by Bret Stephens
Advocates of containment generally believe that Iran's ambitions are limited and regional. As Lindsay and Takeyh write,
the regime has survived because its rulers have recognized the limits of their power and have thus mixed revolutionary agitation with pragmatic adjustment. Although it has denounced the United States as the Great Satan and called for Israel's obliteration, Iran has avoided direct military confrontation with either state. It has vociferously defended the Palestinians, but it has stood by as the Russians have slaughtered Chechens and the Chinese have suppressed Muslim Uighurs. Ideological purity, it seems, has been less important than seeking diplomatic cover from Russia and commercial activity with China. Despite their Islamist compulsions, the mullahs like power too much to be martyrs.
As for Iran's nuclear bid, this too, Lindsay and Takeyh believe, is intended to serve limited aims:
During the presidencies of Hashemi Rafsanjani and Muhammad Khatami, nuclear weapons were seen as tools of deterrence against the United States and Saddam Hussein's regime, among others. The more conservative current ruling elite... sees them as a critical means of ensuring Iran's preeminence in the region. ... And this may be all the more the case now that Iran is engulfed in the worst domestic turmoil it has known in years: these days, the regime seems to be viewing its quest for nuclear self-sufficiency as a way to revive its own political fortunes.
This analysis, however, omits a few key facts. Iran has been waging war against Israel for decades via Hezbollah and Hamas. Iran also had a direct operational role in the bombings of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 and of the Jewish community center there in 1994. The man chiefly responsible for the last of those attacks, Ahmad Vahidi, is today Iran's defense minister. Iran has also carried out high--profile assassinations of its enemies on European soil; taken British sailors hostage; put U.S., Canadian, and French nationals on trial (and in jail) on patently bogus charges; and, famously, imposed a death sentence on British novelist Salman Rushdie.
Moreover, Iran's seizure of the U.S. Embassy in 1979 was a direct attack on sovereign U.S. territory and an act of war by any legal standard. Iran almost certainly had a hand in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, in which 241 American servicemen perished, while the FBI has long believed that Iran was also responsible for the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing that killed another 19 Americans. Then there was the war in Iraq, during which Iran did little to disguise the fact that it supplied Shiite militias, and perhaps also Sunni terrorist groups, with sophisticated, armor-piercing munitions responsible for the deaths of scores, perhaps hundreds, of U.S. soldiers.
Iran is thus very far from being the pragmatic and mostly circumspect power depicted by advocates of containment. On the contrary, the regime has stood out since its earliest days for its willingness to pick fights with powerful enemies, to undertake terrorist strikes at great range, to court international opprobrium and moral outrage, to test international diplomatic patience, and to raise the stakes every time the world seemed ready to come to terms. In short, it has pursued policies that have seemed almost calculated to enshrine its status as a global pariah.
Why has it done this? Much as containment advocates would discount the fact, Iran's leadership remains faithful to the regime's founding principles. "We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah," said the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1980. "For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam remains triumphant in the rest of the world." More than a quarter-century later, Ahmadinejad would send a letter to President Bush that would sound a similar theme. "Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the Liberal democratic system," he wrote. "We increasingly see that people around the world are flocking towards a main focal point—that is the Almighty God. ... My question for you is: 'Do you not want to join them?'"
These ideas may sound deranged to us, but it would be foolish not to give them their due. Like other revolutionary regimes—the Nazis, the Bolsheviks, and, let's face it, the Americans—the Iranian regime makes a philosophical claim, a claim it believes has relevance not only for Iranians and Muslims but also for all mankind. In this sense Iran, as a country, amounts to little more than an accident of geography and culture. What matters to this regime, what sustains and motivates it, is a set of ideas about justice that is bound by neither geography nor culture.
