Unthinkable (45 page)

Israelis and Gulf Arabs sometimes respond that they are much smaller and therefore more vulnerable to nuclear obliteration than India and even South Korea (at least in population). But when it comes to nuclear weapons and existential threats, size does not matter. Pakistan has the ability to do to India what a nuclear Iran would have the ability to do to Israel. North Korea has the ability to do to South Korea what a nuclear Iran would have the ability to do to Saudi Arabia. And both Pakistan and North Korea have fought far more and threatened far more than Iran has toward either Israel or the GCC states.

I am painfully and personally aware of the tragic history of the Jewish people and the many perils the state of Israel has had to endure. I have written extensively on the military history of the Middle East. I am a great proponent of the U.S.-Israel strategic relationship and have defended it, in print and out loud, and have been viciously attacked for doing so, both in public and behind my back.
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I do not dismiss the fears of the Israeli people or the real security needs of their state. Yet that does not mean that Israel is somehow different from every other nation and that those experiences somehow should not apply to issues related to Israeli security—especially when they also entail enormous import for the security of the United States and other countries. Polls of Israeli public opinion show a huge majority of Israelis who do
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share this exaggerated fear that Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons means their own annihilation. With nuclear weapons, the risk is always there, but we have to separate the risk from the reality.

To counteract the hysteria with a bit of understatement, it is unquestionable that Iran's acquisition of a nuclear capability would be a major adjustment for Israel and the Gulf states. It would cause a number of significant problems and threats. And technically, it would constitute an existential threat to all of them, just as the Soviet Union constituted an existential threat to the United States, Europe, and East Asia. Just as Pakistan constitutes an existential threat to India. Just as North Korea constitutes an existential threat to South Korea and Japan—the only country on earth to experience the horrors of atomic attack. Every nation
that lives under the existential threat of nuclear annihilation must work to ensure that that threat is never realized, and there are no guarantees in this world that they never will be. Containing a nuclear threat always entails some element of risk, and it must be pursued assiduously to reduce that risk to an infinitesimal, irreducible minimum. But we should not exaggerate that risk out of all proportion.

The word
existential
is frightening, but there is no reason it should take over our lives or the lives of any other nation. Many generations have lived, loved, and prospered under the distant specter of a nuclear threat. Few of them suffered for it, and most never noticed it at all. We should not—we cannot—ignore the dangers of a nuclear Iran or the challenges of containing it, but we must distinguish the real threats from the exaggerated.

I
f the United States is to contain Iran even after it develops a nuclear capability, possibly even a full-blown arsenal, it will have to lean on deterrence.
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And not just deterrence, but the related concept of extended deterrence.
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If deterrence means convincing Iran not to attack the United States, extended deterrence means convincing Iran not to attack our allies.

Both deterrence and extended deterrence are age-old concepts, common in strategic writings going back thousands of years. They frequently succeed, but they can also fail—and when they fail they fail in an ugly fashion, with wars and conquests. During the Cold War, with its specter of nuclear annihilation, these subjects were practiced as a high art. As early as 1946, the brilliant Yale strategist Bernard Brodie recognized the simple yet compelling logic of nuclear deterrence. That because the destructive power of nuclear weapons is so enormous, it is impossible for
anyone who is not irrational to understand what would happen to him and his society if he were subject to a nuclear attack.
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And because it only took an attack by a small number of nuclear weapons, perhaps no more than one, it was unlikely that either side in a nuclear exchange would not suffer unacceptable damage, and it was therefore unlikely that either side would take any action that might result in such a nuclear exchange. Thus, as Brodie would summarize later, what distinguished nuclear deterrence from conventional deterrence was that it was intolerable that deterrence should fail for either side in a nuclear balance, as it was unmistakable what would happen to them both.
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This logic was the origin of what came to be called “mutual assured destruction” (MAD), the foundation of Cold War strategic thought.

Since the Second World War and the birth of the nuclear era, the logic of nuclear deterrence and extended deterrence has been put to the test a number of times. Remarkably, the two have a perfect track record so far. The reasons that nuclear deterrence has been so successful—rooted in the simple and compelling concepts first articulated by Brodie—are well understood. Many intelligent people have argued that they are foolproof, and that we should rely on them without any second thoughts.
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Still, there have been several dozen instances in which nuclear deterrence or extended deterrence has been challenged since 1945. The lessons are more complicated than a simple affirmation of the power of deterrence. None has resulted in a nuclear exchange, or even a single nuclear explosion. None has ended with a nuclear power being conquered, nor even one of their allies conquered despite an explicit threat of nuclear retaliation. But some have come too close for comfort. The Berlin crisis. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The 1973 Arab-Israeli War. The Sino-Soviet clashes of the 1960s. The Kargil War of 1999. We just don't know how close or how far any of these events was from triggering a nuclear war, but these and several others should make us cautious about assuming that nuclear deterrence cannot fail. As powerful as the logic of Brodie's absolute weapon has proven, humans have an extraordinary capacity to err.

At a bare minimum, nuclear deterrence requires that your adversary is rational.

At least some Americans, Israelis, and others argue that Iran's leadership fails even this most basic criterion. Bret Stephens of the
Wall Street Journal
, whose work I admire even when I disagree with it, has written, “To suggest that there is some universal standard of ‘pragmatism' or ‘rationality' where Iran and the rest of the world can find common ground is a basic (if depressingly common) intellectual error.”
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Stephens's evidence of Iranian irrationality is their ideology, their willingness to pick fights with stronger powers, their willingness to endure tremendous suffering in pursuit of their goals, and their support for terrorism. Despite my respect for him, I find Stephens unpersuasive here.

