Though some press commentary attributed the decision to the recognition by the Bush Administration that a preventive war was not a viable option in dealing with Iran, considerable evidence (adduced by Seymour Hersh) indicates that military planning for a preventive attack proceeds forthwith.2 The dynamic within administration councils was probably quite similar to that which occurred in the summer of 2002, when Secretary of State Colin Powell persuaded President Bush to make an approach to the UN Security Council before attacking Iraq. Undoubtedly, an appreciation of the hazards of preventive war are far greater in the Iranian case than they were in the case of Iraq, but even a hawkish administration prepared in the end to use force would have an interest in attempting to show that it was impossible to resolve the conflict through diplomacy. The willingness to go the diplomatic route, however, was not accompanied by a willingness to make the concessions necessary for the diplomatic route to succeed.

If a diplomatic solution is to prove viable, the United States will need to add to the package of incentives hitherto offered to Iran. Above all, the United States should be prepared to recognize the regime and give up the objective of seeking its overthrow. It is implausible to believe that a negotiation whose central purpose is to ease Western fears of Iranian attack should not have as its complement the easing of Iranian fears of U.S. attack. This would not be a negotiation at all but a diktat, and we have every reason for thinking that the Iranians will not accept any such procedure.

The West also needs to back down from its symbolically important demand that Iran cease all enrichment activities. A far better stance would be to accept limited enrichment together with internationally verified limits on the number of centrifuges the Iranians could operate. This would allow to Iran the right it claims, with justification, under the NPT, while also providing assurances that Iran could not make significant progress towards building nuclear weapons. Though it would undoubtedly be desirable for the Iranians to give up enrichment on their own territory, it would still be preferable for Iran to conduct limited enrichment under outside inspections, than to do so outside the NPT--the likely result if negotiations fail. Such a limited concession would have the further advantage of increasing the likelihood of Russian and Chinese acquiescence to sanctions, were Iran to break its agreement. (The May 2006 agreement of the six powers on the incentives to be offered Iran, it should be noted, was not matched by comparable agreement on the sanctions to be imposed were Iran to refuse the offer.)3

Finally, the international community should put back on the table the series of proposals for a comprehensive settlement communicated by Iran in the spring of 2003--then brusquely rejected by the United States--that entailed Iranian acceptance of Israel's existence, the cessation of support for groups seeking the armed overthrow of Israel, and the acceptance of comprehensive IAEA inspections in return for the normalization of diplomatic relations, the lifting of U.S. sanctions, and the acceptance of a legitimate Iranian role in the region. Whether those terms would prove acceptable today to Iran is unclear, but they indicate the essential terms of a "grand bargain" that the United States should be willing to support.4

As much as a grand bargain would be in the interests of both Iran and the United States, it is improbable that it will happen. What proved impossible under former Presidents Khatami and Clinton is unlikely to transpire under Ahmadinejad and Bush. For the Bush Administration, a grand bargain would constitute a repudiation of its predominant strategic approach and make it difficult, domestically, to play the national security card that has hitherto redounded so much to its political advantage.

So, too, the enthusiastic response among both Republican and Democratic leaders to Israel's attack on Lebanon shows that there continues to be a big market in America for the disproportionate act. Iran has also seen a sharp improvement in its situation due to much higher oil prices and, ironically, to the results of the war in Iraq, where Iran's old and dear friends play vital roles in the coalition government. The realistic prospect is, at best, for a frigid peace, at worst, a raging war.

Getting Power Right

It is the irony of the present crisis that the United States manages to both overestimate and underestimate its true power--hence its interest in schemes that would court certain disaster in an effort to ward off a hypothetical catastrophe. The overestimation is reflected above all in the belief that the pre-emptive use of U.S. military power affords a viable way out of our strategic predicaments and must always remain "on the table." Even with the failure of these strategies in the Iraq War staring us in the face, we do not, in Bolingbroke's words, "easily come off from the habitual prejudices of superior wealth, or power, or skill, or courage, nor from the confidence that these prejudices inspire."

Oddly, however, the confidence that maximalism in aim and method has been the winning strategy over the last generation and will continue to be so in the future is attended by a remarkable underestimation of the deterrent power of U.S. conventional and nuclear forces. The consensus view is that a handful of nuclear weapons in the arms of a "rogue state" would overturn the existing international order. When the objection is raised that offensive actions by the rogues would almost surely bring destruction upon these regimes, the alarmist response is to insist upon the utter irrationality of our adversaries--in effect, reading them out of the human race. This fixation on the putative irrationality of America's enemies is an indispensable feature of the hawks' position, since it renders pointless the examination of the power position of states according to any conventional metric. The emphasis on irrationality enables proponents of preventive war to maintain that what was sufficient to deter a Soviet Union armed with thousands of nuclear weapons is radically insufficient in dealing with "rogue states" armed with a few.

A more reasonable understanding of America's true power is that it maintains in abundance the elements whereby to contain and deter threatening actions by hostile regimes. For defensive purposes, it can still marshal an impressive international consensus; it is only when it finds aggressive war necessary to ensure its security that it becomes isolated and friendless in the international community. For defensive purposes, its military power, both conventional and nuclear, is prodigious; it is only when the United States seeks to assign to military power tasks that press against its inherent limitations--e.g. using force to promote liberal democracy, or threatening force to compel change within the national territory of hostile regimes--that it appears insufficient for the tasks it is called upon to perform.

These simultaneous tendencies toward the over- and underestimation of American power, unfortunately, are propelled by powerful outlooks of both sides of the political spectrum. The Right, undoubtedly, has sinned most grievously in this regard, since it has both assaulted the institution of deterrence and sought to substitute for it the nostrum of preventive war, but the Left is not blameless. The Left does not share the Right's confidence in preventive war, but it does attack the stability of deterrent relationships and thereby contributes to a political climate in which preventive war seems the least bad among a set of awful choices. Neither perspective offers a safe way forward.

The safe way forward does not consist in the invention of entirely new strategic approaches but in a return to the strategies of containment and deterrence that dealt successfully with the Soviet challenge during the Cold War. The stability of deterrence was often challenged in the course of that long struggle, as the Soviet adversary was often portrayed in "essentialist" terms, yielding the conviction that our enemies would prefer to destroy the hated West rather than save their own hides. Little that was said of radical Islamist leaders today--their irrationality, their utter indifference to the security and well-being of their own peoples--was not said of the Communists of yore.

Then, as now, alarmist voices insisted that the choice was between "suicide and surrender", and that no alternative beckoned, save being either Red or dead. Yet through it all, the iron logic of deterrence continued to hold good even as it progressively lost its hold on the strategic imagination. That it will do so again is the solid, though fraying, expectation on which the peace of the world now hinges.

 

1 For further analysis of the pros and cons (mostly the latter) of a U.S. preventive war against Iran, see the Spring 2006 issue of The National Interest. W. Patrick Lang and Larry C. Johnson, "Contemplating the Ifs", emphasize the grim consequences of a U.S. preventive war but also insist that an Iranian bomb might have consequences even more severe. Richard K. Betts, "The Osirak Fallacy", challenges the assumption that a preventive war would seriously set back Iran's capacity to produce nuclear weapons and argues convincingly for the superiority of a strategy of containment and deterrence.

Essay Types: Essay