Containment has become a dirty word in the debate over Iran policy. In Washington, it is denounced as criminal by those on the right, while those on the left insist that they never had any intention of embracing it. In September 2012, the Senate voted 90–1 in favor of a nonbinding “sense of the Senate” resolution that “rejects any United States policy that would rely on efforts to contain a nuclear weapons-capable Iran; and joins the President in ruling out any policy that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.”1 Not to be outdone, President Obama and his senior lieutenants have insisted over and over again that containment is neither their policy nor their intent. After meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu in March 2012, President Obama explained, “We will not countenance Iran getting a nuclear weapon. My policy is not containment; my policy is to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon.”2 Six months later, in his speech to the UN General Assembly in New York, President Obama warned, “Make no mistake: A nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained . . . that’s why the United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”3 In his February 2013 State of the Union address, Obama devoted precious little time to foreign policy and only a single sentence on Iran, but it made the same point: “Likewise, the leaders of Iran must recognize that now is the time for a diplomatic solution, because a coalition stands united in demanding that they meet their obligations, and we will do what is necessary to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon.”4
Somehow, somewhere along the way, containment became confused with appeasement. Many now assume that it means that the United States would accept Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and adjust to Iranian ambitions—in a passive manner. This misunderstanding is a shame. Not only because it is not what a strategy of containment would entail, but also because the United States has always employed a strategy of containment against Iran, we are practicing containment of Iran today, and we will continue to do so for as long as there is a government in Tehran that sees itself as the enemy of the United States.
Containment is not appeasement. Quite the contrary. The most basic way to understand a strategy of containment is that it seeks to prevent a hostile nation from causing harm to American interests and allies, by “containing” it within its borders until the structural flaws in its political system bring an end to the regime itself.5 It means preventing the regime being contained from attacking other countries in any way—militarily, diplomatically, economically, clandestinely, politically, even psychologically—to the greatest extent possible. In the words of a thoughtful essay on the containment of Iran by Karim Sadjadpour and Diane de Gramont, “The goal should be not to contain Iran ad infinitum but to limit its destructive influences while facilitating its transition to a nation that can begin to realize its potential to serve as a constructive force in the world.”6 Or to quote the summary of containment’s purpose from an outstanding study by Thomas Donnelly, Danielle Pletka, and Maseh Zarif, containment “should seek to block any Iranian expansion in the Persian Gulf region; to illuminate the problematic nature of the regime’s ambitions; to constrain and indeed to induce a retraction of Iranian influence, including Iranian soft power; and to work toward a political transformation, if not a physical transformation, of the Tehran regime.”7
The United States has adopted a strategy of containment whenever a nation has been hostile and unwilling to have a normal, peaceful relationship with the United States, but the American people were unwilling to bear the costs and risks of a war to eliminate its government or bend it to our will. Containment is what the United States does when it does not want to appease a nation but is also not willing to try to conquer it. It is our traditional “third way.”
Although containment is not cost-free, it has allowed the United States to minimize the resources it expends on Iran, and to devote far less than would be needed to overthrow its regime. Iranian assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, the goal of every American administration since Carter has been to pay as little attention to Iran as possible without jeopardizing American interests elsewhere in the Middle East.
Containment is also not the same thing as deterrence. Containment is a strategy and deterrence a tactic often employed as part of that strategy. The two terms are often used synonymously, but containment is much more than mere deterrence, typically encompassing political, economic, diplomatic, and other methods as well, and having both offensive and defensive dimensions. Deterrence is a purely defensive tactic and in this context is limited to the narrow military aim of preventing aggression. During the Cold War, the United States contained the Soviet Union, and one of the ways that we did so was to employ both nuclear and conventional deterrence to keep the Soviets from attacking the U.S. homeland directly or invading Europe, the Middle East, and Japan. Similarly, with Iran since 1979, the United States has employed containment to minimize the Islamic Republic’s ability to cause harm abroad, and part of that has been by deterring an Iranian (conventional) attack on U.S. allies in the region.
