The Islamic Republic has focused its ire on a D.C. research outfit that employs a few dozen people. How did the Foundation for Defense of Democracies get so famous in Tehran?.
The same
weekend Iran’s foreign minister showed up unexpectedly in France as world
leaders met, his ministry went on the attack. Iran, it said in a statement, was
suffering under a campaign of “economic terrorism,” pushed in part by an
institution with what it called “a deceitful name”—the Foundation for Defense
of Democracies (FDD)—and its CEO, Mark Dubowitz, both of which would henceforth
be sanctioned.
And with
that, a regime locked in a tit-for-tat escalation with the United States—the
world’s biggest economy, the biggest spender on national security, and a global
superpower with intelligence and military resources around the world—focused
its rage on a guy who runs a think tank.
How a
60-odd person organization became the enemy du jour in Tehran is a story about
the Washington, D.C., influence game as seen from the receiving end. Yet it
also illustrates how what happens here doesn’t stay here, and how a Beltway
reputation can reverberate far from the city’s policy debates.
Since
its founding in 2001, the FDD has carved out a niche for itself as the go-to
haven for D.C.’s Iran hawks, with Dubowitz as its well-connected leader. The
institution’s media stardom—its analysts show up on cable news, their comment
pieces are published in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York
Times—along with Dubowitz’s own forceful Twitter feed, has built it an outsize
reputation in Tehran to match its stature in Washington, all filtered through a
lens of enmity and conspiracy theory.
The
Iranian foreign ministry’s statement ominously noted that the sanctions would
not preclude any (unspecified) actions from other organs of the Iranian
government, including the security services, sparking condemnation from Donald
Trump’s administration and a bipartisan range of commentators in Washington.
The State Department decried Iran’s “outlaw regime” on Twitter, vowing to “hold
Iran responsible for directly or indirectly compromising the safety of any
American.” (The sanctions themselves have no practical effect on the FDD’s
operations.)
Though
the FDD called its targeting by Iran a “badge of honor,” Dubowitz himself was
less sanguine when we spoke, saying he’d spent much of the weekend on the phone
with the FBI; he believes that the statement gives Iranian operatives a green
light to target him and his analysts, and noted that the regime has conducted
assassinations on foreign soil in the past. “We’ve been hammered in Iranian
government-controlled media for years,” he told me, noting that he already
sometimes travels with a security detail. “They’ve just decided to formalize
the threat.”
Whether
that threat is real or just a psychological salvo in Tehran’s mutlifaceted
battle with Washington—the two sides have spent the summer trading threats, and
the Iranian shoot-down of a U.S. drone near the Gulf brought Trump to the brink
of a military strike—it nevertheless speaks to the FDD’s double-edged influence
as Washington power player and Tehran bête noire. Iran specialists of varying
degrees of hawkishness are scattered throughout D.C. think tanks such as the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution, and the
Council on Foreign Relations. But no place else has made an institutional
specialty of recommending hard-line Iran policies and offering detailed
proposals for how to implement them the way the FDD has done.
Dubowitz
has been helping design and push forward sanctions on Iran since well before
they became the centerpiece of Trump’s policy toward the country. He was
closely involved in legislation for sanctions on Iran’s central bank and oil
sector in 2011, and in making it harder for Tehran to move money in 2012; he
helped lead the charge against the emerging nuclear deal beginning in 2013,
establishing the FDD as D.C.’s ground zero for research and policy
recommendations aimed at highlighting and fixing what Dubowitz saw as the flaws
in the nuclear agreement. He and his organization attracted headlines in the
process, and were the go-to place for journalists seeking quotes from the
deal’s critics. A 2015 profile in Slate, for example, traced the think tank’s
rise, noting how its employees appeared before Congress and on cable news to
discuss the Iran deal far more frequently than scholars affiliated with
longer-established and better-funded think tanks.
The FDD
lost its 2015 battle with Barack Obama’s White House; Iran and world powers
including the United States reached a deal that summer. Dubowitz wrote in
Foreign Policy then that the deal “was a ticking time bomb,” that “its key provisions
sunset too quickly, and it grants Iran too much leverage to engage in nuclear
blackmail.” Congress, meanwhile, also signaled skepticism—Obama did not submit
the deal to the body for approval as a treaty, but bipartisan majorities in
both houses voted to give themselves oversight of its implementation. Fear of
lifting sanctions on a designated state sponsor of terror was a major reason
why.
