INTRODUCTION BY RUDYARD GRIFFITHS

Great debates occur when you get the right speakers, talking about the right issues, at the right time. On all three counts our contest on Iran’s nuclear ambitions exceeded expectations. Arguing for the motion “Be it resolved, the world cannot tolerate an Iran with nuclear weapons capability,” was the formidable team of Charles Krauthammer and Maj. Gen. (ret.) Amos Yadlin. Recently celebrated by the Financial Times as America’s most influential political commentator, Charles Krauthammer is renowned for his steely analysis and take-no-prisoners approach to public debate. He is the author of a highly respected Washington Post column on U.S. domestic and international politics, which is syndicated in over 275 newspapers worldwide. He is also a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and The New Republic, and a closely followed political commentator for Fox News in America.

While Charles Krauthammer’s debating partner is less well known to Western audiences, he is a household name in his native country of Israel. Retired from the Israel Defense Forces, Maj. Gen. (ret.) Amos Yadlin’s military career is synonymous with the nuclear threats that have confronted the Jewish homeland. In 1981, he was one of the eight pilots who strapped themselves into F-16 fighters and successfully bombed the Osirak reactor in Iraq. Later, in 2007, as head of Military Intelligence for the IDF, he helped lead the campaign that demolished Syria’s Deir ez-Zor reactor. As a national security adviser up until 2011, he played a key role in managing Israel’s overt and covert campaign against Iran’s uranium enrichment program. Today, he leads the prestigious Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University and writes and speaks widely on national security issues.

One superstar team of debaters deserves another. In Vali Nasr and Fareed Zakaria we were fortunate to have recruited a policy duo who could make the case for why the world can tolerate an Iran with nuclear weapons capability and match the formidable expertise and rhetorical savvy of Krauthammer and Yadlin.

Vali Nasr is dean of Johns Hopkins University’s renowned Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Born in Tehran, Dean Nasr is one of the world’s top experts on the politics and social development of the Middle East and Iran and is the author of the highly respected books The Shia Revival and Democracy in Iran. He is also a distinguished public servant. From 2009 to 2011 he held the post of senior adviser to the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the late Richard Holbrooke, and he currently sits on the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Policy Advisory Board. As a critic of the Iranian regime’s human rights record and acts of political oppression, Vali Nasr brought an invaluable and authentic Iranian perspective to the debate.

Fareed Zakaria is known internationally as the host of CNN’s flagship global affairs program, Fareed Zakaria GPS, which airs in over 200 countries worldwide. He is also a celebrated Washington Post columnist and the editor-at-large of Time magazine. The author of four bestselling books on geopolitics, including The Post-American World: Release 2.0, Dr. Zakaria was recently ranked by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the world’s top twenty thinkers on international affairs. As revealed in the transcript of the debate, Zakaria’s CNN media experience stood him in good stead when going up against a trenchant Charles Krauthammer. The CNN versus Fox News dynamic of the debate only added to the tension on the stage.

As important as experienced and knowledgeable debaters are to creating a battle of the wits and brainpower, good debates are separated from great debates by the issues that animate them and their importance to public conversation as a whole.

It is hard to think of a global issue today that is as potent and complex as Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. For commentators such as Yadlin and Krauthammer, the case to prevent Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons capability is ironclad. For starters, both see a nuclear-armed Iran as dangerously destabilizing a Middle East already roiled by the Arab Spring. Specifically, Yadlin and Krauthammer see the emergence of a Persian bomb as supercharging Shia–Sunni conflicts throughout the region as the Gulf States and Egypt rush to secure their own nuclear weapons to thwart Iran’s bid for regional supremacy. And an Iran with nuclear weapons capability clearly has the potential to raise already heightened tensions with Israel to the level of armed conflict.

Critics of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, such as Yadlin and Krauthammer, rightly ask: How can the Jewish homeland, with its unique history and the lessons of the Holocaust, be expected to co-exist with a nuclear-armed state whose leadership has called for Israel’s destruction? At one particularly powerful moment in the debate, Amos Yadlin reminded the audience: “It is much more frightening to have a real gun barrel pointed directly at your face than watching it on CNN or reading about it in the Washington Post. Last week, Israel was showered with 1,500 rockets and missiles from Gaza, aimed at innocent Israelis . . . Iranian rockets and missiles that were supplied to Hamas and jihadists . . . Thank God they were not nuclear missiles.”