The basic concept of containment is as old as civilization. Thucydides describes how Sparta tried to contain Athenian power after the defeat of Persia in 480–479 BC. For Americans, the intellectual framework for “containing” an unfriendly state derives from George Kennan’s work on U.S. policy toward Russia at the beginning of the Cold War. Kennan started from two key assumptions. First, for both ideological and geostrategic reasons, the Soviet Union would always be an adversary of the United States. Second, because of the unimaginable costs of conquering the Soviet Union, the United States would not seek to eliminate the communist regime by war. Containment, as Kennan proposed it, would be an alternative strategy to prevent Soviet military expansion and political aggrandizement until the Soviet regime collapsed of its own dysfunctionalities. In this sense, it was a defensive effort to prevent Soviet aggression, limit Moscow’s ability to gain allies or undermine American allies, and erode the Soviet economy—upon which Soviet military power rested. However, it also contained a crucial “offensive” element as well in that it sought the demise of the communist regime. Containment worked admirably in the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union, although critics claimed that the strategy was failing from the moment it was unveiled to the moment before it succeeded with the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Thanks to the success of containment toward Russia, Washington came to see containment as a useful strategy in a host of lesser cases during the Cold War and after. The United States has pursued containment strategies at various times against China, North Korea, Cuba, Libya, Iraq, Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan, among others. The range of instances in which the United States has employed a strategy of containment also makes clear that it is a highly flexible one, encompassing a wide range of tactics. What’s more, those tactics can be employed in a broad range of combinations so that there can be lots of different “flavors” of containment.8
At different points during the Cold War, the United States pursued variants of containment toward Russia that emphasized engagement and arms control (Nixon and Carter’s policies of détente), or aggressive unconventional or proxy warfare and information operations (under Eisenhower and Reagan). Against Cuba, containment relied on sanctions and information operations, but a lower-key approach to covert action after the Cuban Missile Crisis. At that point, the United States largely ended its support to Cuban insurgents, but fought back whenever Cuban emissaries attempted to stir up trouble in Latin America and Africa. Against Saddam Husayn’s Iraq, containment featured draconian international sanctions, overt and covert efforts to topple the regime, and the periodic use of air strikes to prevent Saddam from breaking free. Containment of Nicaragua, in many ways an outgrowth of the containment of Cuba, featured considerable assistance to insurgents attempting to overthrow the regime. In short, the basic theory of containment is typically just the foundation of the strategy, and many different kinds of policies can be developed from it.
Because the American commitment to containment of Iran has been so ambivalent, Washington’s application of the strategy has been erratic. At times, America has pursued containment of Iran in a more confrontational manner, and at others Washington has paid little attention to it at all. Some administrations have employed sanctions and other punishments to try to pressure Iran to change its behavior, others have tried offers of rapprochement to change its course.
Although the intensity with which they have been employed over time has varied, the essential elements of America’s containment of Iran have remained largely unchanged. These have consisted of:
• Diplomatic efforts to isolate Iran and enlist as many countries as possible to help the United States in containing it.
• Sanctions to prevent Iran from becoming economically or militarily powerful. These have focused on preventing or dissuading Iran from acquiring ballistic missiles or weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons.
• The delineation, either explicitly or implicitly, of “red lines” that would trigger the use of force by the United States against Iran if Tehran crossed them.
• The basing of American military forces in the Persian Gulf to defend American allies, deter an Iranian attack, and enforce the red lines.
• And on occasion, modest covert action to support various groups inside Iran that have opposed the regime politically.
After the Iranian Revolution and the Carter administration’s brief flirtation with counterrevolution, Washington reached out to the new regime and offered to establish normal relations. That policy went up in smoke in November 1979, when a group of Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, kicking off the 444 days of the hostage ordeal. Carter and his senior aides considered a range of military options in response to the embassy seizure, but settled for a policy of pressuring Iran via economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation. Moreover, in response to the fears of other American allies in the Persian Gulf, the United States began to increase its military assets in the region to deter or defeat an Iranian attempt to spread the revolution by force. In effect, if not original intent, it was a policy of containing Iran—limiting its ability to cause harm beyond its borders and hindering its ability to generate greater power to do so.
Although the Reagan administration took office convinced that everything its predecessor had done had been a mistake, they retained containment as their Iran policy. Despite their aggressive “cowboy” reputation, Reagan’s team showed a remarkable reluctance to confront Iran throughout their eight years in office. They were mostly content to continue the buildup of U.S. military forces in the Gulf, and ramp up arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states.
