Although the United States will need a containment policy if and when Iran gets nuclear weapons, such a program requires a clear understanding of the problems involved and a high level of commitment to make it work. James Lindsay and Ray Takeyh, while making a serious attempt to describe what a containment policy would require, understate the difficulties Washington would face.

By making containment sound too easy, this underestimation may serve to rationalize the Obama administration's lack of serious diplomatic effort to stop Iran from succeeding in its nuclear ambitions. In particular, their analysis makes four questionable assumptions.

First is the premise that the United States' willpower and credibility would be sufficient to make containment work. The authors correctly note that the United States needs "to reassure its friends and allies in the Middle East that it remains firmly committed to preserving the balance of power in the region." But if Iran succeeds in obtaining deliverable nuclear weapons, these countries will have good reason to question the United States' commitment, given how little determination it will have shown in preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear state and its defeat by Tehran in this struggle.

The authors do point out that if Iran gets nuclear weapons, "friends [of the United States] would respond by distancing themselves from Washington," and "foes would challenge U.S. policies more aggressively." Yet they do not draw the obvious conclusion: Iran would emerge as the most powerful regional player, and the United States would become greatly weakened in comparison. Revolutionary Islamist forces in the region -- taking note of Iran's power and perceived success -- would become more aggressive, and many Arab and European governments would try to appease Iran to survive or to avoid trouble. Lindsay and Takeyh dismiss the danger that Arab states will begin appeasing Iran because "pursuing that strategy would mean casting aside U.S. help and betting on the mercy of Tehran." Appeasement, however, need not be an all-or-nothing strategy. Iran's neighbors would likely accept U.S. security guarantees but then hedge their bets by limiting cooperation with Washington while trying hard to please Tehran.

Israel, of course, cannot and will not appease Iran. Lindsay and Takeyh think that "the Israeli government's calculations about Iran would depend on its assessment of the United States' willingness and ability to deter Iran." Since the Obama administration's efforts against Iran have been unimpressive and U.S. support for Israel has become so uncertain, Israel's calculations will not assume confidence in U.S. policy.

In such an environment, merely issuing warnings to Iran, selling more weapons to Persian Gulf Arab governments, and declaring that the United States will protect other states in the region will not be sufficiently convincing to maintain peace and stability. Will Iran believe that Obama would go to war, especially nuclear war, to constrain it? Will Arab rulers bet their regimes' and their personal survival on this expectation? Will Israel entrust its security to a U.S. administration that arguably is the least friendly to Israel in history? To all these questions, the likely answer is no.

The second flawed assumption Lindsay and Takeyh make is that Iran can be expected to act rationally and to respond to pressure with moderation. This could be accurate, but it certainly cannot be assumed. Tehran may not be suicidal, but it is prone to risk taking, and as a highly ideological regime that profoundly misunderstands the West, it is likely to miscalculate in ways that could lead to war. It might underestimate the chance that it will suffer a nuclear attack if it uses nuclear weapons, or it might think that it can go to the brink without setting off a conflict or that it can fool its enemies by secretly transferring arms to others. Iran's nuclear weapons will be controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country's most fanatical institution and the one with the closest ties to terrorist groups, and Iran's defense minister is an internationally wanted terrorist. The modern history of the Middle East is full of examples of less volatile regimes jumping off cliffs: Egypt provoked the 1967 war with Israel, Iraq attacked Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990, and the Palestine Liberation Organization chose war over peace and statehood in 2000. Iran's regime is the farthest thing from a rational state that the United States has confronted since Nazi Germany. Any policy that assumes self-restraint on its part rests on a shaky foundation.

Lindsay and Takeyh's excessive faith in Tehran's common sense leads them to questionable conclusions. They suggest, for example, that Iran would be unlikely to transfer any of its nuclear weapons to Syria or various terrorist groups for fear of the United States' wrath. Yet so far, Washington has responded passively to Iran's cooperation with al Qaeda and to its transfer of conventional weapons to Hamas, Hezbollah, anti-American Islamist groups in Afghanistan, and radical Shiite militias in Iraq. Lindsay and Takeyh argue that Iran's support for militias and terrorists is limited: "Iran has not provided Hezbollah with chemical or biological weapons or Iraqi militias with the means to shoot down U.S. aircraft." This is true, but what about reports that Iran helped with Syria's nuclear program? Their analysis also seems to forget that Iran has already provided advanced antiaircraft systems to Hezbollah and bomb-making materials to Iraqi insurgents for attacking U.S. soldiers. Iran might never transfer weapons of mass destruction, but it is a greater possibility than containment optimists claim. If nothing else, a nuclear Tehran would undoubtedly escalate its transfer of other arms to its clients. Thanks largely to Iran, as U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently pointed out, Hezbollah has more missiles than practically any country.

