Unthinkable (16 page)

However, Turkey also faces a series of countervailing pressures. First is the state of Turkey's economy. Turkey's reemergence as a critical regional and even global power rests on the foundation of its economic revival. That revival in turn has been a product of internal Turkish reforms, engineered by the Erdogan government, that made possible enhanced trade with the Middle East, with Europe, with the United States, and with the Far East. This economic revival is intertwined with critical political reforms. Ankara cannot afford to jeopardize these trade ties for fear that it will undo both Turkey's economic progress and political amity. Pursuing nuclear weapons could do just that.

Although under Erdogan Turkey has tried to be neither East nor West, neither wholly of Europe nor wholly of the Middle East, but something beyond and above both, its ties to Europe and the wider West remain of great importance. The European Union is Turkey's number-one import and export partner, with total trade amounting to €120 billion in 2011. Turkish trade with the EU constituted 42 percent of all Turkish trade in 2010, and the United States added another 5.4 percent. Nothing else comes close in terms of importance to the Turkish economy. By comparison, Iran accounted for only 3.6 percent of Turkish trade that same year.
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The cornerstone of Turkish security remains its membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance, which further ties Ankara to Europe and the United States. From Iraq to Syria to the Balkans to the Caucasus, Ankara has tried to address its foreign policy and security needs through the mechanisms of NATO and the Western alliance.

Turkey will be sensitive to Western and international reactions when it considers a nuclear arsenal, if Iran obtains one.
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Ankara will have to weigh how important it is for Turkey to stand toe-to-toe with a nuclear-armed Iran, or to avoid jeopardizing its crucial security and economic ties to the West. Moreover, those same ties will likely make it easier for Turkey to abjure the nuclear path. As a NATO member, Turkey can be confident that it has the full support of the United States and Europe if there is any threat to Turkey's security. Rather than acquire a nuclear deterrent of its own, Ankara can decide that it already is defended by a nuclear arsenal—America's (and France's and Britain's, for that matter)—an arsenal far more intimidating to Iran than anything that Turkey might ever build. That, and all of the other benefits that Turkey receives from its NATO membership, are likely to make it an asset that Ankara will be loath to discard.

A comprehensive study of Turkey's nuclear policy by the Turkish think tank the Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies (or EDAM) in 2011 concluded that Turkey was unlikely to develop nuclear weapons of its own in response to Iran's moves. In their words:

A Turkish decision to proliferate would seriously complicate its international standing, undermine its economic resurgence and seriously damage relations with the United States and its other NATO allies. Moreover, any Turkish move towards weaponization would draw a harsh rebuke from the United States and would likely be met by an American proposal to strengthen security guarantees, as well as the threat of sanctions if Turkey were to continue its weapons efforts. Given Turkey's non-nuclear history and its long-standing reliance on the NATO security guarantee, it is hard to imagine a scenario where Turkey would simply cast aside its long-standing non-nuclear policy in favor of an independent weapons capability. As a whole, Turkish actions and statements suggest that Ankara will remain committed to the NATO security guarantee, while developing indigenous capabilities to increase its intelligence, surveillance and information management capabilities.
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Just as the events of the Arab Spring have the potential to exacerbate the impact of a nuclear Iran on the instability of the region, so too is there an important interaction between nuclear proliferation and the tumultuous changes that began in 2011. The internal transformations racking the Arab world are likely to dampen proliferation concerns in the short term, but could turn around and amplify them later as stable new Arab states emerge from the chaos.

