The Foreign Service Journal, June 2007

Cramping Our Style? Another likely result of Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon is its use as a deterrent to limit U.S. and Israeli policy options in the Middle East. Clearly, Iran’s nu- clearization would dramatically raise the costs of a U.S. regime-change effort in Tehran. Analyst Thomas Don- nelly of the American Enterprise Institute admits that this is a primary concern: “A nuclear-armed Iran is dou- bly threatening to U.S. interests not only because of the possibility it might employ its weapons or pass them to terrorist groups, but also because of the constraining effect it will impose on U.S. behavior in the region.” In his groundbreaking work The Spread of Nuclear Weapons (co-authored with Scott D. Sagan in 1995), Kenneth Waltz put things still more bluntly: “A big rea- son for America’s resistance to the spread of nuclear weapons is that if weak countries have some, they will cramp our style.” This is indisputably true, but it would be less important if America revised its grandiose and radical foreign policy posture. Analysts like Donnelly fear an Iranian bomb because they favor a revolutionary American foreign policy that attempts to use force to transform regimes Washington dislikes. However, to evaluate the implications of Iranian acquisition of a nuclear weapons capability and the resulting narrowing of America’s options, it is necessary to determine where the two nations’ interests are likely to clash, and to further evaluate these interests in the con- text of nuclear deterrence. The threat of nuclear retaliation is most credible when it is tied to the core interests of any state: government survival and territorial integrity. Thus, while a nuclear capability would take unprovoked regime change off the table, it would not give Iran carte blanche to act as it pleases with respect to all of its foreign policy goals. Threats to use nuclear weapons to secure peripheral interests would be vastly less credible. In general, Washington’s perception of itself as omnipotent has led to excesses in its Middle East strate- gy, such as the Iraq operation, and a strategic myopia in terms of its diplomatic posture in the Middle East. For instance, Washington has long promoted and encouraged an unrealistic approach to Israeli security. It has consis- tently refused to stop the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and supported the ill-advised assault on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure in July 2006. American support for Israeli expansion has damaged our reputation in the world and done little to put Israel on a path to long-term security. A nuclearized Iran will not “cramp our style” in the sense of altering America’s fundamental commitment to Israel’s existence; what it may preclude is a an extension of the present, unrealistic approach to the Middle East generally. War vs. Deterrence Ultimately, the benefits of either policy can be defined by the negative outcomes that they preclude. The benefit of the preventive war option is that it could conceivably delay the Iranian nuclear program. As dis- cussed above, however, this prospect is far from cer- tain, given the poor U.S. intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program. Even if the United States is able to buy a few extra years of time before a nuclear Iran emerges, it is not clear that the delay will ultimately prevent the mullahs from acquiring a nuclear weapon. The policy could yield all of the negative outcomes of a war, and still ulti- mately fail to prevent what the war was supposed to pre- vent — the emergence of a nuclear, theocratic Iran. Admittedly, a policy of bombing now could avoid the uncertainties and dangers of a deterrence policy, at least for a few years. Juxtaposed against that potential bene- fit, however, is an array of negative consequences, vary- ing from merely undesirable to extremely dangerous. By contrast, embracing a posture of deterrence would prevent the inevitable loss of American life that would result from a war. Moreover, billions, if not hundreds of billions, of dollars would be left in the productive econ- omy, rather than being allocated to attempting to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. The mullahs in Iran would remain unpopular, unable to use the American bogey- man to consolidate support internally. We could also avoid a range of Iranian countermeasures: further chaos in Iraq, attacks against U.S. troops in that country or against Israel, and the prospect of sky-high oil prices and volatility in the Strait of Hormuz. The problems of chaos in a regime-changed Iran, should a conflict escalate to that level, could also be avoided. In the end, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that deterrence is a preferable policy to preventive war under the circumstances. The latter option opens so many uncertainties that are out of the range of control of the American government that it should be looked on as a supremely undesirable policy. n F O C U S 40 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 7