In 1982, Iran’s battlefield victories in the Iran-Iraq War allowed the Islamic Republic to counter-invade Iraq to try to overthrow Saddam in what Tehran proclaimed would be a march to Mecca or Jerusalem. In response, the Reagan administration “tilted” toward Iraq as a way of preserving containment. Washington began to provide Baghdad with trade credits and critical intelligence on Iranian military moves, while encouraging its European allies to supply weapons to Iraq. Even after Iran helped drive American forces from Lebanon by creating Hizballah and directing it to seize American hostages and launch horrific terrorist attacks on the U.S. Marine barracks and the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, the Reagan administration made no effort to adopt a more aggressive policy toward Iran.
Later the Reagan administration would depart from containment, attempting a rapprochement with Iran through a series of backchannels to Hashemi Rafsanjani, then the Iranian Majles speaker. This effort, part of the wider Iran-Contra scandal, would end in humiliation when Iranian hardliners throttled Rafsanjani’s scheme. Thereafter, the Reagan administration reverted to its restrained version of containment. When Iranian forces began attacking Gulf Arab oil tankers in the Persian Gulf in 1986–87, the United States initially shied away from defending them for fear of being dragged into a fight with Iran. When the United States agreed to the reflagging and the deployment of additional U.S. Navy ships to defend the reflagged tankers, American rules of engagement were kept tight and Washington intervened repeatedly to prevent conflict with Tehran. It took ever more aggressive Iranian attacks on American forces to provoke limited American military countermoves—although the disparity in strength was so great that the U.S. Navy still managed to sink half of Iran’s major surface warships in a single encounter.
George H. W. Bush took office looking to improve relations with Iran and signaled to Tehran in his inaugural address that “goodwill begets goodwill.” Seeing an opportunity, Rafsanjani (by then Iran’s president) secured the release of a number of American hostages being held by Lebanese allies of Iran in the hope that this would start a rapprochement. But he proved unable to control other groups—and even parts of his own regime—from taking new hostages and threatening American interests in other ways. Meanwhile, the many other demands on the administration’s plate—the fall of communism, the crisis with China over Tiananmen Square, and the Persian Gulf War—forced Bush 41 to rely on a passive version of containment toward Iran. Indeed, Washington was so determined to minimize the amount of energy and resources it committed against Iran so as to maximize its efforts elsewhere that it virtually ignored Iran.
The Clinton administration was the first to publicly embrace the term, announcing a policy of “Dual Containment” of both Iran and Iraq.9 Clinton and his advisors believed that there was an opportunity to forge a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arabs, and they wanted to pursue it as hard as they could. They feared that Saddam’s Iraq and revolutionary Iran would both seek to undermine an Arab-Israeli peace process. Thus both Iran and Iraq would have to be prevented from killing the peace process, but the United States had to minimize the resources it expended on them so that it could instead focus on the peacemaking itself. That meant containment—Dual Containment.
Iran pushed back hard on Dual Containment, waging an aggressive, asymmetric campaign against the United States and its allies in the Middle East. This campaign, in turn, convinced the Clinton administration to get tougher still, shifting from a more passive version of containment to a much more aggressive one. Goaded by a Congress that had little love for Iran, the administration imposed comprehensive unilateral sanctions against Iran, threatened secondary sanctions against non-American companies doing significant business with the Iranian oil industry, and even modestly rejuvenated the moribund covert action campaign against Iran.10
If Clinton’s first term saw the most aggressive version of containment ever pursued against Iran to that point, his second term saw a dramatic reversal. In 1997, Iran elected the reformist Mohammed Khatami as president, who reached out to the United States to try to improve relations. The Clinton administration accepted the offer, seeing in Khatami’s opening a chance to finally end the long, debilitating enmity between Iran and America. However, once again, Iran’s hardliners stepped in and killed the budding reconciliation.