Also, beyond destabilizing the already fraught power dynamics of the Middle East, what would an Iran with an atomic bomb say about the international community’s multi-decade effort to limit the spread of nuclear weapons? For Krauthammer, failure to prevent an Iranian bomb — just a few short years after North Korea successfully detonated nuclear devices — risks ushering in an era of hyper-proliferation where powers large and small believe their security can only be guaranteed by having nuclear weapons. For staunch opponents of a nuclear-armed Iran, such as Yadlin and Krauthammer, one can draw a straight line through history from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the advent of an Iranian nuclear device to the inevitable use of nuclear weapons in our own lifetime.

But are these kinds of alarming prognostications the only way to assess the impact of an Iran with nuclear weapons capability? Over the course of this gripping two-hour debate, Nasr and Zakaria advanced a number of powerful counter-arguments, which, taken together, built an equally compelling case for why the world might well find itself able to live with a nuclear-armed Iran.

To contradict the claim that an Iran with nuclear weapons would plunge the Middle East into a regional arms race and fuel intercommunal conflict among Muslims, Nasr and Zakaria evoked the traditional arguments of nuclear deterrence. Proponents of deterrence theory, such as Nasr and Zakaria, believe that a nuclear Iran, as well as the other powers in the region the country could conceivably threaten, know that any unilateral use of atomic weapons would bring about an overwhelming global response, including the threat of a catastrophic nuclear counterstrike. According to this line of reasoning, the Iranian regime’s quest for nuclear weapons capability is driven by its desire to increase its power and legitimacy domestically and within the larger Muslim world. Iran’s nuclear ambitions are not the culmination of a diabolical plan to destroy Israel or wage wars of regional conquest.

Nasr and Zakaria point out that if Israel or the United States were to pre-emptively attack a nuclear-armed Iran, it would plunge the Middle East into chaos. And intelligence experts believe that a pre-emptive attack would only delay the regime’s acquisition of weapons capability by two to three years at most. For both debaters there is no real choice between the limited effects of a pre-emptive attack carried out by the United States or Israel versus the immense status that such a strike would confer on the Iranian regime, both on its own people and on the larger Muslim world. Instead, Nasr and Zakaria counsel that the best and maybe only course Israel and the West could take to confront the threat of nuclear-armed Iran would be to mirror the way the United States managed nuclear-armed China and Russia or to adopt a long-term policy of containment and credible deterrence.

The most controversial argument in favour of the world learning to live with a nuclear-armed Iran is the contention that nuclear weapons deter armed conflict, full stop. The classic example of this for Zakaria is India and Pakistan, which fought bloody conventional wars up until, but not after, acquiring nuclear weapons. The logical extension of this proposition, advanced by Nasr and Zakaria, is that for Iran, as well as Israel, the threat of conventional conflicts spiralling into nuclear war could just as easily lead to a period of Middle East détente as opposed to heightened conflict in the region. This highly contentious view featured prominently in our debate and fuelled some of its most lively and thought-provoking exchanges.

Great debates are not only defined by the weightiness of the issues they seek to illuminate; the state and play of global events are key to the drama and intensity they generate. As of the publication of this book, the Iranian regime continues to suffer under punitive international sanctions and a viselike oil embargo. The country maintains its plans to enrich its uranium stockpiles and thereby advance its ability to develop a nuclear weapon. The International Atomic Energy Agency has estimated, as recently as November 2012, that Iran will have enough enriched uranium of the requisite purity to move quickly to create an atomic bomb as early as June 2013. Whatever its ultimate intentions, how the world will respond to Iran crossing this “redline” will be one of the defining geopolitical events of our time.

All of us associated with the Munk Debates hope that this debate and the publication of its proceedings will provide the West, Israel, and the Middle East with a better understanding of the geopolitical implications of Iran developing nuclear weapons capability. How the world acts, should this moment come to pass in 2013 or beyond, will shape the course of history for the Middle East and its relationship to Israel and the West for a generation to come. And whether you agree or disagree that the world cannot tolerate an Iran with nuclear weapons capability, more debate of this issue, thoughtfully presented and cogently argued, can only help inform the global conversation the world needs to have.

Rudyard Griffiths

Moderator and Organizer, the Munk Debates

Toronto, Ontario