Jonatrhan Rauch: Cold War strategies might help us handle Tehran’s nuclear ambitions
... Here are some things we have seen before: a nuclear-armed country with a brittle and aggressive ideology, world-revolutionary aspirations, and a belief in the historic inevitability of its triumph against a decadent and ultimately hollow West. In that country, an unpopular and divided regime, with hard-liners and relative pragmatists squabbling for influence. A crumbling, resource-dependent economy. A paranoid worldview in which America is an omnipresent military and ideological threat. A tactical predilection for supporting and manipulating insurgent proxies around the world, instead of engaging in direct confrontations. Above all, a belief that nuclear weapons are strategically essential to deter the United States and maintain national prestige.
Yes—but the Soviet Union was deterrable. Would the same be true of a nuclear Iran? No one knows, and no one wants to find out, and Ahmadinejad’s trash-talking is alarming. Still, that Iran will be “a suicide bomber with a radioactive waist” (as one commentator put it recently) is not a given. The Brookings Institution’s Kenneth M. Pollack, the author of The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America, points out that Iran has been aggressively anti-American “but not reckless.” He explains, “These guys try to press the edge of the envelope, but if they find they’ve pressed too far, they pull back.” Behaviorally, if not rhetorically, the Iranians seem more akin to the opportunistic Nikita Khrushchev of the Cuban missile crisis than the delusional Saddam Hussein of the Kuwait invasion and the Iraq War.
One can hardly count on predictability from the likes of Ahmadinejad. But the presidency is only one of a number of competing Iranian power centers; the supreme ruler is Iran’s top cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei. The fact that Ahmadinejad and his energetic faction are vying for control is not reassuring, but it is worth remembering that Stalin and Khrushchev were not reassuring figures either. Only in hindsight is it evident that they were deterrable.
“Many today forget that Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China were seen as more threatening in both capabilities and intentions than are today’s mullahs in Tehran,” writes Richard K. Betts, of Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, in The National Interest. Even if the Cold War Soviet leadership lacked the Armageddon-minded nuttiness of Ahmadinejad, it was more than paranoid enough to be frightening. “What made things very dangerous,” says Timothy Naftali, a University of Virginia Cold War historian, “was that the Soviets were at times willing to be brinksmen in a nuclear world.”
When American strategists chose to deter and contain the Soviet Union, they didn’t know it to be deterrable and containable. At times, respectable strategists thought it wasn’t. Rather, the United States settled for the deter-and-contain model because the other options seemed worse.
In the end, of course, the Cold War strategy succeeded, spectacularly. The United States not only got regime change in the Soviet Union, it got it without the kind of conflagration or implosion that the collapse of a nuclear superpower might easily have brought. The West was lucky, no doubt, but it was also patient and, on the whole, skillful.
Iran is, if anything, more vulnerable to long-term pressure than the USSR was. It is smaller and weaker in every dimension. Its economy is a mess. Its oil weapon fires backward as well as forward, because oil sales keep Iran’s economy afloat. And, unlike the Soviet Union, Iran has no conceivable hope of disarming or crippling America with a first strike; America’s deterrent against Iran is massive, credible, and impregnable. ...
Read entire article at Atlantic Monthly
Yes—but the Soviet Union was deterrable. Would the same be true of a nuclear Iran? No one knows, and no one wants to find out, and Ahmadinejad’s trash-talking is alarming. Still, that Iran will be “a suicide bomber with a radioactive waist” (as one commentator put it recently) is not a given. The Brookings Institution’s Kenneth M. Pollack, the author of The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America, points out that Iran has been aggressively anti-American “but not reckless.” He explains, “These guys try to press the edge of the envelope, but if they find they’ve pressed too far, they pull back.” Behaviorally, if not rhetorically, the Iranians seem more akin to the opportunistic Nikita Khrushchev of the Cuban missile crisis than the delusional Saddam Hussein of the Kuwait invasion and the Iraq War.
One can hardly count on predictability from the likes of Ahmadinejad. But the presidency is only one of a number of competing Iranian power centers; the supreme ruler is Iran’s top cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei. The fact that Ahmadinejad and his energetic faction are vying for control is not reassuring, but it is worth remembering that Stalin and Khrushchev were not reassuring figures either. Only in hindsight is it evident that they were deterrable.
“Many today forget that Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China were seen as more threatening in both capabilities and intentions than are today’s mullahs in Tehran,” writes Richard K. Betts, of Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, in The National Interest. Even if the Cold War Soviet leadership lacked the Armageddon-minded nuttiness of Ahmadinejad, it was more than paranoid enough to be frightening. “What made things very dangerous,” says Timothy Naftali, a University of Virginia Cold War historian, “was that the Soviets were at times willing to be brinksmen in a nuclear world.”
When American strategists chose to deter and contain the Soviet Union, they didn’t know it to be deterrable and containable. At times, respectable strategists thought it wasn’t. Rather, the United States settled for the deter-and-contain model because the other options seemed worse.
In the end, of course, the Cold War strategy succeeded, spectacularly. The United States not only got regime change in the Soviet Union, it got it without the kind of conflagration or implosion that the collapse of a nuclear superpower might easily have brought. The West was lucky, no doubt, but it was also patient and, on the whole, skillful.
Iran is, if anything, more vulnerable to long-term pressure than the USSR was. It is smaller and weaker in every dimension. Its economy is a mess. Its oil weapon fires backward as well as forward, because oil sales keep Iran’s economy afloat. And, unlike the Soviet Union, Iran has no conceivable hope of disarming or crippling America with a first strike; America’s deterrent against Iran is massive, credible, and impregnable. ...