A third misleading assumption made by Lindsay and Takeyh is that the threat posed by an Iran with nuclear weapons would be limited to the possibility that it would actually use those weapons. In fact, two other possible outcomes -- an upswing in revolutionary Islamism inspired by Iran's apparent power and Tehran's use of nuclear arms to engage in subversive aggression -- might prove to be far bigger problems.

Consider the effect of millions of Muslims concluding that mighty Iran got it right: that revolutionary, anti-American Islamism works and wins. Islamist movements everywhere, including in Europe, would likely become more violent and reckless. Lindsay and Takeyh contend that a U.S.-backed Israel would keep radical groups in the Middle East "in check." Tehran, they claim, "will not risk a nuclear confrontation with Israel to assist" Hamas and Hezbollah. But Iran is already helping those groups at no cost to itself and can ramp up its support without any prospect of a nuclear confrontation with Israel.

Moreover, Israel has no leverage to defeat revolutionary Islamist groups outside the West Bank. Israel cannot overthrow Hamas in the Gaza Strip, thanks to a U.S. policy that in effect protects that regime by restraining Israel's efforts against it. In Lebanon, where Israel has no ability to roll back Iranian influence, the United States will not battle to stop Iran and Syria from taking over by using Hezbollah and other proxies. Once Iran is emboldened by its nuclear weapons and its growing popularity on the Arab street, the Palestinian Authority and other Arab governments will be too fearful of it to move toward peace with Israel. If somehow they do make progress, Iran and its allies will be far better able to sabotage these efforts.

The second tremendous strategic threat will be that Iran would use its nuclear umbrella to protect itself and its clients in Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Yemen, and elsewhere from any attempts at deterrence by the United States or others. As Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of the al Arabiya television network, has written, "An Iranian bomb . . . will not be put to military use; it will be used as a way to change the rules of the game." Iran would not need to attack anyone; it would merely need to ensure that no one else threatened or pressured it as it stepped up its support for terrorism and its efforts to subvert neighboring governments.

A nuclear Iran might engage in brinkmanship, too, using the threat of a disastrous war to intimidate others into doing what it wants. As the Kuwaiti newspaper editor Ahmed al-Jarallah has put it, Arab states would be "hostage to fears of rash actions by Iran that could cause nuclear catastrophes." They would do everything possible to keep Iran happy in order to avoid any risk of being obliterated. This would be true no matter what the United States promised: it would be cold comfort for these countries to know that Iran would also be flattened if it incinerated them.

Finally, Lindsay and Takeyh mistakenly assume that Washington can "persuade the Iranian ruling class that the revisionist game it has been playing is simply not worth the candle." There is little chance that the current rulers could be convinced that they are losing when they clearly seem to be winning. It is far more likely that the revisionist game will yield fruit and that the bomb will make Iran more powerful, respected, and influential. This is especially so since the containment policy being proposed in the U.S. policy debate would cost Iran almost nothing compared to the gains it could be enjoying.

The authors conclude that Washington could live with an Iran that abandoned its nuclear ambitions and respected its neighbors' sovereignty. This is fine in theory, but such an Iran will not exist anytime soon. It took half a century and many proxy wars to contain the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union was a far more cautious, status quo power at the beginning of the Cold War than Iran is today.

One fundamental problem with the plan for containment as put forward by the authors and the current U.S. government is that it is in basic conflict with the Obama administration's strategy to date. The plan is to contain Iran by scaring it -- by persuading Iran's rulers that the U.S. government is so strong and daring that it will smash them if they cross its "redlines" -- and by reassuring Arab regimes threatened by Iran that they are secure under the United States' nuclear umbrella. But the current U.S. government cannot project such an image of itself when it has decried the United States' past use of force and generally rejected the idea of strong U.S. leadership in the world. Without the requisite credibility and genuine toughness, a containment strategy is extremely dangerous. If a nuclear Iran acted aggressively, either the United States would fail to deter it (which would bring a strategic disaster) or it would surprise an understandably skeptical Tehran by retaliating in response to a move that Iran thought it could get away with (which would mean war).

Successfully containing Iran would be extraordinarily difficult and would require major changes in the U.S. government's thinking and behavior. It would first require understanding the inescapable conflict between U.S. interests and revolutionary Islamist movements and recognizing that a regional alliance led by Iran would be an extremely dangerous adversary, one more determined and more ruthless than the United States itself. To contain a nuclear Iran, the United States would have to do more than apply merely one element of its Cold War experience, nuclear deterrence. Instead, it would need to adopt a truly tough, energetic, and comprehensive posture; contest every country allied with Tehran and battle every revolutionary surrogate of Tehran; and employ a gamut of overt and covert military, diplomatic, and economic tools. Given the U.S. government's failure to contemplate such measures so far, it is all the more essential to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. And if Iran does obtain nuclear weapons, the United States is going to have to invoke a containment policy far costlier and bolder than what is now being considered.

 

Available at Amazon.com:

The Great Gamble

At War with the Weather: Managing Large-Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes

 

 

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