If the previous thirteen chapters have demonstrated anything, it is that there are no good options left when it comes to dealing with Iran and its pursuit of a nuclear capability. That is not to say there aren’t options that are relatively better and worse, just none that are good in an absolute sense. There are none that are low cost, low risk with a high probability of success. Our choices are awful, but choose we must.
It should also be self-evident why there remains a broad consensus that the United States should try to make a revised carrot-and-stick policy work. It is unquestionably the best of our bad choices. The Obama administration is right to pursue it, and to pursue it for as long as it offers any prospect of hope. There are three related aspects of the administration’s approach that are particularly important to consider moving forward.
The administration is correct to focus on weaponization as the key red line for Iran’s nuclear program—the step that we have to try to prevent if we can—and not the achievement of a narrow breakout capability. Iran already has a breakout capability. Moreover, any deal secured by the carrot-and-stick approach will leave Iran with some kind of a breakout capability, and it is hard to affix a specific time span to what a certain set of capabilities would translate into in terms of a breakout window. The difference between even a narrow breakout window of just a month or two and Iran’s possession of a deployed nuclear arsenal is huge. In short, the administration is correct to not let perfect become the enemy of good enough, because if we demand perfection, we will probably get nothing at all.
Building off the previous point, the administration is right that there is no reason to impose false time constraints on the negotiations. The real deal-breaker would be Iranian weaponization. Short of that, there is no reason not to keep negotiating, and to keep pushing Iran to make compromises by dint of sanctions and other forms of pressure. This does not mean that we should hold off on imposing these forms of pressure on Iran indefinitely. There is no reason we cannot tell the Iranians that they have until a specific date to accept the terms of an offer or they will be subject to additional penalties. Just that the real decision point for the United States is when we see Iran moving to weaponize, and we should not create false, artificial deadlines based on the fear that Iran is about to pass some other milestone related to a breakout window rather than to weaponization.
The Israelis have tried to create such artificial deadlines as a way of holding the world’s feet to the fire. Jerusalem’s rationale is entirely understandable, it has worked so far, and it was probably necessary for them to do so. But we should note that at least a half dozen such Israeli red lines have passed by without an Israeli attack, and therefore we should not short-circuit the process and give up what would be the best feasible outcome because of a false deadline created principally to galvanize international action. Israel’s ability to cause meaningful damage to the Iranian nuclear program has now diminished to the point where it should not be a driving consideration in our approach to Iran. Again, the administration has been right to maintain that if anyone were going to bomb Iran, it should be the United States, and we have a lot more time than the Israelis do. Because of our much greater capabilities, we have until Iran begins to weaponize. We do not need to act before then, if we choose to act in this fashion at all.
For my part, I will also say that I fully agree with the administration’s focus on securing a deal with Iran that would cap its nuclear progress short of weaponization and enable extensive, intrusive inspections to ensure that Tehran complies—and ensure that we would know it if they don’t. I do not believe that it is necessary to roll back Iran’s nuclear progress to eliminate any breakout capability, nor do I believe that such a standard is possible any longer. The Iranians have made it clear that they will not agree to a deal that does not allow them some enrichment capability; therefore we should focus on getting a deal that gives us the greatest confidence that Iran would not weaponize rather than trying to make it physically impossible for them to do so. As our experience with Iraq should teach us, the former is all we need and holding out for the latter will likely prove self-defeating.
However, by the same token, I think it a mistake for the administration to disdain even to examine and test a program of regime change for Iran, in particular by trying to find ways to help the Iranian opposition. I say this in full expectation that regime change probably will not work in Iran. However, if the carrot-and-stick approach fails to secure an acceptable halt to the Iranian program and Tehran proceeds toward weaponization, we should want to try almost anything else that might work—that might let us avoid the ultimate choice between war or containment. Even if regime change is a low probability, and I grant that it is, trying a low-probability approach is worth it if there is any chance that it might head off the need to accept either war or containment.
What’s more, I believe that the administration has misread the impact of a regime change strategy on the Iranian regime. The historical evidence we have available, limited as it is, suggests that applying additional pressure in the form of regime change is likely to make Tehran more willing to compromise rather than less. Even then, it may not be enough to convince Tehran to agree to a deal. If that is the case, then as Danielle Pletka pointed out all those years ago, all that will matter is whether we supported the legitimate aspirations of the Iranian people, a great many of whom have demanded a different government. Given the numbers and the dedication of those who revolted against the regime in 2009, we cannot say that there is no longer a large, legitimate domestic opposition to the regime. Our values and experience both argue that we should support them as best we can. And if doing so also helps us achieve a solution to the nuclear impasse before we must make the awful choice between war and containment, so much the better.
Yet a renewed effort to secure a deal and whatever we might do to help the Iranian opposition may all fail in the end. And that end may not be far away at this point. If that is the case, we will face the last choice, the choice between war and containment. Having worked through each of these approaches separately, it is now time to compare them and reach some kind of a conclusion.
I am going to lay out my logic and I am going to do so writing in the first person. My reason for presenting this analysis in this fashion is to emphasize that this analysis derives from my assumptions, my assessments, and my preferences. They are why I prefer containment over war in the majority of circumstances. It is also meant to underscore what should be obvious: that a different person with different assumptions and preferences might assess the balance very differently. My hope is less to persuade you that I am right and more to persuade you that every American, certainly every American concerned about this critical foreign policy issue, needs to weigh the costs and risks as they are, not as we would like them to be. And that we have to weigh all of them, not just the ones we like, although every American will weight each of the factors differently based on his or her idiosyncratic views and preferences. In the end, if you decide instead that war is the least bad option, so be it. As long as we all recognize all of the risks and costs and prepare for them accordingly.
