Unthinkable (53 page)

Finally, there is Israel. Israel does not need American help to defend itself against Iran. It has its own strategic deterrent, the most powerful conventional forces in the region, some of the most formidable ballistic missile defenses anywhere, and it is even building a secure second-strike capability by acquiring a half dozen conventional submarines that can fire nuclear-capable long-range cruise missiles.
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Of course, Israel does face a broader range of threats—particularly rockets, missiles, and terrorist attacks from Iranian allies (like Hizballah) and proxies (like PIJ). Yet here as well, Israeli conventional air and ground forces, now complemented by the Iron Dome anti-tactical rocket system, as well as Patriot, David's Sling, and Arrow antiballistic missile systems, give Jerusalem everything it would need to deal with these threats. As Israel needs more sophisticated versions of these capabilities to deal with new generations of threats, it will develop them itself or buy them from the United States, as it has for many decades. Instead, what Jerusalem will want from the United States will be increased funding for its armed forces and increased access to American technology to enable it to maintain its current range of advantages over Iran and its partners. That's not nothing, and it could mean a fairly significant increase in aid to Israel, but neither is it a wholesale departure from past U.S. practice or likely to break the bank.

DEFENSE TREATIES.
Although the record of formal defense treaties is somewhat mixed, on balance, the history of the Cold War suggests that having a regional military alliance of some kind that includes the United States would be helpful to contain a nuclear Iran. There are several reasons:

• The existence of the NATO and Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) treaties provided a legal basis for the deployment of American forces during the Cold War that mitigated the domestic political costs of American unpopularity for the regional states. At various times the United States was unpopular with European publics, but the sanctity of the NATO treaty eliminated any move to evict U.S. forces. In the Gulf, American forces are well tolerated by the GCC states, but if that were to change in the future, having stronger legal cover could be helpful.

• The NATO and SEATO treaties prevented the USSR from creating political rifts between the United States and its regional allies that could have eliminated the American presence from Soviet borders.

• NATO and SEATO provided the countries of Western Europe and East Asia with an excuse, a set of incentives, and political cover to work together and on one another's behalf in ways that might have been difficult otherwise. The core mutual interests expressed in these two treaties bound the states of Western Europe and East Asia together in ways that a series of bilateral treaties with the United States never would have. Especially in the case of the Persian Gulf, where the GCC has often had difficulty practicing cooperative defense planning, such a multilateral treaty could be quite useful.

Of course, the region has already had one such treaty, the 1955 Baghdad Pact/Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), which failed and is largely seen as a symbol of the foolishness of trying to extend such treaty arrangements to the Middle East. While the failure of CENTO should stand as a warning, it should also be remembered that the region is very different from what it was then. The conditions that destroyed CENTO are no longer present.
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Other impediments remain, however, and thus while desirable, it is far from clear that a new treaty pact for the region is feasible.

It is also not clear that such measures would be necessary for American allies in the Middle East, at least for the specific reasons that they were seen as necessary for Europe and Japan. Turkey is a member of
NATO, so it needs nothing more by way of treaty arrangements with the United States. Israel, Bahrain, and Kuwait (and Jordan and Egypt) are “Major Non-NATO Allies” of the United States, which gives them preferable access to American equipment and other benefits but does not entail any formal defense commitment. Nevertheless, there are American forces already based in most of the GCC states. Given that the United States threatened to employ its nuclear forces to prevent the Soviet Union from intervening against Israel in the 1973 October War, fought Iranian warships to defend Kuwaiti oil tankers in 1987–88, deployed 250,000 troops to defend Saudi Arabia from Iraqi attack in 1990, sent American antiballistic missile batteries to defend Israel against Iraqi missile attack in 1991, committed more than 500,000 troops to liberate Kuwait that same year, and deployed 35,000 troops to Kuwait to prevent another Iraqi invasion in 1994, one could argue that the United States has established a good track record demonstrating that it will defend these countries however it has to do so. Certainly the Iranians do not seem to be under any illusions that the United States won't defend them. In Chubin's words, “As long as there is a sizeable U.S. presence in the Arabian peninsula, any such threats would inevitably involve the United States and its deterrent. The extension of a formal nuclear guarantee to the GCC states beyond this would appear excessive and certainly premature.”
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THE GREAT UNKNOWNS.
Deterrence is an exercise in political psychology. It is about convincing one's adversary not to try something, because it will fail or will result in greater pain than any gain it might produce. Extended deterrence is even more complicated, a bank-shot version of the same. It involves not only deterring a potential aggressor, but convincing the possible target state that they do not have to fear the aggressor. As one perceptive scholarly work on extended deterrence put it, reassurance is “in the eye of the beholder.”
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The only way that the United States can prevent the GCC states from bandwagoning with Iran, or (more likely) from balancing against Tehran in aggressive ways that could start wars or by acquiring nuclear arsenals of their own, is to convince these
states that they can count on the United States to protect them no matter what.

Although the United States will be far better positioned to do so for the GCC states (and Israel and Turkey and others) against a nuclear Iran than we were for Western Europe and Japan in the face of the Soviet threat, there are no guarantees. Former British defense minister Dennis Healey once famously observed that it often takes more to reassure allies than it does to deter an adversary.
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We cannot know what it will take to reassure our Gulf allies. All of the points above
should
be enough. Yet they may not.

Perhaps just at first, to get them over that shock or to reassure their publics that nothing has particularly changed and they are not now threatened in a way that they previously weren't, the United States may have to do a number of things that have no particular military value but are critical to psychological reassurance. In 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, Saddam began firing modified Scud missiles at Israel. The missiles were militarily irrelevant and ended up causing few casualties, but their psychological (and economic) impact on the Israeli people was far-reaching. General Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of coalition forces, planned to do almost nothing to try to stop the launches because they were militarily irrelevant. But the Israeli government put tremendous pressure on President Bush to stop them. Ultimately, Schwarzkopf had to divert more than a thousand aircraft sorties and even insert special operations forces into western Iraq to try to stop the Scud launches—which they effectively did, even though we never destroyed a single Scud launcher. Schwarzkopf was right that the Scud attacks on Israel were militarily irrelevant, yet he was foolish to insist that therefore they could be ignored.

