Unthinkable (44 page)

Looking back on that history, a number of themes emerge. First, containment is not a “one-size-fits-all” policy. Against Iran, the United States has employed both passive and aggressive versions. This flexibility makes it useful to Washington, which has been able to dial up or scale back the pressure on Tehran based on many factors—strategic, political, and otherwise.

Second, although American administrations have typically played up whatever they have added onto the foundation of containment, American policy toward Iran has been quite consistent over the years because it has always been built around containment. The attempted openings to Iran under Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, and Obama were important efforts to see if there was a way beyond containment, but none ever succeeded in finding it. Likewise, the efforts to pressure or punish Iran under Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama always had the goal of preventing Iran from causing mayhem beyond its borders—keeping it contained.

Looking forward, all of America's options toward Iran except one would require the continuation of containment in one form or another
because containment will remain necessary as long as the Iranian regime remains our adversary. The conditional engagement on offer as part of the Obama administration's carrot-and-stick approach would have to start as just a tactic—a way of managing the confrontation, like détente during the Cold War—until Iran stopped pursuing objectives incompatible with our security. Over time, if Iran were to halt activities that threatened American interests, engagement might become a path out of containment to peaceful relations, but that would be a long way off and it would start from the basis of containment. Likewise, sanctions and other forms of pressure might someday cause Iran to make significant compromises on its nuclear program, but again, until Tehran is willing to engage in a real rapprochement with the United States, even that would not eliminate the need to contain an anti-American Iranian regime, although it would ease the costs of doing so. Regime change might someday produce a new Iranian government, one that did not threaten U.S. security or interests, which would then allow us to jettison containment in favor of normal relations. However, until that day, a regime change policy would have to rely on containment to play “defense” until its “offensive” elements brought about a transformation in Tehran. Ultimately, regime change is just a policy that would simply emphasize the “offensive” aspects of containment. Even air strikes, by Israel or the United States, would still require containment to prevent Iran from reconstituting and retaliating afterward. Indeed, air strikes are really a means of
bolstering
containment—not superseding it—by trying to deprive Iran of its nuclear potential.

Ultimately, the only approach that offers a true alternative to containment is an invasion of Iran. Yet that is the policy the United States is least likely to pursue, barring some unforeseen and unlikely Iranian provocation of such magnitude as to rearrange the priorities of the American people. That is what happened on 9/11 and it would doubtless require an Iranian misstep of equivalent proportions to move the American people to accept a commensurate military effort one more time.

The last pattern threading the history of America's containment of Iran
is that the United States has almost never wanted to acknowledge that it was practicing containment of Iran. Several U.S. administrations went to great pains to describe their policy toward Iran as something other than containment because the strategy is typically seen as too weak by the right and too strong by the left. The right dislikes it because it often feels purely defensive and only indirectly exerts pressure to halt Iran's nuclear program, let alone bring about the end of the regime altogether. The left dislikes it because it requires frequent confrontation and the occasional threat of conflict with Iran. The only time that an American administration honestly described its policy as containment, under Clinton, critics from the left and the right shelled it. The Obama administration has denied that it is relying on containment, even a little bit. It may be a fiction, but unfortunately, in American politics today, it is a necessary fiction. Given how badly mischaracterized containment has become, acknowledging that American policy toward Iran involves any element of containment—let alone that the administration recognizes that containment will likely have to remain the basis for U.S. policy toward Iran in the future—would cause a political firestorm.

But that's not the only reason that no U.S. administration, and certainly not the Obama administration, is likely to acknowledge that containment is its policy. The other is that embracing containment might signal to Iran, to Israel, and to other American allies that the United States no longer cares about Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability. That this reading would be a severe misrepresentation of containment would be immaterial if that were what the Iranians and our allies believed. That could be disastrous for our efforts to convince Iran to make compromises on its nuclear program and to keep Israel from launching a military operation that could cause more problems than it solves.

In the future, it seems likely that the Obama administration and its successors will continue to pursue one or another version of containment but will insist on calling it “pressure” or “conditional engagement,” or something else like that. It would be better if we could call our Iran policy by its right name, but that seems unlikely.

Many Americans seem exasperated with our allies in the Middle East, but I can only find sympathy for them. None of them—not even Israel—has the ability to deal with Iran's nuclear threat alone. Short of employing nuclear weapons of its own against Iran, which is a nonstarter except if its national existence is threatened, Israel could damage but not eliminate Iran's nuclear program. The Turks, Iraqis, Saudis, and other Gulf states have even fewer options. Only the United States could eliminate that threat altogether, and if the United States opts to rely on deterrence and containment, our Middle Eastern allies have no choice but to support that strategy.

An American decision to adopt containment is a decision made by the United States for the West as a whole. If we choose containment, our allies must choose it, too. It seems only fair in that if we choose war it is we, the American people, who will be expected to absorb most of the costs and risks. The Iranians would doubtless attack Israel and the GCC states in the event of a U.S.-led war, but they would come after the United States, too, and we would have to pay in blood and treasure to do whatever was necessary to bring the fight to a successful resolution, including perhaps invading and occupying Iran.

However, it is also why we as Americans need to sympathize with the endless warnings coming from Israel in particular about the dangers of a nuclear Iran. The Gulf states have echoed these warnings, but they have preferred to do so in private. Thus it has been Israeli voices that have been the mainstays urging immediate action and predicting dire consequences if action is not forthcoming. There is no question that this can be tiresome. However, it is important to recognize that Israel's threats and warnings have been useful and even necessary.