So let’s get started. I am going to begin by looking at the pros, cons, and other factors of pursuing U.S. (not Israeli) air strikes against the Iranian nuclear program before I do the same for containment, and then will explain how I see them interacting. Please note that in the lists of advantages and disadvantages I have drawn up, what matters is not the quantity of the pros and cons but their quality. One really big advantage could outweigh many smaller and/or less likely disadvantages.
THE ADVANTAGES OF AIR STRIKES. I see seven potential advantages to air strikes. I have highlighted those I believe most salient in bold italic.
• Air strikes play to our greatest advantage—our enormous conventional military superiority over Iran.
• U.S. air strikes would probably set the Iranian nuclear program back somewhere between two and ten years. Lower figures are probably more likely given Iran’s demonstrated ability to build new nuclear facilities from scratch and the fact that even extensive air strikes could not eliminate Iran’s understanding of the enrichment process. There is some risk that air strikes would set back the Iranian program by less than two years—either because our strikes are not as effective as expected, the Iranians have hidden sites we do not know about at the time of the attack, or they receive considerable foreign assistance in rebuilding after an attack.
• There is a possibility that Iran would never rebuild after successful air strikes or that they would not be able to rebuild because other events would prevent them from doing so. While this seems less likely than the prospect that Tehran would rebuild, it is certainly possible. The regime might fear getting struck again and might decide that the game is just not worth the candle. After the Israeli air strike against the Syrian nuclear facility at al-Kibar in 2007, the onset of the Arab Spring in 2011 meant that the Asad regime never acquired the nuclear weapon it desired. (Of course, in that case the evidence is overwhelming that it was the Arab Spring, not the al-Kibar strike, that precluded the Asad regime’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon. Syria was not even close to having a nuclear weapon in 2007 and even had Israel not struck the facility, it would not have been able to produce a nuclear weapon before the Arab Spring plunged the country into civil war in 2011.)
• There is some possibility that air strikes would exacerbate popular unhappiness with the regime, conceivably even enough to lead to the downfall of the regime—or merely to convince them not to rebuild for fear that another American strike might be cause for another popular revolt. The former seems highly unlikely, the latter just unlikely.
• Air strikes would be comparatively low cost. Depending on how many days or weeks we had to run them, they probably would cost only tens of billions of dollars—comparatively cheap, especially if the air campaign actually solves the problem. However, they would doubtless cause the oil market to spike. The duration of the spike could vary considerably depending on how Iran responds and how able the United States and its allies are to deal with Iranian retaliation.
• Iran might be so afraid of further America strikes that it would not retaliate at all or its efforts to retaliate would be too weak to overcome our defenses. The former strikes me as highly unlikely, whereas the latter is much harder to gauge but certainly quite possible.
• If air strikes succeed, they will do so quickly, allowing the United States to turn to other problems.
THE DISADVANTAGES OF AIR STRIKES. I see eleven potential disadvantages to air strikes. I have again highlighted those I believe most salient in bold italic.
• It is more likely that the Iranians would rebuild their nuclear program than not. In the event that they rebuild, they would most likely withdraw from the NPT and banish the inspectors to be able to rebuild unfettered and without the IAEA reporting on their efforts to the world. They might even announce their intent to deploy actual weapons to prevent another American strike. A determination to rebuild is both far more in line with this regime’s past behavior and rhetoric, and is more consistent with the limited historical evidence. The Iraqis rebuilt their nuclear program (or tried to do so) after the successful Israeli air strike in 1981 and the partially successful American air campaign in 1991. Syria does not seem to have tried to rebuild the al-Kibar facility after the 2007 Israeli air strike, but the unclassified evidence is paltry; we do not know if Damascus had started to reconstitute elsewhere, or what might have happened had the Arab Spring not intervened in 2011.
• It is far more likely that Iran would retaliate than not. Moreover, the available evidence strongly indicates that they would try to retaliate here in the United States itself with both cyber and terrorist attacks. How much damage they would inflict would depend on how good our homeland and cyber defenses are compared to how good their attacks would be. The Iranians might retaliate over the course of months or years, during which time they could improve on their tactics if early attacks failed. The Arbabsiar plot suggested that their capability to mount terrorist attacks in the United States was negligible in 2010, but according to press reports, the U.S. intelligence community believes that Iran has been working hard to expand it. In addition, Iranian retaliation could further drive up the price of oil, potentially keeping it high for many months.
• It is highly likely that Iran would retaliate against Israel and probably the GCC states. There is a reasonable probability that Hizballah would participate in such retaliation, and a significantly lower probability that Hamas would join as well. Again, depending on the balance between Israeli/American/GCC defenses and Iranian/Hizballah/PIJ offensive capabilities at the time that the air strikes were launched (and for potentially a long period of time afterward), the damage from such retaliation could range from the utterly inconsequential (a few rocket attacks and a few tourists killed) to the truly catastrophic (crippling the Israeli economy for weeks or months and cutting Gulf oil production). The Iranians might also ramp up their efforts to subvert American Arab allies, although this would unfold over a much longer period of time.
• Iran might try to close the Strait of Hormuz. This seems unlikely as long as the Iranians can tell that the air strikes are not the start of an invasion or a decapitation campaign, but it is not impossible.
• As a result either of highly damaging Iranian retaliation or an Iranian decision to rebuild its nuclear program, the United States could be forced to invade and occupy Iran—or live with a nuclear Iran that will be hostile, intent on revenge, and in possession of nuclear weapons.
• Air strikes might fail. Either because we are not aware of all of Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iranian defenses prove tougher than we expect, our own forces experience unexpected problems, or some combination of all of the above, we may do much less damage than we expect. I think this probability low, but not zero.