In the wake of Clinton’s failed rapprochement, the George W. Bush administration saw little reason to accommodate Iran, but could not agree on a more aggressive policy. Ultimately, they slipped back into containment as well, and initially a laissez-faire version at that. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the United States and Iran engaged in extensive cooperation against their mutual adversaries, the Taliban and al-Qa’ida. There is evidence that some in the Iranian regime hoped to turn this tacit cooperation into a wider opening, but it came to naught. Although there was some evidence that the hawks in the administration hoped to pursue regime change in Iran after Afghanistan and Iraq, the disastrous mishandling of the Iraq War put an end to any such notions and the United States settled in to renewed containment instead.
Washington’s complacency was shattered in 2002 by the news that Iran was making far greater progress toward acquiring the capability to make nuclear weapons than previously believed. Americans feared that this progress would undermine the containment of Iran and lead to widespread instability, if not outright warfare. In response, first the Bush 43 administration and then the Obama administration attempted to employ a carrot-and-stick approach to convince Tehran to halt its nuclear program. In both instances, the United States and its allies offered Iran (modest) economic and diplomatic inducements to halt the program while threatening to impose new, more stringent sanctions on Tehran if it refused to do so.
Both administrations saw this policy as having two goals. First, the policy was intended to buttress containment. In that sense it was a continuation of America’s long-standing effort to prevent Iran from increasing its military power, in this case by acquiring nuclear weapons. However, both administrations also hoped that Iran would be willing to accept the American offer of a negotiated resolution. This was especially true of the Obama administration, which genuinely sought engagement as a path to real reconciliation. They hoped that Iranian pragmatists willing to accept restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program in return for concessions from the West would prevail over hardliners unwilling to give up the nuclear program. Implicit in this gambit was the possibility that a victory by the pragmatists might lead to their ascendance, which in turn might create broader openings for rapprochement. In this way, the carrot-and-stick approach was not only an effort to bolster containment, but also a bid to end it by shifting the composition and the policies of the Iranian regime.
Looking back on that history, a number of themes emerge. First, containment is not a “one-size-fits-all” policy. Against Iran, the United States has employed both passive and aggressive versions. This flexibility makes it useful to Washington, which has been able to dial up or scale back the pressure on Tehran based on many factors—strategic, political, and otherwise.
Second, although American administrations have typically played up whatever they have added onto the foundation of containment, American policy toward Iran has been quite consistent over the years because it has always been built around containment. The attempted openings to Iran under Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, and Obama were important efforts to see if there was a way beyond containment, but none ever succeeded in finding it. Likewise, the efforts to pressure or punish Iran under Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama always had the goal of preventing Iran from causing mayhem beyond its borders—keeping it contained.
Looking forward, all of America’s options toward Iran except one would require the continuation of containment in one form or another because containment will remain necessary as long as the Iranian regime remains our adversary. The conditional engagement on offer as part of the Obama administration’s carrot-and-stick approach would have to start as just a tactic—a way of managing the confrontation, like détente during the Cold War—until Iran stopped pursuing objectives incompatible with our security. Over time, if Iran were to halt activities that threatened American interests, engagement might become a path out of containment to peaceful relations, but that would be a long way off and it would start from the basis of containment. Likewise, sanctions and other forms of pressure might someday cause Iran to make significant compromises on its nuclear program, but again, until Tehran is willing to engage in a real rapprochement with the United States, even that would not eliminate the need to contain an anti-American Iranian regime, although it would ease the costs of doing so. Regime change might someday produce a new Iranian government, one that did not threaten U.S. security or interests, which would then allow us to jettison containment in favor of normal relations. However, until that day, a regime change policy would have to rely on containment to play “defense” until its “offensive” elements brought about a transformation in Tehran. Ultimately, regime change is just a policy that would simply emphasize the “offensive” aspects of containment. Even air strikes, by Israel or the United States, would still require containment to prevent Iran from reconstituting and retaliating afterward. Indeed, air strikes are really a means of bolstering containment—not superseding it—by trying to deprive Iran of its nuclear potential.
Ultimately, the only approach that offers a true alternative to containment is an invasion of Iran. Yet that is the policy the United States is least likely to pursue, barring some unforeseen and unlikely Iranian provocation of such magnitude as to rearrange the priorities of the American people. That is what happened on 9/11 and it would doubtless require an Iranian misstep of equivalent proportions to move the American people to accept a commensurate military effort one more time.
