The fact that the Iranian regime is split between old clerics who came to power with Ayatollah Khomeini and younger, nonclerical leaders such as Ahmadinejad adds to Iranian worries. But the leaders’ primary concern is that they have seen other U.S. -sponsored uprisings succeed, particularly in the former Soviet Union, and they cannot gamble that the United States won’t get lucky again.
The Iranians learned from the North Koreans, who portrayed themselves as unstable and dangerous while launching a nuclear program.
To convince people that they might actually use those weapons, they made statements that sounded mad. Everyone feared a regime collapse that would lead to unintended consequences.
North Koreans managed to create a situation in which powers such as the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea tried to coax them to the table with aid. The North Koreans were so successful that they had the great powers negotiating to entice them to negotiate. It was an extraordinary performance.
Iran played to America’s nuclear phobia. They managed to put themselves in a position where members of the UN plus Germany tried to negotiate with them over the issue of whether they would negotiate. Iran copied the North Korea blueprint and it worked.
Iraq’s collapse left the U.S. in a bad position with few options. An air strike against Iranian nuclear targets would strengthen the regime. Plus, Iran had the ability to further stabilize Iraq, and to some extent, Afghanistan. Iran could also unleash Hezbollah, or mine the Strait of Hormuz and create economic chaos by blocking the flow of oil from Gulf states.
Therefore, disrupting America’s policy of maintaining regional balances and limited engagement, led to a geopolitical worst-case scenario. Iran has now become the dominant native power in the Persian Gulf and only the U.S. is capable of counterbalancing it. But if they did, the U.S. would violate their strategic principles. And the unbalanced attention given to this region left the U.S. weak in other parts of the world.
This is the defining geopolitical problem that President Obama inherited and that he and all other presidents of the next decade will have to deal with. Iran has become the pivot on which the Middle East will turn. In many ways, it was always the pivot. But before the United States could deal with Iran, it had to do something definitive about Islamic terror. It devoted its resources to wars it saw as directed against terrorism, which effectively insulated Iran from the threat of American intervention and even enhanced its position in the region.
The economic and geopolitical events of the past decade were intertwined. They created a crisis of confidence in the American public as well as drawing American strategic thinking into a series of short-term, tactical solutions. The Iran question is tied up with fears that rising oil prices will crush the economic recovery, as well as with the impact of action on the jihadist war. September 11 and the events of 2008 have combined to create a trap for American strategic thinking. As the United States moves forward into the next decade, it must escape the trap. The economic problem will resolve itself in time. The geopolitical challenge of terrorism requires decisions.
President Obama dropped the term war on terror, and rightly so. Terrorism is not an enemy but a type of warfare that may or may not be adopted by an enemy. Imagine if, after Pearl Harbor, an attack that relied on aircraft carriers, President Roosevelt had declared a global war on naval aviation. By focusing on terrorism instead of al Qaeda or radical Islam, Bush elevated a specific kind of assault to a position that shaped American global strategy, which left the United States strategically off-balance.
Obama may have clarified the nomenclature, but he left in place a significant portion of the imbalance, which is an obsession with the threat of terrorist attacks. As we consider presidential options in the coming decade, it appears imperative that we clear up just how much of a threat terrorism actually presents and what that threat means for U.S. policy.
The purpose of war, according to von Clausewitz, is to impose your will on another nation by rendering that other nation incapable of resisting nation by rendering that other nation incapable of resisting. The primary means for doing this is to destroy the nation’s military, or to undermine the population’s will to resist.
Another unpleasant reality that will loom over the next ten years, which needs to be considered separately, is weapons of mass destruction. The existence of such weapons will occasionally prompt severe responses from the presidents who lead us. The damage that a nuclear device might do would dwarf that of conventional terrorism
There have been many reports of Soviet-era nuclear weapons, and biological and chemical weapons, being available on the black market, but most of the offers were made by intelligence agencies trying to lure terrorists into a trap. If you were a terrorist offered a suitcase nuke by a former Soviet colonel, how could you possibly tell whether what you were looking at was the real thing or just a box stuffed with wires and blinking lights? The same uncertainty would have to hold for chemical or biological weapons as well.
Only one country ever produced a nuclear weapon from scratch, and that was the United States. The British got their nukes in compensation for their contribution to the American research effort. The French also acquired the technology from the Americans, which they then regifted to Israel. The Russians stole the knowledge from the Americans, then transferred it to both the Chinese and the Indians. The Chinese gave the technology to the Pakistanis. The point is, the development of these weapons through an independent research program is enormously difficult, which is why Iran is still struggling and North Korea has never gotten it quite right.