• It is more likely that air strikes would either stoke Iranian nationalism and rally people around the regime, or turn them against the United States, than it is that they would cause the people to turn more against the regime. Historically, that is just how air campaigns work.
• Air strikes would totally consume our attention in the run-up, the execution, and for some time thereafter. If we were forced to invade, that would consume far more of our attention (and resources) for far longer than either the air strikes on their own or possibly even containment.
• Even if the air strikes are highly successful, except in the unlikely circumstances in which the regime opts not to rebuild its nuclear program (and it is very clear to the outside world that this is their decision) or is overthrown by the Iranian people as a result of them, air strikes would leave the United States still relying on containment—albeit containment of a non-nuclear Iran.
• If the air strikes are unsuccessful—meaning either that they failed to set back the Iranian program by much or that Tehran announced afterward its determination to rebuild and build weapons—and the United States opts not to invade, we would be forced back onto a policy of containing a nuclear Iran anyway. Moreover, it would be containing a much more dangerous nuclear Iran, one that would almost certainly be implacably hostile, bent on revenge, and uninterested in any agreements with the United States. It could also mean containing a nuclear Iran without the invaluable help of the NPT and the IAEA inspectors to constrain Iran.
• Air strikes would likely deepen anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, although it would be unlikely that this would have any concrete, near-term effects.
THE ADVANTAGES OF CONTAINMENT. I see seven potential advantages from containment.
• It would have a much lower risk of involving the United States in a war with Iran than air strikes (where the risk is 100 percent since attacking Iran with air strikes is going to war). Under containment, crises could get out of hand and result in a war, so the probability is not zero. However, one of the goals of containment would be to try to avoid a war and there are numerous steps the United States could take to try to minimize the probability of inadvertent escalation.
• It would have a much lower risk of involving the United States in an invasion and occupation of Iran along the lines of what the United States mounted in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is hard to the point of impossibility to imagine circumstances in which the United States would invade a nuclear Iran. At most, we might feel compelled to mount limited incursions to secure Iranian nuclear weapons in the event the regime were to collapse and we became concerned about the status of its nuclear weapons. That could be difficult and ugly, but would be nothing like an invasion and occupation.
• It holds out the prospects for a negotiated resolution to our problems with Iran at a later date. Détente is a distinct possibility under containment and it is not inconceivable that by pursuing this course rather than going to war, we could eventually work out confidence-building measures and even arms control agreements with Iran that would diminish or eliminate many of the problems of containment. It might even set us on the road to an eventual rapprochement with Iran.
• It seems more likely that containment would exacerbate the divisions between the Iranian regime and so many of its people than would air strikes. Again, air strikes appear to have a higher probability of helping the Iranian regime to hold power than undermining their control because of the visceral reaction that accompanies any act of war against a people. In contrast, the constant pressure and isolation of the international community against Iran has undeniably contributed to the regime’s unpopularity. It is impossible to know how much foreign pressure was responsible for this popular disillusionment compared to factors wholly internal to Iran, but they unquestionably had a positive impact. Thus, the more likely negative impact of air strikes has to be compared to the more likely positive impact of continued containment.
• It would probably garner international sympathy, especially in the short term. At least for some period of time—varying based in large part on how well we handle ourselves—we could count on a fair degree of international support for our containment efforts. The key would be to invest that support in building a durable containment regime, one that can last for the long term.
• It would probably require less attention and resources concentrated on Iran than even successful air strikes, at least in the short term. Successful air strikes would mean a high expenditure of both attention and resources for some period of weeks or months, diminishing markedly over the long term. In contrast, containment would mean lesser commitments throughout but paid out regularly for potentially much longer. Then again, unsuccessful air strikes would likely mean both large outlays in the short term and significant commitments over the long term, too.
• It could result in increased arms sales to the GCC.
THE DISADVANTAGES OF CONTAINMENT. I see nine potential disadvantages from containment.
• Iran will continue to try to subvert the governments of American regional allies; it will back terrorist groups, insurgencies, militias, and other violent extremists. There is a strong probability that it will do so even more than it has in the past, although its ability to do so successfully and the likelihood that this support will produce the outcomes Iran seeks will be determined by a range of factors beyond its control.
• Deterrence may fail. The combination of Iran’s likely aggressive behavior and the potential for the GCC states or Israel to respond in equally assertive fashion will probably spark crises. Either as a result of deliberate action or inadvertent escalation, one or more of these crises could lead to a war, and potentially even the use of nuclear weapons by one side or both.
• It is highly likely that the GCC states will seek to balance a nuclear Iran rather than bandwagon with it. That could help produce crises with Iran. It could also produce nuclear proliferation, particularly on the part of Saudi Arabia, but potentially by the UAE as well. Proliferation by Turkey and Egypt seem far less likely, but not impossible.
• There are a number of increased costs attendant on containment, although most are modest: possibly modernizing our strategic nuclear forces, adding a mid-course missile defense system to the Middle East’s defenses, possibly augmenting slightly our conventional forces in the region, and probably increasing military aid to Israel, but the costs pale in comparison to the potential costs of a war with Iran, especially an invasion and occupation.
• The price of oil would almost certainly be affected by fears related to a nuclear Iran. However, that impact could range from marginal to disastrous. The actual impact is likely to be determined heavily by how early crises with a nuclear Iran work out—whether the United States involves itself early, whether the crisis results in a war, whether it results in any actual cuts to oil production or exports, and whether Iran is seen as having been emboldened by the outcome or chastened by it.
• Iran will continue to attack the United States with cyber weapons and possibly some forms of terrorism at least for as long as we continue to do similar things to them. Again, they might be so emboldened by their acquisition of nuclear weapons that they might try to increase the severity of these attacks and/or continue to pursue them even if we desist. Nevertheless, there is no reason to believe that, even if Iran adopted this pattern of behavior early on, the United States could not mitigate the impact and convince them to modify or discontinue it by our own actions—as we have done at various points in the past.
• Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons could convince other countries outside the Middle East that the NPT has lost its bite, the norm against nuclear proliferation is breaking down, and therefore that they would suffer less if they pursued a nuclear capability. Of course, Iran has already suffered for its pursuit of such a capability in defiance of the international community to an extent greater than almost any other country (except North Korea) would tolerate, which would be an important check on this problem.
• It is most likely that Supreme Leader Khamene’i will be replaced by another weak figure unlikely to deviate significantly from Iran’s current course (or possibly by a committee that would probably do the same). However, there is a lesser probability that a more dangerous man might take his place, one far more aggressive and reckless—Saddam Husayn in a turban. Such a leader would be more likely to provoke crises with the United States, the GCC, Israel, and other American allies. He might also be far more difficult to deter than Khamene’i, which would call into question the central premise of containment.
• At some point, the Islamic Republic is likely to pass from history. There is a risk that this will occur with a bang, rather than a whimper—the state will fracture and collapse. If that happens, there is also a risk that elements of its nuclear arsenal could be used or transferred to some of Tehran’s vicious terrorist friends. While this is certainly a real concern, it is worth noting that historically a nuclear state has never fractured and collapsed into chaos; the Soviet Union fractured, but it never collapsed into chaos and the issue of “loose nukes” from the USSR was handled without tragedy, albeit not without some drama.
This brief comparison should reinforce the ultimate point that both of the options, air strikes and containment, are pretty rotten. For both paired lists, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. There should be little doubt that if we have other options, like the carrot-and-stick or even regime change, we ought to try them rather than going with either of these two.
In addition, I hope you recognize how ultimately subjective so many of these statements are, and how hard it is to ascribe any real precision to their likelihood. There are simply too many unknowns at work here to be able to say much with real confidence. The best we can do, as I have tried throughout this book, is to lay out the evidence from Iranian and international history relevant to each of these issues, the deductive logic behind each, and how other, similar states have behaved in similar circumstances. That is not terrible, and it is certainly the best we are going to be able to do, but is a far cry from certainty.
Now let me explain how I get to where I get to.
AIR STRIKES. My starting point is a simple one. I have a great deal of concern about air strikes. I am an old military analyst, and this operation rubs me the wrong way. I am certainly no shrinking violet. I am no pacifist. I believe that force can advance our national interests and should be employed when necessary. I supported a war against Saddam, albeit not the one that the Bush 43 administration waged. I was among the first to argue that the United States had to shift to a true counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, and supported the “surge” there when the Bush administration finally came around to this realization.1 I am also a firm believer that airpower can do some remarkable things, including on its own. I supported the U.S. strategy in Operation Enduring Freedom against Afghanistan—and said so in print. I also supported Operation Desert Fox, and said so in print. In fact, I wanted it to go on longer and go after more of Saddam’s security apparatus. Nevertheless, I get very nervous when people start telling me that a limited air campaign can solve all of our problems. That is something that has been promised repeatedly throughout history and has almost never proven close to being true.
Still, my thinking about air strikes has changed over the years. I once saw a great many risks inherent in the air strike option that have since faded. The American effort to secure and rebuild Iraq was probably the biggest of those. At one time, it was too important and too vulnerable to Iranian retaliation to risk. Today, for good or ill, it is gone and therefore cannot be a reason to oppose an air campaign. Similarly, although I am hardly 100 percent confident that we know where all of Iran’s nuclear sites are, I have a lot more confidence than I did ten years ago. The intelligence services of the United States and other countries have been going over Iran with a fine-tooth comb and the discoveries of Natanz, Arak, and Fordow suggest that they have learned something from their past mistakes. I may not be 100 percent confident, but I am more comfortable than I once was.
Yet each time I work through the air strikes option, I cannot get it to work out right. As you have read, I am concerned that air strikes will prove to be nothing more than a prelude to invasion, as they were in Iraq and almost were in Kosovo. I note that even Matt Kroenig, a passionate advocate of air strikes, shares my fears, writing, “In the midst of such spiraling violence, neither side may see a clear path out of the battle, resulting in a long-lasting, devastating war, whose impact may critically damage the United States’ standing in the Muslim world.” I find I concur with the way that Tom Donnelly, Dany Pletka, and Maseh Zarif, three people normally found on the rightward side of the political aisle, put it in their analysis of the problems of containment: “We agree that escalated confrontation with Iran—and there is undeniably, a low-level war already being waged by Iranian operatives or proxies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere—would throw an already volatile region into chaos, perhaps spread and involve other great powers, and place a heavy burden on over-stretched American forces and finances. The costs of war are all too obvious and painfully familiar.”2
I fear that Iranian retaliation will prove more than we are willing to bear or that Iran will choose to reconstitute its nuclear program—and will do so as a weapons program, without the constraints of the NPT. Both seem like quite high likelihoods based on past Iranian practice, Iranian public and private statements, and the behavior of other, similar regimes under similar circumstances. If either proves to be the case, let alone both, I think it will be difficult for the president to avoid shifting to an invasion. I was there, in the room in 1999 when the Clinton NSC reached the conclusion that the NATO air campaign was not accomplishing its mission and therefore the United States would have to invade Kosovo if Milosevic did not back down before the ground force was deployed and ready. It was a grim moment.