The last pattern threading the history of America’s containment of Iran is that the United States has almost never wanted to acknowledge that it was practicing containment of Iran. Several U.S. administrations went to great pains to describe their policy toward Iran as something other than containment because the strategy is typically seen as too weak by the right and too strong by the left. The right dislikes it because it often feels purely defensive and only indirectly exerts pressure to halt Iran’s nuclear program, let alone bring about the end of the regime altogether. The left dislikes it because it requires frequent confrontation and the occasional threat of conflict with Iran. The only time that an American administration honestly described its policy as containment, under Clinton, critics from the left and the right shelled it. The Obama administration has denied that it is relying on containment, even a little bit. It may be a fiction, but unfortunately, in American politics today, it is a necessary fiction. Given how badly mischaracterized containment has become, acknowledging that American policy toward Iran involves any element of containment—let alone that the administration recognizes that containment will likely have to remain the basis for U.S. policy toward Iran in the future—would cause a political firestorm.
But that’s not the only reason that no U.S. administration, and certainly not the Obama administration, is likely to acknowledge that containment is its policy. The other is that embracing containment might signal to Iran, to Israel, and to other American allies that the United States no longer cares about Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability. That this reading would be a severe misrepresentation of containment would be immaterial if that were what the Iranians and our allies believed. That could be disastrous for our efforts to convince Iran to make compromises on its nuclear program and to keep Israel from launching a military operation that could cause more problems than it solves.
In the future, it seems likely that the Obama administration and its successors will continue to pursue one or another version of containment but will insist on calling it “pressure” or “conditional engagement,” or something else like that. It would be better if we could call our Iran policy by its right name, but that seems unlikely.
Many Americans seem exasperated with our allies in the Middle East, but I can only find sympathy for them. None of them—not even Israel—has the ability to deal with Iran’s nuclear threat alone. Short of employing nuclear weapons of its own against Iran, which is a nonstarter except if its national existence is threatened, Israel could damage but not eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. The Turks, Iraqis, Saudis, and other Gulf states have even fewer options. Only the United States could eliminate that threat altogether, and if the United States opts to rely on deterrence and containment, our Middle Eastern allies have no choice but to support that strategy.
An American decision to adopt containment is a decision made by the United States for the West as a whole. If we choose containment, our allies must choose it, too. It seems only fair in that if we choose war it is we, the American people, who will be expected to absorb most of the costs and risks. The Iranians would doubtless attack Israel and the GCC states in the event of a U.S.-led war, but they would come after the United States, too, and we would have to pay in blood and treasure to do whatever was necessary to bring the fight to a successful resolution, including perhaps invading and occupying Iran.
However, it is also why we as Americans need to sympathize with the endless warnings coming from Israel in particular about the dangers of a nuclear Iran. The Gulf states have echoed these warnings, but they have preferred to do so in private. Thus it has been Israeli voices that have been the mainstays urging immediate action and predicting dire consequences if action is not forthcoming. There is no question that this can be tiresome. However, it is important to recognize that Israel’s threats and warnings have been useful and even necessary.
Without unremitting Israeli (and GCC) threats, the world would have forgotten about the Iranian nuclear program long ago. There is good reason to believe that the Iranians would have nuclear weapons already. In 2002, and for several years thereafter, the world did not want to be bothered by Iran’s nuclear program. The Europeans, led by the French, British, and Germans, did some important things, but even they were not considering the kind of sanctions that have since been enacted. The United States, preoccupied by al-Qa’ida, Afghanistan, and Iraq at that time, wanted even less to do with Iran. As for the rest of the world, no one outside the Middle East could rouse themselves to worry about Iranian nuclear weapons—especially after it was revealed that the warnings of Saddam’s WMD had been wildly incorrect. On numerous occasions since, had the Israelis not threatened to go to war, it would have been virtually impossible for those few countries working to do something about the Iranian program to secure international support for sanctions. Diplomats from Scandinavian, Mediterranean, Latin American, and East Asian states have all admitted—often grudgingly—over the years that had it not been for the constant Israeli threats to go to war, their governments would never have supported this economic sanction or that diplomatic initiative. In that sense, though we may find these repeated warnings irksome, we should recognize that they were necessary to keep the great powers and the wider international community as focused on Iran as they have been since 2002.