Dubowitz
maintained then and now that his goal was to fix the deal, not scrap it
altogether—but Trump came into office vowing to do away with it. Dubowitz and
others within the FDD itself were split on the wisdom of that decision, not to
mention whether and how Trump should pursue a policy of regime change. Dubowitz
said he worked with then–National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster to try to
find a fix, but lost that round, too, when John Bolton took over and Trump
scrapped the accord entirely last year. Since then, Trump has embraced a
strategy the administration calls “maximum pressure,” repeatedly escalating
sanctions on Iran, often in line with policies the FDD has recommended.
In the
meantime came a cascade of coverage putting the FDD at the center of the
campaign currently crushing Iran’s economy, which Dubowitz said has exaggerated
the think tank’s real influence and fed conspiracy theories overseas. The
Nation’s profile: “This Think Tank Is Pushing Regime Change in Iran—And the
White House Is Listening.” The New York Times on Dubowitz himself: “He Was a
Tireless Critic of the Iran Deal. Now He Insists He Wanted to Save It.” That
story, which contained numerous factual errors that the Times later corrected,
described the torrent of tweets that Iran analysts and former Obama officials
aimed at Dubowitz and the FDD, blaming them for Trump leaving the deal.
The
United States and Iran officially have no direct contact, but members of the
Iranian government are active on Twitter and follow U.S. policy debates through
the American media—in much the same way that American analysts and officials
track Iran through its own outlets and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’s
Twitter feed. Zarif condemned the FDD directly on Twitter, in fact, when the
organization got early access to declassified CIA documents describing Iran’s
relationship to al-Qaeda. “A record low for the reach of petrodollars,” he
wrote in 2017. “CIA & FDD fake news w/ selective AlQaeda docs re: Iran
can’t whitewash role of US allies in 9/11.” (The documents, as described by the
FDD’s Long War Journal, describe how some senior al-Qaeda figures sheltered in
Iran after 9/11; 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were citizens of Saudi Arabia, a
U.S. ally and Iranian foe.)
The
tweet points to another important dynamic likely informing the FDD’s reputation
within Iran. “Iran, like much of the Middle East, doesn’t have independent
think tanks,” says Ariane Tabatabai, an Iran analyst at the Rand Corporation.
“The research institutions that exist are more associated with the government.
The foreign ministry has a think tank; [Iranian President Hassan] Rouhani was
at a think tank. They sort of assume that that’s the case here.” Think tanks
including Rand do get funding from the United States and other governments, and
the influence of Gulf money at Washington research institutions in particular
has been controversial, but Tabatabai notes that funders are not supposed to
direct the outcome of research. (The FDD does not get U.S. government funding
and has a policy of not accepting foreign funding, Dubowitz said.)
Drawing
too straight a line between FDD policy papers and Trump’s decision making would
be simplistic. The administration is well stocked with hawks of its own—Bolton
and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to name two—who come by their antipathy to
the Islamic Republic independently. (Bolton in particular has been advocating
regime change in Iran for years.) “We’re a think tank,” Dubowitz said. “We
don’t sit in the Oval Office every day telling President Trump what to do.”
Barbara Slavin, who is among Dubowitz’s fiercest critics and runs the Future of
Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, says it gives the FDD “too much
credit” to suggest that it effectively runs Trump’s Iran policy. Dubowitz and
his colleagues, she says, “have tremendous expertise in terms of sanctions—they
know how to find stuff to sanction.” That gives them influence, but by no means
control.
In the
context of the current face-off between Iran and the United States, the foreign
ministry’s swipe at Dubowitz and the FDD follows a U.S. decision to sanction
Zarif himself. It was another in a series of provocations and
counter-provocations since May, when the administration vowed to sanction
anyone still importing Iranian oil—a move the FDD supported, along with Bolton
and hawks such as Senator Ted Cruz. (The weekend of the foreign ministry’s
announcement, Iran’s Fars News Agency reported that Iran’s Parliament would
take up a bill to sanction Bolton, Cruz, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin,
as well.)
Yet the
same weekend the Iranians were signaling their own perception of the FDD’s
influence, Trump himself showed its limits when he floated the idea of meeting
with Rouhani and perhaps extending the regime a line of credit. Having just
been sanctioned by Iran, Dubowitz responded, characteristically, on Twitter:
“Note to @realDonaldTrump: severe sanctions not premature relief.”
***Kathy
Gilsinan is a staff writer at The Atlantic, covering national security and
global affairs.