If the United States attacked Iran to destroy its nuclear sites and the Iranians retaliated in ways we found too painful to bear, or they stood up from the rubble, brushed off the dust, and vowed to rebuild and this time to get a bomb—the fatwa be damned—I do not believe the president, any president, could just stop. The president would have to defend the American people and the American homeland against attack, retaliatory or otherwise. Likewise, if the president commits the nation to war to defend against what he will have to say is a grave threat to our vital national interests, he is going to have to finish the job with ground troops if air strikes alone fail to get it done.
CONTAINMENT. As with air strikes, I start with the history. My reading of history is that nuclear deterrence works. Certainly, it has never failed—at least not yet. I am persuaded that the logic of nuclear deterrence is so simple and dramatic that it is compelling and the vast majority of people will be swayed by it. However, I do not think that nuclear deterrence is easy, perfect, or self-sustaining. While I have no idea just how close the world came to a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Kargil War, I don’t particularly like taking any steps in that direction.
Similarly, my reading of the history of the containment of Iran is that it has worked quite well. Amid our fourth decade of containment, Iran is weak, isolated, internally divided, and externally embattled. It stirs trouble in the region as best it can, but it is no threat to the territorial integrity of any other country and its unconventional warfare campaigns have tended to be lethal nuisances far more than they have contributed to meaningful shifts in the balance of power—or even threatened the leadership of key states. Although they keep trying and someday might succeed, Iran has never overthrown the government of an American ally. Likewise, it has exacerbated a lot of regional conflicts but never caused one. In short, my reading of the history is that both nuclear deterrence and containment of Iran are powerful concepts that have proven themselves reliable over time.
Nevertheless, I recognize the dangers of both, and am concerned about how Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons could change the dynamics that produced both of those historical patterns of success: nuclear deterrence and containment of Iran. The problems that loom largest to me are the potential for nuclear crises, especially in the early years after Iran acquires a nuclear weapon but has not yet learned the rules of the nuclear road; the potential for proliferation, particularly by Saudi Arabia and perhaps the UAE; the potential for the oil market to go haywire; and the potential for Khamene’i’s successor to prove more dangerous than he is. In general, I am concerned about each of these problems, but I suspect that each is not catastrophic to begin with and could be significantly mitigated by American action.
Crisis management is my greatest concern about containing a nuclear Iran. I am far more concerned about the potential for crises to escalate than I am about the impact of more aggressive Iranian unconventional warfare. I expect that a nuclear Iran would become more aggressive in its support for terrorism, insurgents, and other subversive groups, and I believe that will further destabilize the Middle East. But given the accomplishments of Iranian unconventional warfare to date, I do not see an expansion of that effort as a compelling argument in favor of going to war with Iran instead. That is especially so since it seems highly likely that an American air campaign would cause the Iranians to do exactly the same thing, perhaps with even greater zeal and less restraint, since they will have just been attacked. In contrast, if the United States were relying on containment, Iranian subversive efforts would take place under a rubric of red lines and a desire to poke at us without provoking us. In fact, unless Iran finds a way to overthrow a foreign government in a way it never has in the past, the worst that is likely to happen from this would be that Iran’s efforts would provoke a nuclear crisis. That would certainly be dangerous, but what would make it dangerous was the fact that it was a nuclear crisis, not the Iranian subversive activities. So that just brings me back to my concern about nuclear crises.
Crises, especially nuclear crises, suffer from a variety of inherent problems related to time, uncertainty, communications, all of which are going to be worse with the Iranians simply because of the nature of their system and their perceptions of the United States. However, as I have also described in the preceding pages, there are important mitigating factors. The first is that the logic of nuclear deterrence is incredibly powerful, and I have seen nothing in Iran’s behavior under Khamene’i, or even Khomeini for that matter, that makes me feel that they will not understand it as well. I feel quite comfortable about that judgment. I wish that I could be certain, but that is never possible and the small residual doubt cannot be allowed to be determinative. We could not be certain that nuclear deterrence would work with the Soviet Union, China, Pakistan, or North Korea either, yet it has worked in every case so far.
The second important mitigating factor is that America’s possession of escalation dominance over Iran is an extremely powerful force to ensure that nuclear crises with Iran do not get out of hand, and that they end to our advantage. Once we are involved in a crisis, there is no level of warfare at which Iran can defeat the United States The smartest thing they could do would be to back down, de-escalate, and try to go back to fighting at the unconventional level where they may have an advantage over us—although even that is no longer certain after Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terror, and the Arab Spring. At any other level of warfare, we will do infinitely greater damage to them than they can do to us. There is always the potential for catastrophic miscalculation, but in every nuclear crisis in the past, regardless of the participants—including India and Pakistan—the moment that their nuclear arsenals were engaged, all sides suddenly began to demonstrate enormous care and caution, and a willingness to tolerate humiliating defeat rather than face annihilation. That includes risk-tolerant and casualty-tolerant leaders like Khrushchev, Stalin, and Pakistan’s generals. Iran’s leaders would thus have to be categorically different kinds of people to act differently—again, they would have to be as different as Saddam Husayn, who was willing to gamble on the ruin of his regime and his own death on numerous occasions from 1980 until his final miscalculation in 2003. There is nothing about the behavior of Iran’s leaders that looks to me like they belong in that narrow category.