Let's take each of Stephens's concerns in reverse order, starting with the notion that Iranian support for terrorism constitutes a basis to doubt their rationality. As Richard L. Kugler, a wise old former RAND analyst, put it,

As a general rule, historical experience shows that even nation-states with extremist ideologies tend to value their interests and survival enough to act prudently when faced with credible guarantees that they will be frustrated in pursuing their goals and/or punished severely if they commit aggression or otherwise behave in menacing ways. . . . Although the future is uncertain, Iran's fundamentalist Islamic ideology is not prone to committing national suicide, and thus far its government has demonstrated a capacity to calculate carefully in ways suggesting that while its policies are self-interested, they are often guided by rational perceptions of costs and benefits. Making selective use of suicide bombers to target Israel entails limited risks and costs—only the suicide bombers lose their lives, not the people directing them. Exposing the entire country of Iran, including its leaders, to U.S. nuclear retaliation is a quite different, less attractive proposition.
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Indeed, Iranian behavior overwhelmingly demonstrates ruthlessness and pragmatism, not irrationality. Iran's support for terrorism, even suicide terrorism, does not make it irrational. In many ways, it speaks to a cunning rationality. As Kugler notes, suicide terrorism may be irrational for the suicide bomber, but for the state or group controlling him, it is an effective form of attack against a powerful adversary. As David Menashri, the dean of Israel's Iran experts, has argued, nothing could be more pragmatic, or more ruthless, than Iran's support for regional terrorists and other violent extremists because it allows them to strike at their enemies where they, the Iranians, are strong and their enemies weak, and to minimize the danger of escalation.
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Iran's willingness to endure severe costs is at times extreme, but hardly insane. Throughout history a great many countries have refused to bow down to the will of another and endured extreme hardships for their defiance. In many cases, we laud those examples as heroic. Perhaps a more rational nation than Churchill's Britain would have made peace with Hitler's Germany in 1940 rather than withstand the Blitz, the U-boat blockade, and other horrors, yet we are all grateful that they did, and we remember it as their “finest hour.” We don't agree with the Iranian narratives that justify these extreme sacrifices—and not all Iranians do, either—but that does not make them irrational. Sending tens of thousands of young Iranians into battle with nothing but a Koran and a prayer, only to be slaughtered by Iraqi artillery and machine guns, may seem horrific and wasteful, but was it irrational? Was British leadership irrational to send tens of thousands of young men to die from German artillery and machine guns at the Somme and Passchendaele? How about the hundreds of thousands of Russians whom Stalin sent into battle without weapons during the Second World War? Such conduct may be obscene, but it is all too rational from the perspective of the leadership.

Similarly, smaller nations have stood up to larger nations time and again throughout history. Just as often, they were lionized by some and demonized by others for doing so, based on whose side one was on. The American people have a great fondness for the state of Israel, which defied
a coalition of much larger Arab states for at least twenty-five years (and eventually won). In 1948, the odds were much worse for Israel against the Arabs than they have ever been for the Islamic Republic against the United States. Again, we object to Iran's characterization of the conflict and their perceptions of our motives (and even our actions), but that is hardly a novelty in history or a reason to dispute their rationality.

It is Iran's ideology that is hardest for Westerners, particularly Americans, to come to terms with. And while we may find Iran's hardline ideology bizarre, wrongheaded, even incongruent with the facts, that does not make it irrational any more than say, communism—about which the same things could and were said. Iranian leaders start with different assumptions and beliefs about the world from those of the West. This ideology is foreign to our way of thinking, but it is nonetheless consistent with their own reading of their history. The fact that we do not agree with their interpretation of history does not make them irrational either. Enmity toward the United States, Israel, and the conservative states of the Middle East is a core element of Tehran's assumptions and beliefs, but the Iranians aren't the only ones who make such assumptions or act in an aggressive manner based upon them. And many other states that share some of Iran's assumptions, including their sentiments about the United States—such as North Korea, Cuba, Qadhafi's Libya, even the late Chávez's Venezuela—have also demonstrated a clear respect for the logic of deterrence.

Stephens is right to point out that the Iranians are driven by different motives than we are, but that is not proof that Iran's leaders are irrational or immune to the logic of nuclear deterrence. And there is nothing in the Iranian behaviors he cites that is inconsistent with deterrence logic—albeit of an aggressive type. That aggression makes Iran's leaders harder to deter than others, but by no means impossible.

This last point is a critical one, because it gets at a larger truth about deterrence and extended deterrence: rationality is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a successful containment regime. What else is
needed on the part of the targeted nation is not just rational decision-making, but prudent decision-making.

One of the worst mistakes that Americans indulge in foreign policy-making is the cardinal sin of “mirror imaging”: assuming that leaders of foreign countries share American values, assumptions, and assessments of history, and therefore will behave like Americans would in their position. It is the age-old fallacy of “putting yourself in the other guy's shoes.” This practice has gotten our nation into trouble on too many occasions to count. As Keith Payne and Paul Bracken have both warned, the danger of mirror-imaging is even greater in what they have called “the Second Nuclear Age,” the post–Cold War world in which the number of nuclear powers is growing, and these countries are not motivated to act in accordance with Cold War dynamics.
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A country like North Korea is different from the United States or the Soviet Union (or France or Britain) in terms of its goals, how it makes policy, and the position it occupies in the geostrategic order. All of that could lead it to handle its nuclear arsenal in ways fundamentally different from how the United States and USSR did during the Cold War.