Brinksmanship Doesn’t Always End in Battle

Is war between the United States, its allies and Iran inevitable? It certainly feels that way right now. This is a tit-for-tat escalation right out of the textbook. Since Iran's Revolutionary Guard Navy seized 15 British sailors in the Persian Gulf last week, Tehran has paraded the captives before TV cameras and elicited apologies from them in a way that probably violates the Geneva Conventions (which bar humiliating treatment of prisoners). Iran's armed forces have fired off new test missiles, while George W. Bush has put on the biggest show of U.S. naval power in the Gulf in years.

British sailors have been detained before, most recently in a similar Gulf incident in 2004. But this time, Tehran shows no sign of releasing its prisoners soon. The standoff is expected to continue while the United States holds Iranian personnel inside Iraq under mysterious circumstances and British Prime Minister Tony Blair petitions the United Nations to secure his sailors' freedom, rather than talking directly with Tehran.

Blair's approach to the U.N. will only aggravate the dispute, says one international diplomat who is familiar with Tehran's thinking, who requested anonymity when speaking of such sensitive matters. After last week's second resolution against its nuclear program, Iran takes a particularly dim view of the  Security Council. Not surprisingly, Iran abruptly dropped a conciliatory offer to release the lone female prisoner, and Tehran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, warned that the prisoners now "may face a legal path"—a clear threat to prosecute them, possibly as spies. "The British have got to come down from their high horse. They've got to work at solving this bilaterally," says the international diplomat. "They shouldn't take the higher moral ground."

A British diplomat told NEWSWEEK that those claims were "outrageous" and said London's ambassador to Iran had been meeting regularly with officials at Tehran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs to gain the captives' release. (Britain declares it has global positioning satellite data that proves its patrol ships were not in Iranian waters, while Iran says the British incursions into its territory had happened no fewer than six times before.) Yet Blair declared Thursday he would not negotiate. And now the British leader, who reportedly told Bush months ago that he opposed war with Iran, may have little choice but to back one.

The savage rhetoric between the two sides evokes the kind of irreconcilable differences that have paved the path to war in the past. Revolutionary fervor still prevails in both capitals—inside Iran, to spread jihadism; inside the Bush administration, to sow the sort of regime change that will end this jihadism. As Henry Kissinger wrote recently in an essay: "So long as Iran views itself as a crusade rather than a nation, a common interest will not emerge from negotiations."

Are Western and Iranian interests really so irreconcilable? No. Believe it or not, there is still time to rediscover that. Even though the U.S. Navy has worried for years that Iranian Revolutionary Guards zooming around in Gulf boats—they were first deployed there during the 1980s Iraq-Iran war—could "swarm our ships," as a former senior U.S. official put it, the sailors who were seized were British, after all, not American. Some Iran observers say this was quite calculated. "Historically, the Iranians are very, very cautious about not going after Americans directly," says Washington-based scholar Trita Parsi. During tense confrontations in the past—the U.S. shoot-down of an Iranian airliner in 1988, for example—Tehran has sometimes proved notably restrained in its reaction.