The Saudis also worry me. My experience of the Saudis is that they don’t bluff lightly, unlike some of our other Middle Eastern allies. I take them at their word when they say that they plan to get a bomb of their own if the Iranians do. Nevertheless, I suspect that when it comes down to it, doing so will prove harder for the Saudis than it might seem now. First, I am skeptical that the Iranians will weaponize, at least for some time, because they fear Russia, China, and India joining the sanctions; they fear the United States mounting an all-out regime change campaign against them; and they may even fear an American or Israeli military response. In the ambiguous circumstances in which Iran abstains from weaponizing, would the Saudis go for a bomb? To the rest of the world, it will look like international pressure is working with Iran—and then the Saudis come along and wreck it by getting a bomb of their own? Maybe. There is also the question of whether the Pakistanis will actually give it to them if they ask for it, no matter how much Riyadh may have contributed to Islamabad’s bomb-making program. The Pakistanis have actually been remarkably careful with their nuclear arsenal, and they may fear that if they are caught giving a bomb to someone, they will come under severe international sanctions that they simply cannot tolerate—and from which neither the Americans nor the Chinese will save them. The Saudis, too, may still calculate that it is more useful for them to have a strong defense relationship with the United States than to go out on their own, acquire a small nuclear arsenal, and perhaps sour the long strategic relationship with the United States that has been the cornerstone of their security since the Second World War.
Then there is the issue of Khamene’i’s successor. First, I suspect that for their own reasons the Iranians are not going to pick a crackpot to succeed him. Next, in a post-Khamene’i era, my guess is that the Supreme Leader will be more constrained even than he is now. This is the nature of bureaucratic autocracies: they dislike strong leaders who want to push for particular visions. Left to choose their own leaders, they tend toward safe choices—nonentities, consensus builders, and committees. Just looking at the current Iranian political scene, it strikes me as difficult for one of the real firebrands to get himself named Supreme Leader. Even if one of them could, I think it highly unlikely that they would be even as bad as Khomeini, who still abided by deterrence logic and respected the overwhelming strength of the United States even if he fought it however he could. So to the extent that I worry about Khamene’i’s successor, it is not as much as I worry about the risks and concerns of a war.
Finally, there is the issue of oil. I am certainly very concerned about the potential for the price of oil to swing wildly as a result of a range of factors related to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. However, I am struck by how dependent this problem is on American behavior. That’s why I wanted to come to this last. Oil prices do not operate in a vacuum. They are determined by traders trying to predict outcomes—traders who can panic, but who also learn. And it is what they learn that is likely to have the greatest impact, because the overall risk premium (the long-term increase in the price of oil) is likely to prove far more important than spikes resulting from individual crises. The global economy can overcome virtually any single spike, but a series of spikes resulting in ever-worsening long-term volatility would be devastating.
However, what is so important about the oil issue is what is so important to so many aspects of containment: the American role. In speaking to oil experts and reading their work for decades—and then specifically about this issue for this book—what stands out is how much they believe that American behavior is likely to prove decisive. The more that the United States is seen involving itself early and actively in problems related to Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon and to threats in the region more generally, the more reassured they will be. Similarly, the more that regional crises are resolved quickly and without escalation, the more that the oil markets will be reassured, and that too will be much more likely if the United States intervenes quickly and decisively. Finally, if regional crises end with Iran chastened rather than emboldened, that too will calm the oil markets and that too is far more likely if the United States gets involved than if it doesn’t.
That is an important point to me because it echoes the conclusions of so many other points about containment: that it is far more likely to prove successful if the United States is an active participant rather than a passive bystander. Crisis management, proliferation, the potential overreactions of our own allies, and oil price volatility are all likely to prove highly sensitive to the American role. The more that the United States acts as the “guardian of the Gulf,” stepping in to crises between Iran and other states, reassuring its allies, facing down the Iranians whenever it is necessary, mediating conflicts whenever it is possible, the more that all of these problems will be ameliorated. Thus, another advantage I see in containment is that its success is likely to depend heavily on how the United States acts—because if we act, there is good reason to believe that containment can succeed.
However, the alternative is also true. That the less we act, the more likely that containment will fail. The more that we leave crises to the states of the region to work out themselves, the greater the likelihood that they will end badly. The more that we stay in the background, the more that our regional allies will feel the need to deter or push back on Iran themselves, and that will not only provoke more such crises: it will push them to seek nuclear weapons to be on a par with Iran when they do so. And the more that oil traders see these kinds of problems cropping up and not seeing the United States doing anything about them, the more frightened they will become, the more that the price of oil will rise, and the easier for small incidents to produce very big swings in the price of oil. The price of oil is the ultimate “public good” and the United States remains the only country capable of providing that public good. If the oil markets see the United States walking away from that role, they will panic and that will be very bad for business—everybody’s business.
I also contrast this with air strikes in another way. Again, what this analysis of containment reveals is how much the potential success or failure rests on how the United States acts, which I find reassuring. With air strikes, the ultimate outcome depends on how Iran acts: how they choose to retaliate, whether they choose to reconstitute their nuclear program, when they agree to stop fighting. Those will be their decisions to make and we will have relatively little ability to influence them. Yet this could be the difference between success and failure, between a relatively brief air campaign and an invasion and occupation. And that troubles me.
Thus, when I compare the costs and risks of air strikes to the costs and risks of containment, I ultimately judge that I am more comfortable paying the costs and running the risks associated with containment than I am those associated with air strikes, or more properly, war. I do not say that lightly.
What’s more, I think it important to add four brief caveats to this conclusion. First, I am much more comfortable espousing containment if it is pursued by a United States that is militarily and diplomatically involved in the region, not aloof and disconnected. The Obama administration has been trying to remove itself from Middle Eastern disputes wherever and however it can. The Middle East is not better off for it, and I fear that we will pay a price for it as well. Likewise, many of the most ardent—and most intelligent and knowledgeable—proponents of containment do so in the name of a policy of “restraint” that would similarly see the United States less active and engaged in the problems of the Middle East. That approach strikes me as being particularly dangerous as part of the containment of a nuclear Iran. It is not that it is bound to fail, only that it will be much harder for it to succeed. Far better for the United States to play an active role and boost the odds of containment’s success along with it. After all, one of the greatest problems with containment is that if it fails it potentially could fail catastrophically.