No wonder the Obama administration and its allies in Europe have had such a difficult time trying to get the regime to see reason; by the regime's lights, it is the rest of the world that fails to see reason, because the rest of the world is adhering to an inequitable and self-serving international system. No wonder, too, that the regime has pressed forward with its ideas for reordering that system by whatever means it has at its disposal; in the absence of those ideas, the revolution would be a failure even if the regime itself managed to survive. To desist from its efforts to seek Israel's destruction, or maintain a confrontational stance toward the West, or build a bomb is not simply something the regime will not do. Rather, it cannot do it, lest it betray its deepest purposes.
It is for this reason that the regime has consistently been willing to take apparently reckless risks for the sake of its objectives—and would most likely take many more such risks if it had a nuclear arsenal at its disposal. Then again, it also has learned something from a 30-year experience of watching its enemies routinely back away from confrontation. This was true of the Carter administration vis-à-vis the embassy hostages, and of the Reagan administration vis-à-vis the hostages in Lebanon. It was true of Israel's failure to deliver the coup de grace against Hezbollah in 2006, and of the failure of the Bush administration to avenge the murder of its soldiers in Iraq or greenlight an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities in 2008.
Above all, it has been true of the West's collective failure to stop Iran's nuclear programs in their tracks. As of this writing, the U.S. can point to three UN Security Council resolutions that rebuke Iran for its nuclear deceptions and impose relatively trivial sanctions. But Iran can also note with satisfaction that it is mainly the West that has been in retreat, allowing Iran to cross one supposed red line after another without consequence. As Ahmadinejad noted last December: "A few years ago, they [the West] said we had to completely stop all our nuclear activities. Now look where we are today."
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The combination of Iranian aggressiveness and Western diffidence has consequences for how a containment strategy would play out against a nuclear Iran. Behavior, after all, is largely a function of experience: why would a nuclear Iran, emboldened after successfully defying years of Western threats and sanctions, believe that the U.S. was seriously prepared to enforce this or that red line for the sake of containment? More likely, the U.S. would be at continual pains trying to restrain its allies, Israel above all, from responding too forcefully against Iranian provocations, lest they "destabilize" the region.
Consider also the red lines that Lindsay and Takeyh say would be essential for a policy of containment to work. Washington, they believe, would have to "publicly pledge to retaliate by any means it chooses if Iran used nuclear weapons against Israel"; it would have to tell Tehran that it "would strike preemptively, with whatever means it deems necessary, if Iran ever placed its nuclear forces on alert"; and it "should hold Tehran responsible for any nuclear transfer, whether authorized or not."
Merely to list these conditions underscores the risks the U.S. would be required to run to enforce a containment policy. And given its habits of provocation, Iran would almost certainly be inclined to test America's mettle at the earliest opportunity, probably by finding ambiguous ways to transgress America's red lines. What would the U.S. do, for instance, if Iran found ways to transfer components of a nuclear program, perhaps of a dual-use variety, to Syria? Would that suffice as a casus belliagainst a nuclear Iran as far as the Obama administration was concerned? Or, as so often has been the case in the past, would the administration be content to express "grave concern" and perhaps refer the matter to the International Atomic Energy Agency?
One might also ask why Iran shouldn't consider making wholesale nuclear-technology transfers to other parties if that suited its needs. After all, there is a precedent here: following North Korea's first nuclear test in 2006, President Bush warned that "the transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable for the consequences of such action." Yet when Pyongyang was exposed in 2007 as having made precisely that kind of transfer to Syria, it paid no price (other than the loss, at Israel's hands, of its investment). On the contrary, thanks to a bit of diplomatic gamesmanship, North Korea was soon rewarded by the Bush administration by being removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Iran is well aware of this history, just as it is aware that the Bush administration had previously been adamant that a North Korean nuclear test would be "unacceptable." For too long, every red line the U.S. has drawn for both Pyongyang and Tehran has been exposed as a bluff. Yet the essence of any successful containment strategy is that the red lines cannot be bluffs—and, what's more, that the country being contained must be convinced of that. When America's containment of the Soviet Union began in the late 1940s, the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still fresh. By contrast, the U.S. would be moving toward a containment policy toward Iran following years of hollow threats and a perceptibly weakening will to thwart its ambitions. For an American president to pledge today that the U.S. would bear any burden, meet any hardship, or support any friend to contain Iran would simply not be taken seriously by the leadership of Tehran.