The events of the Arab Spring were not about foreign policy and international security, and are not likely to be about those issues for some time to come. The revolts sweeping the region since 2011 (2009 in the case of Iran) originated in the economic, political, and social stagnation of the Muslim Middle East.
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All of their governments—the new and the old—are focused on addressing those problems in ways that they never had before. Where the ancien régimes were overthrown, their successors are trying to pull together new, workable alternative systems. If they succeed, they will have to confront the residual economic and social dilemmas. Foreign policy issues, even on matters where their publics care passionately, like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute—have figured low as priorities. That is likely to remain so for some time to come.
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The surviving autocracies, largely monarchies, have continued to pay much greater attention to foreign affairs, particularly the threat from Iran and the Sunni-Shi'a split, which reinforces the greater likelihood that they (in the form of Saudi Arabia and perhaps the UAE) might choose to acquire a nuclear capability to match Iran. Yet even they are being forced to pay far more attention to their internal political, economic, and social dynamics than in the past. Especially for troubled monarchies such as Jordan and Bahrain, but also for the Saudis, who have the same set of internal challenges, the survivors have less time, energy, and resources to put into foreign policy because they have to devote so much more to domestic matters.

Domestic demands should dampen the ardor of these states to make
a major investment in nuclear weapons, at least until their internal problems have been addressed. However, this same dynamic could produce a different set of outcomes over the longer term. One particular aspect of the Arab Spring that could make proliferation a greater problem over time is the emergence of Arab public opinion as a driving force in Arab politics. The Arab autocracies were never quite as inured to popular sentiment as often claimed, and they would take action in response to public pressures (or prejudice) on foreign policy matters to avoid antagonizing their populations unnecessarily, given their much greater interest in preserving public quiescence on domestic matters. A good example of this tendency was the increasing Arab discomfort with the U.S. sanctions and air strikes on Iraq in the late 1990s, a tendency driven by a combination of Saddam's bribes and popular distaste—principally the latter in the Gulf states, which were immune to Saddam's payoffs.

The political upheavals in the Arab world since 2011 have made public opinion a critical factor in Arab foreign policy moving forward. The new democracies will be far more sensitive to public attitudes. Even the remaining autocracies (and the new illiberal democracies that may emerge instead of true democracies in places such as Iraq or even Egypt) will likely be more deferential to popular sentiment for fear of triggering a revolt against themselves. Now that everyone knows that Arab publics will not remain passive forever, all of the governments will have to work much harder to keep them from rising up again.

Arab public opinion is not necessarily more anti-Iranian than that of their elites, and in some ways, it is less so. All public opinion, however, tends to be fickle. It is also susceptible to the siren song of demagogues. As time passes, the leaders of the various Arab states may find it harder to cope with the internal problems that gave rise to the revolutions in the first place, and some of those leaders may choose to try to divert rising popular unhappiness to an external scapegoat. While Israel and the United States are both potential (and traditional) candidates for that role, so too are Iran and Shi'ism. And if Iran becomes the scapegoat of choice,
some of these leaders may decide to push for a nuclear capability—or suggest that one is needed—to confront the scapegoat. (Of course, the same could be true if Israel is the preferred distraction, as it has been in the past.) Indeed, some might even see in North Korea's nuclear history a hope that pursuing nuclear weapons could secure additional economic aid that would help with domestic problems.

The effects of the Arab Spring relate to nuclear proliferation—and the Iranian nuclear issue—in one other potentially unhappy way. As we have seen in the Middle East and as is the case with most revolutions, for many years after the fall of its old regime, a country may be consumed by instability and frequent changes of government. If such states still manage to acquire nuclear weapons their instability will be a cause for alarm, raising the fear that their nuclear arms might fall into the hands of terrorists. Saudi Arabia is the state most experts and policymakers fear will experience revolutionary instability, and it is not out of the question that it would do so after acquiring a nuclear capability of some kind in response to Iran's acquisition of the same. A revolution or civil war in Saudi Arabia would be bad enough because of the potentially catastrophic impact this would have on the global energy market. The addition of nuclear weapons to that mix could make that scenario the worst of all possible worlds.