Second, to return to one of the themes of the last chapter, all of this underscores just how much better it would be if Iran could be kept from weaponizing, even if that means allowing them a narrow breakout window. All of the problems of containment—crisis management, proliferation, oil prices, and so on—are ameliorated if not eliminated if Iran is kept from weaponizing.
Third, although I generally oppose the idea of going to war with Iran and prefer to contain Iran, even a nuclear Iran, if left with only the choice between these two, I believe it would be a huge mistake to let the Iranians believe that the United States has ruled out the military option. It is one thing for some former government official at a Washington think tank to say that we should not go to war; it is something else entirely for the sitting president or secretary of defense to say it—or even imply it. We do not know just how much Iran’s own restraint with regard to its nuclear program stemmed from a fear that the United States might attack, but it was almost certainly part of their thinking. I suspect that Iran would prefer not to be attacked by Israel, but I think it is frightened of being attacked by America, and I think that fear has had a salutary effect on their behavior, including helping to convince them that they shouldn’t weaponize, or at least should not weaponize yet.
Last, I want to return to one point I made in discussing American military options: the calculus for war changes if Tehran takes some foolish action that would justify an attack on Iran in the eyes of the American people and international public opinion. So many of the problems of air strikes relate to the difficulty we may have generating political and diplomatic support, coupled with the difficulty of bringing such a war to a close short of an invasion. However, if the Iranians attack us first, then we would be well within our rights to respond by crushing their nuclear program and then walking away. If they wanted to retaliate themselves, there would be plenty more target sets we could hit that would make such a conflict increasingly painful for Tehran. The key differences would be that the military operation would not have to be justified by the grave threat posed by Iranian nuclear weapons to America’s vital interests, and international and domestic opinion would be with us. In these circumstances, bombing Iran’s nuclear sites, and perhaps buying ourselves anywhere from two to ten years, would not just be acceptable, it might well be the best option of all.
I have been reading books, articles, memos, and policy papers making the case for one or another way of handling the Iranian nuclear program for at least a decade and a half. In researching this book I have gone back over many of these pieces—and read many that I hadn’t earlier. One of the most dispiriting aspects of this survey has been to see how much hysteria has come to surround this issue. Many of the brightest, most experienced, most able of our nation’s thinkers and policymakers are guilty of this practice. On both left and right, advocates of one position or another have employed some of the most outrageous, unrealistic, even ridiculous forms of argumentation. Both sides consistently present only the worst case for the course of action favored by the other, and only the best possible case for their own preferred policy.
On the left, many smart, well-intentioned people put forth preposterous claims about what will happen if the United States bombs Iran, to persuade the undecided of the virtues of containment. This includes the argument that the “Arab street” or even “the entire Muslim world” will rise up against the United States if we strike Iran. No, they won’t. It’s not just that people have been making this prediction repeatedly for several decades about any number of other American actions and been proven wrong every time. It’s also that most Arabs, and a whole lot of Muslims, are ambivalent at best about Iran and its nuclear program. They won’t like an American (let alone an Israeli) air campaign, some might use it as an excuse to vent their anger about other issues, but most will have their own problems to worry about.
For some on the right, the preferred course of argumentation seems to be to try to discredit containment by holding it to ridiculous standards. The most obvious of these is the insistence that we can only trust containment if we are 100 percent certain that Iran’s leaders are not messianic or insane. Of course, we can never be 100 percent certain of any human enterprise and so it is absurd to establish that as the standard for anything. We can’t be 100 percent certain that air strikes against Iran would not cause the end of the world, either. The evidence we have strongly indicates that Iran’s leaders are not messianic or insane, and there simply is no good evidence that they are. That is as good as it gets for mere mortals, and more than adequate for countless policy decisions of similar import in the past.
Another example of this ploy is that some who oppose containment and favor air strikes have argued that for containment to be considered successful, it would have to prevent Iran from transferring nuclear technology to other countries. It’s hard to know what “success” would mean in this case, but if it means that we have to bomb Iran unless we can be certain that they won’t give another country blueprints for a centrifuge, then this criteria is hard to take seriously. After all, Pakistan’s A. Q. Khan network transferred all manner of plans and nuclear equipment to a variety of countries, including Libya, North Korea, and Iran. It’s tough to think of countries we would have less wanted to receive nuclear technology than these three. Yet we did not bomb Pakistan. In fact, they are now one of the largest recipients of American aid. North Korea then turned around and transferred nuclear technology to Asad’s Syria (one of the other countries we really did not want to receive such assistance), and still we have not bombed North Korea, either. Thus, this cannot be a reasonable standard for the “success” or “failure” of containment, and it certainly cannot be a basis for mounting air strikes against Iran.
Still another alarming issue raised by those who oppose containment is the possibility of an accident involving Iranian nuclear weapons—an accidental detonation or even an accidental launch. However, there is no reason to suspect that Iran will be any more careless with its nuclear weapons than Pakistan, India, North Korea, or someday a nuclear Brazil or Argentina will be. These countries have actually demonstrated great care with their nuclear forces. In truth, to the best of our knowledge, the country that has behaved most cavalierly with its nuclear forces and had the most accidents with them has been the United States. For periods of the Cold War, we had bombers in the air loaded with nuclear weapons on a regular basis—and at least once, a bomber accidentally dropped four nuclear bombs on Spain (fortunately, they did not set off a nuclear explosion). No other nuclear power has ever behaved so carelessly.3
Thus, while there is certainly some validity to this fear, it is a problem with nuclear proliferation, not necessarily with Iran. The more countries with nuclear weapons, then simply by the law of averages, the greater the likelihood that there will be an accident. But that is hardly a justification for attacking Iran. If that is our standard, why didn’t we attack North Korea when it crossed the nuclear threshold? Or Pakistan? Or India? Or Israel? Similarly, should we attack Brazil if someday it decides to acquire nuclear weapons? Or South Korea? In other words, this is a reasonable concern and an issue that should be addressed, but it is not a valid criterion for attacking Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
I will not speculate on the motives behind this unnecessary and unfortunate hysteria from both sides around the Iranian nuclear issue. I do not know whether these reflect a sense that in today’s polarized world this is what it takes to persuade a broader audience of one’s preferred position, or a genuine—but genuinely irrational—fear of the consequences of the other side’s position. It probably varies from person to person and in many cases may reflect some mix of the two. Whatever the motives, it needs to stop. The experts need to stop indulging in this unhelpful behavior, but more than that, the public needs to recognize it for the hysteria that it is.
