampered with civil order; when after changing
laws, it tampered with age-old customs and even
the French language; when not content with
wrecking the whole structure of the government
of France, it proceeded to undermine the social
order and even aimed at dethroning God himself;
when, worse, still, it began operating beyond the
borders of its place of origin employing methods
hitherto unknown, new tactics, murderous
slogans—‘opinions in arms,’ as Pitt described them.
Not only were the barriers of kingdoms swept
away and thrones laid low, but the masses were
trampled underfoot—and yet, amazingly enough,
these masses rallied to the cause of the new order.”
Observers of the Iranian revolution might make
similar statements about its dire consequences.
During its first year, the revolutionary momentum
in Tehran engulfed and swept away many of its
more moderate supporters—a dynamic very
similar to what happened in France in the early
1790s. This process of a revolution feeding
upon itself produced a reckless challenge to
international norms of behavior in the storming
of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the seizure of
its employees as hostages. This act threatened the
most basic rules of diplomacy, but the Iranians
got away with it. It was this powerlessness of the
established order that was probably the abiding
lesson for the Iranian revolutionaries. Iran’s
late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini
expressed the wonderment and empowerment of
his nation in a phrase that is repeated in Tehran
to this day: “America can’t do a damned thing.”
Across the Persian Gulf, and indeed, throughout
the Muslim world, ordinary people were roused
by the success of the Iranian revolutionaries in
defying the United States and its CIA-installed
Shah—and ruling elites were frightened.
Within 18 months after the revolution, Iran
was at war. In this case, it was not an Iranian
attempt to export revolution but an Arab attempt
to contain it—with Iraq acting as the proxy
for frightened Sunni Muslim states. (A similar
pattern occurred in Europe, where the first
attempt to contain the French Revolution—the
Pillnitz Declaration of 1791—predated Napoleon’s
rise. Status quo Europe understood that it was
the revolution itself that posed the threat.)
I traveled with Iraq’s army into Iran in the early
weeks of the war, and I know the Iraqis believed
that they would score a quick victory against the
ayatollahs’ shaky new regime. What saved the
Iranians was their ability to mobilize a mass army of
believers—much like the mass army of revolution-
aroused Frenchmen that Napoleon had sent
rampaging across Europe in his early conquests.
As it pushed back the Iraqi army, the Islamic
Republic and its supporters counter-attacked
along other fronts. Iranian-backed radical Islamic
movements began to gain support among Shia
Muslim communities in Bahrain, Kuwait, and
Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. Among Sunni
Muslims, extremist religious movements also
took courage from the Islamic revolution in
Iran. Fanatics seized the Mecca mosque in late
1979, a few weeks after the U.S. Embassy in
Tehran was seized. The extremists were only
dislodged with help from the French military. The
American Embassy in Islamabad was stormed,
too, by copycat Sunni “students.” The Egyptian
group Takfir w’al Hijra, a precursor to Al-Qaeda,
penetrated the Egyptian army so deeply that
it was able to assassinate Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat during a military parade in 1981.
By 1983, the Iranian secret services had burrowed
deep within the Shia community of Lebanon.
Through cut-outs, Iranian operatives organized the
April 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.
Iranian intelligence also helped create the Lebanese
Shiite militia Hezbollah, which continues to project
Iranian power in Lebanon to this day. By 1984,
Hezbollah kidnappings of Americans and other
westerners had made West Beirut a no-go zone.
Adding to the climate of revolutionary defiance
was the fatwa sanctioning the murder of Indian
Muslim novelist Salman Rushdie for writing The
Satanic Verses, a supposedly anti-Muslim book.
Of Ayatollahs and Jacobins 5
 The Iranians also pushed ahead to acquire the
ultimate token of power in the modern world, a
nuclear weapon. They acquired fuel-enrichment
technology from the Pakistani network of A.Q.
Khan during the 1990s. And according to the
recent NIE, they began an actual bomb-making
program to produce a deliverable nuclear weapon.