Nor would such a pledge carry much weight among America's traditional allies in the region, who are already openly expressing doubts about U.S. seriousness. Speaking at a press conference alongside Hillary Clinton in February, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal cast doubt on the administration's sanctions efforts and, by implication, the merits of a containment strategy: "Sanctions are a long-term solution," he said. "They may work, we can't judge. But we see the issue in the shorter term maybe because we are closer to the threat. ... So we need an immediate resolution rather than a gradual resolution." Why would Saudi Arabia—or, for that matter, Egypt, Iraq, the Gulf emirates, or Israel—be more inclined to put its trust in U.S. security guarantees after America had failed to stop Iran from going nuclear than it is now?
The answer, say the advocates of containment, is that these countries wouldn't have much choice: American power would remain their single best hedge against Iranian encroachments. But that may not be true, at least in the long term. Sunni states, both Arab and non-Arab, could also choose to compete with a nuclear Iran. Or they could seek to cooperate with it. Both possibilities would be ruinous for U.S. interests.
Competition with Iran would most likely take the form of Arab (or Sunni) states developing nuclear arsenals of their own. In recent years, Turkey, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and even Yemen have all expressed an interest in building nuclear power plants, ostensibly for civilian reasons, though with other purposes plainly in mind. Egypt, which has not had full diplomatic ties with Iran since it signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1979, and which more recently has tangled with the Islamic republic over its support of Hamas in Sinai and Gaza, has been even less circumspect in advertising its intentions. "We don't want nuclear arms in the area but we are obligated to defend ourselves," Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said in 2007. "We will have to have the appropriate weapons. It is irrational that we sit and watch from the sidelines when we might be attacked at any moment."
Then there is the cooperative approach. Turkey has mended its previously frayed relations with Iran (as it has with Syria), with the effect that it is now on the point of becoming a de facto enemy of Israel and a diplomatic thorn in America's side (as Michael Rubin explains in his article, beginning on page 81). The rest of the Muslim states in the region hardly need Iran to persuade them to hate Israel. But they do need to be persuaded that a nuclear Iran would respect their sovereignty and that Iran would exercise its newfound regional pre-eminence with a light hand. Nothing prevents Iran from doing so. Over time, Iran could easily apply some combination of inducements and pressure to persuade Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain to shut down their U.S. military bases. Iran could also learn from its mistakes in Iraq—where its brazen and often violent tactics provoked a popular backlash—to mend relations with its neighbor while promoting the fortunes of its numerous and influential political sympathizers.
Additional scenarios come to mind, in various combinations. What happens, say, if Egypt develops an indigenous nuclear arsenal as a counterweight to Iran—and then its regime collapses, Iranian-style, to a Muslim Brotherhood–led Islamic revolution? What happens, too, if the Saudi monarchy falls to some of its most radical elements after it has purchased a nuclear arsenal from Pakistan? Such scenarios may be unlikely, but they are far from implausible—and there are many of them. And if any of them were to come to pass, they would almost certainly force America's effective withdrawal from much of the Middle East, leaving Israel to fend for itself.
Still, the most frightening scenario of all would be a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran. Most advocates of containment believe the possibility is highly remote, since Iran would not risk its own annihilation by attacking the Jewish state. But as even Lindsay and Takeyh acknowledge, "Iran's possession of a bomb would create an inherently unstable situation, in which both parties would have an incentive to strike first: Iran, to avoid losing its arsenal, and Israel, to keep Tehran from using it." To manage that risk, the authors place great weight on Jerusalem's "assessment of the United States' willingness and ability to deter Iran." Yet as with its Arab neighbors, Jerusalem's assessment is unlikely to be positive following Washington's failure to prevent Iran from going nuclear in the first place.
Bret Stephens is a deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page and the author of the paper's Global View, a weekly column.
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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