In similar fashion, there is no military or strategic reason that the United States would need to deploy more conventional forces or tactical nuclear forces to the region, try to build up GCC military capabilities to match Iran's, or even sign mutual defense pacts with any of the countries of the region to better deter a nuclear Iran. Yet the United States may be compelled to do so anyway, or at least forced to consider it, because of
the fears of our allies in the region and the need to reassure them. A better way to reassure them would be to convince them that the forces we have in place are more than adequate to block any Iranian conventional move, that our nuclear forces so outmatch Iran's that we have escalation dominance over them, that the presence of American forces in many of those countries and our history of defending them demonstrates our commitments to their security, and therefore, only if Iran's leaders were truly insane would they believe that it would be worthwhile to try to attack America's regional allies.

Hopefully, all of that would be enough. But it may not be. If not, the United States would be advised to look into one or more of these steps. Building up the GCC militaries and increasing our own conventional forces in the region would be the preferable ways to help reassure skittish regional populations, because these represent mere augmentations of existing conditions. Signing defense pacts, let alone deploying tactical nuclear weapons, would mean introducing new dynamics into the region that could have unexpected consequences. Moreover, an increasingly isolationist Congress might reject the treaties, and international opinion (including Arab public opinion) would probably reject the tactical nuclear weapons.

Containment would not be a cost-free policy, although its costs are nowhere near as significant as its risks. One of the attractive aspects of containment is that it would be comparatively low-cost, which is an important selling point for at least some of its supporters. Many of containment's detractors have argued that its costs could be high in terms of financial costs, opportunity costs, and political costs, but I find these arguments to be overstated.

BUILDING UP AMERICAN CONVENTIONAL MILITARY FORCES IN THE GULF.
American conventional forces in the region, especially when
considered alongside the forces that the United States can move there quickly, are more than adequate to defeat any Iranian conventional move against the GCC. Neither Israel nor Turkey needs American assistance to deal with a conventional threat from Iran. Our starting assumption should be that our forces in the region will not have to be augmented. There is absolutely no military reason that they need to be.

To reassure our regional allies, the United States may feel the need to augment its forces in the Gulf anyway. This gesture would be purely psychological, so there is no reason that it would need to be big. A third combat air wing, a third Army brigade set, or some additional surface naval vessels—all played up through a public diplomacy campaign that stressed the superiority of American forces over Iran's military—should be more than enough to check this box. Moreover, although the actual numbers are kept under tight wraps, the GCC countries pay much of the costs for the American forces stationed in the region. The United States still pays for salaries, benefits, training, and all of the other normal costs for the personnel and their equipment, but the host countries pay for the bases, their upkeep, and for part or all of the provisions. Consequently, it is sometimes cheaper to have these units based in the GCC than on bases in the United States.

It is a canard to posit that defending the Persian Gulf requires us to sustain forces we would not otherwise have, and therefore imposes an unnecessary cost. The assets the United States maintains in the Gulf region are a fraction of our overall force structure. There is no reason to believe that if the Persian Gulf did not exist we would not have all of these forces in our order of battle and so might save the cost of maintaining them.
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The United States Navy has ten aircraft carriers and there is nothing to suggest that if there were no requirement to defend the Persian Gulf, the United States would have fewer. The desire to have ten carriers stems principally from a desire to maintain a certain overall force structure for use in an emergency anywhere in the globe, rather than from a strict calculation of the needs of securing different regions. The Air Force keeps five of its fifty-seven wings in the Gulf, but only two of these are
combat wings and each typically has only a single squadron on hand. The Army and Marines don't have any formations permanently based in the Gulf, just equipment sets, which cost far, far less than fully manned formations. It is true that the Navy maintains at least one carrier in the Gulf region at all times, but having ten carriers allows the United States to have three on station at all times, and it is important for the readiness of those carriers as well as the security of the United States that we maintain carriers deployed on station at all times. As Henry Kissinger once famously remarked, at the start of any crisis the first question he invariably asked the NSC staff was, “where are the carriers.”
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Given that the United States is going to have three carriers on station at all times for the foreseeable future, is there another region somewhere in the world that would benefit from having a carrier on station more than the Persian Gulf? Typically, the other two carriers are in East Asia, the Indian Ocean, or the Mediterranean. Do we desperately need a carrier in the Caribbean? The South Pacific? Even absent the threat of a nuclear Iran, chances are that we would want one of those carriers in or near the Persian Gulf.

Along these same lines, it is important to recognize that there just aren't opportunity costs involved in keeping so modest a force in the Gulf region on a regular basis. That remains true even if the United States decided to augment our forces there slightly to reassure nervous GCC populations. There is no other part of the world being deprived of American military power because of the needs of the Gulf. That statement was not true back when the United States had 160,000 troops in Iraq and another 20,000–30,000 elsewhere in the Gulf. To the extent that another part of the globe is being deprived of military force because of the needs of an ongoing war, that war is in Afghanistan—not part of the Gulf and not a country that the United States would be expected to defend against an Iranian attack. With the war in Afghanistan winding down, even that requirement is disappearing. The bottom line is that our forces in the Gulf are more than adequate to deter or defeat any Iranian conventional move but are not anywhere near big enough as a proportion of the overall American force structure to impinge on the needs of other theaters, nor is
it likely that we would disband those forces if there were no requirement to defend the Gulf.