America's interest in nonproliferation in the Middle East also has a component that transcends our narrow interests in the region. The United States has always feared a more general threat to global security from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), a fear based on two different concerns. The first of these is that the more states that have WMD, the greater the likelihood that such weapons will fall into the hands of terrorists (or other dangerous individuals) or be used accidentally. This fear is statistical: the more countries with a nuclear arsenal,
the greater the probability that one or more will fail to safeguard them properly, the greater the probability that one or more will choose to sell a weapon or give one to terrorists, and the greater the probability that political instability (and even governmental collapse) will lead to “the worst weapons” falling into the hands of “the worst people,” as President George W. Bush warned. Now that North Korea and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, and Iran is making considerable progress in the same direction, these fears are not idle.

The other fear relates to the tendency of nuclear proliferation to cause more nuclear proliferation. In a number of cases, one country's possession of nuclear weapons has convinced another to do the same. America's acquisition of the first nuclear weapons caused the Soviets to develop their own. To deter both superpowers, China decided to acquire its own nuclear arsenal. Fearing the Chinese, the Indians concluded that they too had to have a nuclear weapon, which in turn propelled the Pakistanis down the same path. The more Middle Eastern states acquire nuclear weapons, the more likely that others, inside the region and out, may feel the need to do the same.

Historically, the greatest incentive for countries to refrain from acquiring nuclear weapons has been the threat of sanctions and other forms of punishment. Since 1945, a number of countries have started down the path of acquiring nuclear weapons but ultimately chose not do so. Egypt, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, and Argentina all discontinued nuclear programs before they had acquired a weapon. In every case an important element in their decision to do so was the potential price they believed they would pay in terms of international opprobrium, if not formal sanctions.
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Consequently, the more that countries are able to acquire nuclear weapons (or other WMD) without incurring heavy penalties for doing so, the more that it could convince others that it would be worth it for them to do so as well. Already, Israel, India, and even Pakistan are widely seen as having crossed the nuclear weapons threshold without paying much of a price.
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Moreover, the more states that have successfully proliferated
in the face of international pressure not to do so, the less international pressure that can be expected to be applied against the next state to try, potentially eroding the entire nonproliferation regime over time.

In contrast, there are three well-known cases in which a would-be proliferator paid a terrible price. Saddam's Iraq was invaded to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. Qadhafi's Libya faced harsh sanctions to compel it to give up its nuclear and other WMD programs and then, after it did so, the regime was overthrown with help from the United States and its allies. North Korea succeeded in acquiring nuclear weapons, but only because it cut itself off from the rest of the world and suffered terrible privations for doing so. These three examples have cooled the ardor of many other states that might otherwise have wanted nuclear weapons.

Given this three-versus-three lineup, Iran looks like the rubber match. Yet, more than just being the final game in a best-of-seven series, the outcome with Iran is important because of the unusual public commitment that all the great powers have made to this crisis. Although their preferred tactics vary, all of the great powers have stated that Iran should not be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. In January 2012, China's then-premier Wen Jiabao stated that the Chinese government “adamantly opposes Iran developing and possessing nuclear weapons.”
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The following month, Russian president Vladimir Putin stated, “We're not interested in Iran becoming a nuclear power. . . . It would lead to greater risks to international stability.”
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It is also why both Beijing and Moscow have voted for six UN Security Council resolutions demanding that Iran halt its program.

In light of this unusual consensus among the great powers that Iran cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, if Tehran were nonetheless able to do so, it could send an unhelpful signal to other would-be proliferators. If the world is not willing to stop Iran—whose acquisition of nuclear weapons has been universally condemned—who is going to stop Japan? Or South Korea? Or Brazil? Or Argentina? Those countries could all assume that they would face far less international opposition than Iran as they are seen as so much less threatening than Iran. Consequently,
supporters of nuclear nonproliferation fear that if Iran defies the international community and acquires a nuclear weapon, it could represent a very serious blow to nonproliferation efforts more generally. Some even fear that it could spell the end of the NPT as a tangible restraint on nuclear proliferation.