Without unremitting Israeli (and GCC) threats, the world would have forgotten about the Iranian nuclear program long ago. There is good reason to believe that the Iranians would have nuclear weapons already. In 2002, and for several years thereafter, the world did not want to be
bothered by Iran's nuclear program. The Europeans, led by the French, British, and Germans, did some important things, but even they were not considering the kind of sanctions that have since been enacted. The United States, preoccupied by al-Qa'ida, Afghanistan, and Iraq at that time, wanted even less to do with Iran. As for the rest of the world, no one outside the Middle East could rouse themselves to worry about Iranian nuclear weapons—especially after it was revealed that the warnings of Saddam's WMD had been wildly incorrect. On numerous occasions since, had the Israelis not threatened to go to war, it would have been virtually impossible for those few countries working to do something about the Iranian program to secure international support for sanctions. Diplomats from Scandinavian, Mediterranean, Latin American, and East Asian states have all admitted—often grudgingly—over the years that had it not been for the constant Israeli threats to go to war, their governments would never have supported this economic sanction or that diplomatic initiative. In that sense, though we may find these repeated warnings irksome, we should recognize that they were necessary to keep the great powers and the wider international community as focused on Iran as they have been since 2002.

THE REALITY AND HYPERBOLE OF EXISTENTIAL THREATS.
Although the United States should remain sympathetic to the plight of its regional allies, we cannot allow their fears to overwhelm our interests and experience. Some Israelis in public and some Gulf Arabs in private can hit hysterical heights of panic when it comes to the “existential threat” they face from a nuclear Iran. They see this fear as requiring that anything and everything possible be done to prevent it.

Is a nuclear Iran an “existential” threat to Israel and the GCC states? Technically speaking, yes. Given the small size of the populations of Israel and the GCC states and their heavy concentration in just a few cities, once Iran has an arsenal of five to ten weapons that it can deliver against any of those countries, it will have a theoretical capability to wipe out
anywhere from 20 to 90 percent of their populations. That sounds terrifying, and it should.

Yet the reality is far more mundane. Since the advent of the nuclear era, a great many countries have lived, and even thrived, under an existential threat. For forty years, the United States feared a Soviet nuclear attack that would have incinerated our nation. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. Schoolchildren were taught to “duck and cover” under their desks. Buildings in cities across the country boasted signs designating them as fallout shelters. Yet, the country survived. In fact, we did quite well. We still live with such an existential threat: Russia retains about 2,500 nuclear weapons that could end our existence.

The Western European nations shared this threat during the Cold War, perhaps even more than we did, because the thousands of tactical nuclear weapons deployed on either side of the Iron Curtain made a local nuclear exchange somewhat more likely than a homeland exchange between superpowers. Yet under that shadow Western Europe developed into one of the most prosperous and peaceful lands history has ever known. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the other Asian “tigers” faced (and still face) existential threats from both Russia and China, but their economic performance and cultural development outstripped that of even Europe and the United States. The existential threat of nuclear obliteration did not frighten off investment, cause mass emigration, or distort domestic policies (although it monopolized foreign policies).

India has been locked in a vicious struggle with Pakistan since the violent birth of the two nations in 1947. Since then, they have fought four wars and experienced any number of crises. Although most Indians want to see an end to the conflict and have Pakistan leave them alone, much of Pakistan's elite remains obsessed with India—scheming to get back all of Kashmir, seeing Indian plots behind every problem in Pakistan, fearing Indian attack, and launching repeated attacks against India for various convoluted reasons. Pakistan is overrun with terrorists and violent extremists,
its economy and social systems are in shambles, and it is waging guerrilla wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Many analysts fear that the state is on the brink of collapse.
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Pakistan also possesses something on the order of one hundred nuclear weapons aimed at India and has continued to attack India and provoke nuclear crises with New Delhi even after it crossed the nuclear threshold sometime between 1985 and 1990.
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If Pakistan launched those hundred nuclear weapons at India's fifty to one hundred largest urban areas, tens of millions of people would die, and India would effectively cease to exist as a functional nation. India has every reason to fear a Pakistani launch either stemming from escalation out of a crisis or as a result of the implosion of the tenuous Pakistani state, yet India has survived. And it too has thrived, posting phenomenal rates of economic growth and achieving something of a high-tech miracle.

North Korea first obtained nuclear weapons in the 1990s, although it did not test until 2006. Today it is believed to have as many as ten nuclear weapons. If it launched those weapons at Japan or South Korea's largest cities, they would kill tens of millions of people and would cripple both nations. The “Hermit Kingdom” is a land so bizarre, so belligerent, so impenetrable, and so unpredictable that it makes Iran look like Canada by comparison. North Korea hurls all manner of threats at South Korea. During the spring 2013 crisis, Pyongyang repeatedly and luridly threatened to launch nuclear weapons at South Korea and the United States.
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Earlier that year, a North Korean diplomat publicly threatened the South with “final destruction,” at the United Nations Conference on Disarmament, of all places.
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In 2012, the official North Korean army Supreme Command issued a statement announcing to South Korea that it was about to “reduce all the rat-like groups [the government of South Korea] and the bases for provocations to ashes in three or four minutes, (or) in much shorter time, by unprecedented peculiar means and methods of our own style.”
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In 2011, the North Korean military released an official statement threatening to turn South Korea's Blue House—their equivalent of the White House—into a “sea of fire” if South Korean forces ever fired a single shot into North Korea's territory.
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