The Iranian nuclear issue is hard enough as it is without such exaggeration. Adding to it simply turns what is already a difficult conversation into a useless screaming match.
As I have noted earlier, the world will not end the day after Iran acquires nuclear weapons. It did not end when Russia got them. Or when Mao’s China, or Pakistan, or North Korea got them, either. The world will be more difficult and there will be real and dangerous risks, but the apocalypse is low on that list. It is highly unlikely that Iran will use nuclear weapons unprovoked or give them to terrorists. I say that as an American, but as a reminder, polls have consistently demonstrated that four out of every five Israelis believe the same.
By the same token, a war with Iran is not going to cause the fall of the United States of America. It will not bankrupt the country. It will not result in massive loss of American life on the scale of the Civil War or World War II. It will not mean the end of Western civilization. It will not drag the United States into a vast war with the Islamic world. It will not cause the Arab street to “rise up” against the United States, or Israel.
Yet to listen to the two sides, this would appear to be the choice we have before us.
So I want to put in a plea that we set aside the hysteria—the not-inconceivable but exceptionally unlikely claims bandied about by partisans of both sides to play on our worst fears. In the realm of policy, there is always uncertainty. When nuclear weapons are involved, that uncertainty can quickly turn to fear. Yet despite that lingering uncertainty, the only responsible thing we can do is to make decisions based on what is likely, not on the possibilities that fear can conjure. If we learn nothing else from the Cold War, it should be that allowing highly unlikely but catastrophically bad scenarios to drive our planning, spending, and decision-making was ruinously wasteful and dangerously distorted policy in ways that made us all less safe rather than more.
Few countries have practiced strategies of containment and deterrence as deliberately, as skillfully, and as successfully as the United States. Historically, a great many cases of containment when practiced by other countries have ended in war. Think of the French efforts to contain Germany after 1870: the outcome was the two world wars. Not successful by anyone’s standards, but certainly not for France. British efforts to contain France itself under Louis XIV and Napoleon succeeded, but produced war after war (which may have been unavoidable in the pre-nuclear era). Britain did an admirable job containing Russia in the eighteenth century (what they referred to as “the Great Game”), but it isn’t clear just how necessary it was for them to do so. Of all the containment regimes the United States practiced during the twentieth century—against the USSR, China, North Korea after 1953, Cuba, Vietnam after 1975, Iran, Nicaragua, Libya, and Iraq—only the last resulted in a war. Every other containment strategy succeeded in preventing war, the conquest of additional territory, and any other meaningful increase in the power of the target state. Most of the states on that list are now our friends and staunch trading partners, in no small part because of the success of containment. It seems we are good at containment.
Yet we hate it. We hate it because it is ambiguous—a situation that is not war, but not peace, either. We hate it because it is protracted, leaving us in this state of limbo for decades in most cases. We hate it because it is not tough enough for conservatives and not compassionate enough for liberals. We hate it because it seems passive—even though most of the containment strategies we employed were actually pretty aggressive—and we are a people who admire action. We hate it because it gets monotonous, even though that is often the measure of its success. Perhaps it is related to why so few Americans enjoy soccer? Any sport in which a draw is something to be celebrated turns us off. Maybe any strategy that promises only perpetual draws, or just 1–0 victories, can’t win our hearts, either.
In the case of containing a nuclear Iran, there are reasons to be concerned about containment. It entails some not insignificant costs and some real risks. But there are also real reasons to be concerned about air strikes, both whether they will work and what they will get us into. Because of the unpredictability of conflict, going to war always means opening Pandora’s box. Sometimes we may be ready for what flies out. Sometimes we may prevent anything truly bad from escaping. But there are too many instances throughout history of war releasing furies that were never imagined. And with Iran our uncertainties are greater than almost anywhere else, except maybe North Korea. Making allowances for the uncertainty that pervades Iran must be a critical element of our decisions about how to deal with it.
We need also to remember the lessons of Iraq. With Iraq we felt just as certain about Saddam’s WMD activities, perhaps even more so than we are today about Iran. Almost no one believed that Saddam had not reconstituted his WMD programs, at least to some extent, and those who did were castigated as deranged. And yet, we were wrong. Terribly wrong. And that should make us more humble and more careful when contemplating our actions toward Iran.
We can all wish that we had better options. That some perfect strategy will appear before us and save us from the choices we have left. The time for that is long past. We can only choose the best from among the detritus.
Let us hope that we can persuade Iran to negotiate a halt to its nuclear program. Nothing would be better, even if it will be far from perfect. If that fails, let us try to help the people of Iran to change their circumstances and in so doing, change ours.
If all else fails we will face the fork in the road between war and containment. Neither is a good path. Neither may get us to our destination.
Yet choose we must. Unless circumstances change dramatically, I will choose the path of containment. It feels better, safer to me. If our nation chooses the path of war, may we walk it with greater care than in our last few forays and in the full understanding of its costs and risks. Perhaps the outcome will be better, but at least we will not have to say we did not know.