THE REALITY AND HYPERBOLE OF EXISTENTIAL THREATS. Although the United States should remain sympathetic to the plight of its regional allies, we cannot allow their fears to overwhelm our interests and experience. Some Israelis in public and some Gulf Arabs in private can hit hysterical heights of panic when it comes to the “existential threat” they face from a nuclear Iran. They see this fear as requiring that anything and everything possible be done to prevent it.
Is a nuclear Iran an “existential” threat to Israel and the GCC states? Technically speaking, yes. Given the small size of the populations of Israel and the GCC states and their heavy concentration in just a few cities, once Iran has an arsenal of five to ten weapons that it can deliver against any of those countries, it will have a theoretical capability to wipe out anywhere from 20 to 90 percent of their populations. That sounds terrifying, and it should.
Yet the reality is far more mundane. Since the advent of the nuclear era, a great many countries have lived, and even thrived, under an existential threat. For forty years, the United States feared a Soviet nuclear attack that would have incinerated our nation. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. Schoolchildren were taught to “duck and cover” under their desks. Buildings in cities across the country boasted signs designating them as fallout shelters. Yet, the country survived. In fact, we did quite well. We still live with such an existential threat: Russia retains about 2,500 nuclear weapons that could end our existence.
The Western European nations shared this threat during the Cold War, perhaps even more than we did, because the thousands of tactical nuclear weapons deployed on either side of the Iron Curtain made a local nuclear exchange somewhat more likely than a homeland exchange between superpowers. Yet under that shadow Western Europe developed into one of the most prosperous and peaceful lands history has ever known. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the other Asian “tigers” faced (and still face) existential threats from both Russia and China, but their economic performance and cultural development outstripped that of even Europe and the United States. The existential threat of nuclear obliteration did not frighten off investment, cause mass emigration, or distort domestic policies (although it monopolized foreign policies).
India has been locked in a vicious struggle with Pakistan since the violent birth of the two nations in 1947. Since then, they have fought four wars and experienced any number of crises. Although most Indians want to see an end to the conflict and have Pakistan leave them alone, much of Pakistan’s elite remains obsessed with India—scheming to get back all of Kashmir, seeing Indian plots behind every problem in Pakistan, fearing Indian attack, and launching repeated attacks against India for various convoluted reasons. Pakistan is overrun with terrorists and violent extremists, its economy and social systems are in shambles, and it is waging guerrilla wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Many analysts fear that the state is on the brink of collapse.11 Pakistan also possesses something on the order of one hundred nuclear weapons aimed at India and has continued to attack India and provoke nuclear crises with New Delhi even after it crossed the nuclear threshold sometime between 1985 and 1990.12 If Pakistan launched those hundred nuclear weapons at India’s fifty to one hundred largest urban areas, tens of millions of people would die, and India would effectively cease to exist as a functional nation. India has every reason to fear a Pakistani launch either stemming from escalation out of a crisis or as a result of the implosion of the tenuous Pakistani state, yet India has survived. And it too has thrived, posting phenomenal rates of economic growth and achieving something of a high-tech miracle.
North Korea first obtained nuclear weapons in the 1990s, although it did not test until 2006. Today it is believed to have as many as ten nuclear weapons. If it launched those weapons at Japan or South Korea’s largest cities, they would kill tens of millions of people and would cripple both nations. The “Hermit Kingdom” is a land so bizarre, so belligerent, so impenetrable, and so unpredictable that it makes Iran look like Canada by comparison. North Korea hurls all manner of threats at South Korea. During the spring 2013 crisis, Pyongyang repeatedly and luridly threatened to launch nuclear weapons at South Korea and the United States.13 Earlier that year, a North Korean diplomat publicly threatened the South with “final destruction,” at the United Nations Conference on Disarmament, of all places.14 In 2012, the official North Korean army Supreme Command issued a statement announcing to South Korea that it was about to “reduce all the rat-like groups [the government of South Korea] and the bases for provocations to ashes in three or four minutes, (or) in much shorter time, by unprecedented peculiar means and methods of our own style.”15 In 2011, the North Korean military released an official statement threatening to turn South Korea’s Blue House—their equivalent of the White House—into a “sea of fire” if South Korean forces ever fired a single shot into North Korea’s territory.16
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.17 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 not 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.