Iran and the bomb

Posted by Chris

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Seriously, though, one of the major impediments to thinking about these questions is that it's hard to muster a great deal of sympathy for folks like the guys running Iran. Nevertheless, in order to understand what's happening, one needs to understand how things look from their perspective. It's obvious now that the US national security establishment went badly awry by failing to understand how the world looked to Saddam Hussein. In retrospect, as we see, he had some perfectly good reasons for pretending to have more in the way of WMD than he really had.

Moving toward Iran, the regime's leaders are unpleasant people, and it's certainly possible that they're hell-bent on acquiring a nuclear weapon no matter what and intend to use this weapon to grievously injure America's fundamental interests. But it's also definitely the case that the Iranian government has long had some perfectly good reasons to feel threatened by its many (Pakistan, Russia, Israel) near-nuclear neighbors which have now been joined by some very good reasons to feel threatened by the United States of America. It may be the case that this latter set of concerns is really all (along with some prestige considerations) that's driving the Iranian nuclear program. If that's the case, then a deal should be workable. But a workable deal wouldn't have the form of a cash-for-promises kind of thing. Instead, the US (and, to some extent, other allies) would need to offer Iran concessions that resolve its fundamental security concerns. With something like that on the table, were the offer to be rejected it would be reasonable to conclude that the nuclear program is not primarily defensive in nature. Last but by no means least, one must keep in mind that the consequences of military action would almost certainly be very very bad.

Type "Iran" into the search bar to the side to confirm that Iranian mullahs with nukes give me the willies. But I would like to know what kind of agreement would actually address Iran's "fundamental security concerns". Likewise, I'd like to hear more about what is "primarily defensive in nature".

Would a guarantee from the U.S. to refrain from attacking address Iran's fundamental security concerns? Really, what would that guarantee be worth? And, just as important, what would Iran's leadership think that guarantee would be worth? What recourse would Iran have if the U.S. started nibbling away at the agreement? After all, there are a lot of ways that the U.S. could seriously threaten Iran short of commencing major hostilities. What happens if the U.S. takes a jab or two at Iran via a proxy, like Israel? Or if Israel goes freelancing, with half-hearted U.S. support? Or if Israel goes freelancing, against the wishes of the U.S., but with U.S. military hardware and after-the-fact diplomatic and military support to deal with the consequences? And anyway, as the whole debate about preventative/preemptive war ought to remind us, questions about what is primarily defensive in nature are awfully slippery. If you ask me - no one did, alas - the mini-nuke bunker busters currently under development within the U.S. military aren't defensive in nature. Neither are a lot of things that seem to come naturally to the Bush administration (or the Clinton administration, for that matter). So will U.S. negotiators say that Iran ought to limit itself to military programs that are primarily defensive in nature, unlike the U.S.? And how will their Iranian counterparts feel about that? And how will the way they feel about that influence the way they think about it? (Really, issues of prestige and pride matter here, as Yglesias points out. Believe it or not, sometimes the rest of the world finds hypocrisy galling. Sometimes they find hypocrisy galling enough to dig in their heels on issues where a cost/benefit analysis suggests they shouldn't.)

My fundamental lack of sympathy for hardline Iranian leaders encourages me to regard the prospect of a nuclear Iran with real anxiety. But here is Iran's situation: It sits in the heart of a very dangerous neighbourhood, immediately beside a radically destabilized sworn enemy, which is currently occupied by another sworn enemy - a nuclear hyper power, no less. Israel, yet another sworn enemy, and itself a nuclear power, waits and watches and rattles its sabres. Another neighbour, Pakistan, has nuclear weapons, and it isn't too far fetched to imagine the country some day falling into the clutches of hardline Sunni extremists. Forget whose fault any of this is. Iran's leaders would have to be bonkers to give up the prospect of nuclear weapons - at least, short of concessions from the U.S. (and probably others) that the U.S. (and others) could never accept, and perhaps even shouldn't (after all, everyone else has good reasons to protect themselves too). Yglesias sees Iran's strategic situation at least as clearly as I do. It's interesting that we come away with such different senses of what Iran would, could, or should be willing to agree to.

Here is all that we - the rest of the world, that is - can really do: In the short term, we can encourage and support anti-proliferation regimes, which do at least slow the pace of nuclear proliferation, if nothing else. We can buy off countries that do choose to cooperate, e.g., Libya. We can strive to reduce the most blatant forms of hypocrisy on the part of the recognize nuclear powers. We can (peacefully) promote genuine democratic movements, on the theory that in the very long-run, a democratic world will eventually look much more like present Europe than early 20th Century Europe. And we can work to find just solutions to the conflicts which may some day spin out of control into full-blown nuclear holocausts.

But that, I'm afraid, is all that we can do. It's a pity we're not doing it better.

Posted by Chris at November 21, 2004 12:37 PM