Though we live
today in what The political arc of the Iranian revolution finally
seemed to be bending downward by the late
is sometimes
1990s, with the election of a reformist president,
described as a
Mohammed Khatami. He wasn’t strong enough
“unipolar” world of to re-establish open diplomatic relations with the
one superpower,
United States, but the two countries did begin
America’s a period of quiet cooperation—first against
misadventure Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002,
in Iraq has and then in Iraq in 2003. The United States
demonstrated was destroying the two potent adversaries on
that the sole Iran’s border. Whether because it was afraid of
superpower is American power or because it felt less threatened
not easily able by Iraq, Iran decided in the fall of 2003 to halt its
to impose its nuclear weapons program, as the NIE posits.
will…that the This period of de facto U.S.–Iranian cooperation
modern United was probably the greatest opportunity to date to
States has a need achieve the kind of broad strategic rapprochement
for traditional that Kissinger describes in A World Restored.
“balance of Indeed, the Iranians in 2003 circulated to the
power” relations. United States a document summarizing the basis
on which such a dialogue would be conducted.
Diplomacy was opportune at this time in part
because both the United States and Iran were
feeling relatively strong. The zero-sum game
that often applies to U.S.–Iranian relations was
absent. What made the diplomatic failure here
so unfortunate was that it stemmed from what
was an American fantasy—that Iran was on the
verge of a counter-revolution that would topple
the Islamic Republic. This failure to engage Iran at
an opportune moment may have lasting effects.
Though we live today in what is sometimes
described as a “unipolar” world of one superpower,
6 The German Marshall Fund of the United States
America’s misadventure in Iraq has demonstrated
that the sole superpower is not easily able to
impose its will—even on a much weaker Iran—and
that the modern United States has a need for
traditional “balance of power” relations. The
Iraq war began as an assertion of U.S. power in
the region and, to the extent one can understand
what was going through the minds of U.S.
policymakers, as a prelude to a subsequent move
to alter or replace the hostile clerical regime in
Iran. By 2008, it seems clear, however, that even
with the most optimistic reading, a principal
strategic consequence of the war will be the
ehancement of Iranian power in the region.
This reality—that the Iraq war empowered Iran—
raises the stakes for a regional re-balancing of
power. It’s all the more necessary to find a regional
architecture that recognizes the fact of Iranian
power. But if Iran holds to its revolutionary goals
of challenging the other powers of the region and,
indeed, the legitimacy of the established order, then
diplomatic concessions will be very dangerous. An
accommodation that is forged on Iranian terms
would be harmful to the United States and its allies,
from Egypt and Israel all the way to Pakistan.
So how should the United States and Europe
think about a new balance of power in the
Middle East—one that is faithful to the model
Kissinger described in A World Restored?
The first requirement for a Metternichian solution,
unfortunately, is a defeat of the revolutionary
power on the battlefield. It was Napoleon’s defeat
in Russia in 1812 that set the stage for all the
diplomatic maneuvering that followed. Had
Napoleon succeeded in Russia, any rebalancing
of Europe would have been on terms all but
dictated by post-revolutionary France.
By analogy, one can argue that a defeat for the
Iranian revolution is the requirement for a workable
balance of power in the Gulf. That opportunity
arose after the Iraq–Iran war, which if not a disaster
on the level of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow,
certainly was not an Iranian victory. Since the
war ended without a formal peace treaty, it was
an opportunity ripe for a modern Metternich. If
U.S. diplomats had been more creative and skillful,
they might have moved to transform the cease-
fire that ended the Iraq–Iran war to a broader
regional agreement that could be analogized
to the 1814 Treaty of Paris and the Congress of
Vienna a year later. But that opportunity was lost.
A second attribute of a diplomatic “concert”
is that it must address the range of security
interests of the key parties. No nation achieves
all of its desired outcomes, but each makes
sufficient gains that the deal as a whole is
acceptable. It is a matter, as economists might
say, of “satisficing,” rather than maximizing.
As Kissinger explains, the diplomatic bargaining
that preceded the 1815 Congress of Vienna,
Britain and Austria were essentially status quo
powers; they wanted to restore a measure of the
old, pre-revolutionary order. Russia and Prussia
were “acquisitive” powers that wanted to digest the
gains they had achieved from Napoleon’s defeat.
The essential element in the new equilibrium was
that France renounced influence outside its own
borders. Russia’s ambitions in Poland were satisfied
by an arrangement that created a Kingdom of
Poland under the hegemony of the Tsar of Russia.
