Is it cheaper to pay off the mafia than to fight it? This is the moral dilemma the world is now facing with Iran and nobody has the right answer. For 40 years, the smartest people in the world’s foreign policy establishments have tried, yet the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is still there, still expanding, still holding the region hostage. So maybe the issue here is not about finding the right answer — maybe it is about whether we are even asking the right questions.
There are only three ways to deal with a protection racket. You pay, you wait for it to go legitimate, or you hit it hard enough that it has to reconsider everything. The world has mostly been going with the first of these options. It has occasionally hoped for the second. It has only recently attempted the third by attacking Iran in its own territory rather than keeping busy fighting its proxies. So, here are my three questions. They are not easy to answer and are even uncomfortable to pose.
Do we pay the mafia? The case for paying is not stupid — it was suggested to me by a very clever friend who is also a columnist for Arab News. We have seen how the IRGC can close the Strait of Hormuz and choke off a fifth of the world’s oil exports. It has proxies in five countries and it has already demonstrated how it can seriously threaten its Arab Gulf neighbors. Open confrontation carries real risks and serious people have spent careers mapping them. So, we have kept paying and have managed the relationship, avoiding confrontation.
Reagan traded weapons for hostages and the lesson Tehran took away was not gratitude — it was that the Americans have a price
Nadim Shehadi
The problem is that every time we have paid, the IRGC has reinvested the payment. Former US President Ronald Reagan traded weapons for hostages and the lesson Tehran took away was not gratitude — it was that the Americans have a price. Barack Obama negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal and the money that flowed into Iran went to Hezbollah’s payroll, Houthi missiles and militia infrastructure across Iraq and Syria. The deal deliberately said nothing about any of that. Its architects called it a foundation. Iran called it a down payment. Those are very different things.
A protection racket does not retire when it is satisfied. It expands when it is fed. Every concession is proof that the system works and pays dividends. You are not buying peace, you are financing the next demand.
But what if the mafia goes legitimate? History is full of pirates who became admirals, robber barons who became philanthropists, criminals who became the establishment. Carnegie and Rockefeller built their empires through predation and ended up endowing universities and concert halls. The Godfather himself — in “The Godfather Part III” — wanted nothing more than to go clean, be received by the pope and leave the family business behind.
So, could the IRGC follow the same arc? It has spent four decades building not just a military network but a vast economic empire — construction, telecoms, logistics, banking. At some point, does an organization with that much to lose from instability become a stakeholder in stability? It is a tempting idea. But it may also need a strong push and that has not happened with the IRGC.
And then there is the Godfather problem. Michael Corleone’s tragedy is not that he does not want to go legitimate — he desperately does — the tragedy is that the organization will not let him. Too many people’s power and income depend on the criminal structure continuing. Even if pragmatic factions inside the Iranian system would prefer a different relationship with the world, the IRGC has too many internal stakes in confrontation to make the transition on its own.
The next question is can hitting hard enough, like what just happened to Iran, provoke the desired reset? Like giving your old television a kick to make it work. The lessons from the 2003 invasion of Iraq are that you cannot destroy the system completely and occupy and construct from scratch. You do not have the knowledge or the persistence, it is too costly, and eventually regime change happens at home before you see the desired results. Occupation is expensive. What we learned is that nation-building takes generations and we lack the patience and competence to manage it.
What the disruptive approach gets right is recognizing that accommodating the status quo indefinitely is not a neutral act
Nadim Shehadi
Perhaps the lessons from Syria are also relevant. The world engaged Bashar Assad for years, accommodated him and treated him as a rational actor who could be managed and helped to reform. The regime pretended to comply — surrendering chemical weapons on paper, negotiating ceasefires it never intended to honor — meaning we were kept busy while the regime destroyed the country, massacred and displaced its people and held on to power.
And then, after all that, the regime collapsed anyway. Not because of a Western strategy. But because its own contradictions caught up with it and a rebel force nobody had planned for moved faster than anyone thought possible. Assad fled to Moscow. Syria is now governed by people who were on every terrorism watchlist five years ago. Maybe an attack in 2013 honoring Obama’s red line would have sped up that process and saved many lives and many cities.
But what if there is a new Trump doctrine of regime change that is emerging? Simply put, it is a combination of maximum pressure and sudden shocks like the assassination of Qassem Soleimani and the February attacks, leading to decapitation and major destruction of military infrastructure. Batter the regime through sanctions, degrade its capacity and deliver shocks — without committing to what comes next. Shake the system, disrupt it and then take a step back and watch what happens. If it does not reset in a way you like, you can just whack it again. No occupation, no micromanaging, just like kicking that old TV again. Maybe what happened in Venezuela was a test run.
The direction of the break is not predictable. But the theory is that you do not need to control the outcome — you just need to change the conditions enough that a different outcome becomes possible. The mafia eventually learns what is sustainable. Maybe.
What the disruptive approach gets right is the recognition that the status quo cannot hold and that accommodating it indefinitely is not a neutral act. What Donald Trump is doing and saying keeps both the enemy and the US’ allies confused. The main idea is that you cannot precisely design an outcome, you just know that you cannot continue with the present arrangement and hope that, through trial and error, you reach one you can live with.
There is, of course, also the hardest question of all: the important moral dimension of giving a brutal and repressive regime a new lease of life while its people desperately want to get rid of it.
BY: Nadim Shehadi is an economist and political adviser.
Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect The Times Union‘ point of view