As for Prussia, its hope of annexing Saxony was
partially met; it obtained two-thirds of Saxony, plus
Pomerania, plus the Duchy of Westphalia. In other
words, each of the players got some of what they
wanted, but nobody got all of what they wanted.
Kissinger applied this bargaining approach most
effectively in his famous opening to China. One
can now study the once-secret memoranda of
conversation from his 1971 and 1972 meetings
with Zhou Enlai, in which the two men discussed
the national interests of their two nations and
how they might overlap and indeed converge.
Their discussions were an extraordinary
application of the precepts that Kissinger
had drawn from his study of Metternich.
In the case of contemporary Iran, the challenge of
Iriuscidunt verci
a similar diplomatic opening would be to identify
tinciduisi. Lis ad
the interests of the key parties—and then to explore
where they converge and diverge. Iraq would be elessi. Um alis
an especially fruitful area for such discussion dolor si. Ing eum
between the United States and Iran. Both would dolorem nullaor
seem to share an interest in the success of the tionseq uipsum
Shia-led government that will rule the country ipsusto dolore
under any likely democratic regime in the future. feum quiscil iscilis
If either side presses for unilateral advantage, it er si et vent amcor
risks a chaotic outcome in which both sides would ad dio eum vel
be worse off. This is obviously the basis for a
rational diplomatic bargain—if reason can prevail.
A similar identity of interests would seem to
exist in the larger arena of strategic relations in
the Persian Gulf. Any stable system will have to
accommodate the reality of Iranian power—for
a rising Iran is simply a fact of life in that part of
the world. But if the United States and its allies
must accept an Iranian role in the regional balance
so, too, must Iran accept a continuing American
security role there. Even after setbacks in Iraq, the
United States retains immense power in the Gulf.
The Iranians will not achieve their strategic goals
until they accept and accommodate this fact.
A final lesson of this study in Metternich-Kissinger
realism is that if the conditions do not exist for a
genuine peace that recognizes and accommodates
the mutual interests of both the revolutionary and
status quo powers, then the only sound alternative
is containment of the revolutionary power until
times are more propitious for settlement. To quote
Kissinger again, “whenever peace—conceived as
Of Ayatollahs and Jacobins 7
 the avoidance of war—has been the primary object
of a power or group of powers, the international
system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless
member.” The goal of diplomacy, after all, is not
some abstract notion of “peace,” but stability
and security. Certainly, Kissinger adopted the
approach of armed containment toward the
History tells Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s. But
us that if Iran it’s noteworthy that when the opportunity arose
continues to act for this supreme realist to explore “détente” with
as a revolutionary Moscow during the Nixon years, Kissinger seized it.
power that seeks A statesman’s prescription for the United States
to project and and Iran, then, would begin with the need for
expand its power, dialogue. The goal should be to explore whether
then a future war the conditions exist for a balancing of mutual
of containment interests. In pursuing this approach, the United
may be inevitable. States would be hoping that the first Metternichian
condition does not apply—that the eventual
American war of containment against Iran, which
many analysts in the Gulf assume is inevitable,
can be obviated by aggressive diplomacy.
In such a dialogue, each side would have
to recognize the need to forgo some of its
maximalist objectives. Iran would have to give
up its revolutionary challenge to the legitimacy
and sovereignty of its neighbors; it would have
to embrace a role as a co-guarantor of regional
stability, rather than as a threat to that stability.
8 The German Marshall Fund of the United States
Iran would also have to accept limits on its
nuclear program that effectively checked it from
producing nuclear weapons. The United States,
in turn, would have to accept limits on its ability
to steer events in the region unilaterally. In Iraq,
for example, it would accept the inevitability of
a strong Iranian role as America withdraws its
troops. In this concert of nations, the interests
of other key powers, such as Saudi Arabia and
Turkey, would also have to be accommodated.
It may be that dialogue would reveal the
impossibility of achieving such a regional “concert
of nations,” and that there could be no Middle
East version of the Congress of Vienna for the
foreseeable future. In that case, the various
powers will inevitably and appropriately pursue
their national interests. History tells us that if
Iran continues to act as a revolutionary power
that seeks to project and expand its power, then
a future war of containment may be inevitable.
But that course would be folly on Iran’s part—as
unwise as Napoleon’s march into Russia.
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