Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  Will anything change when Iran’s Shia bomb squares off against Pakistan’s Sunni bomb or Israel’s Jewish bomb? Objectively no, although in its numerical infancy, Tehran’s initial nuclear capability will make a tempting target for a nervous Tel Aviv and a trigger-happy Washington. Since conventional invasion is hard to imagine following America’s difficulties in far smaller Iraq, and because conventional bombing alone can’t rid Iran of its nuclear capabilities, both Israel and the U.S. face an equally unthinkable choice: going nuclear to prevent Iran’s nuclear capability. That gets us back to Schelling’s basic point: get a nuke and permanently rule out invasion. Whether we care to admit it or not, Iran has already achieved a sloppy, asymmetrical form of deterrence. Tehran doesn’t need to field nuclear weapons to maintain this deterrence. Like Japan, it can simply stop its nuclear efforts at a point from which weaponization can be achieved within a short time frame—a “break this glass in the event of imminent threat” capability. Our intelligence community’s November 2007 estimate indicated that Iran was aiming for just such a carefully triangulated position: developing the “gunpowder” (enriched uranium) and clearly possessing the “gun” (ballistic missiles), but refusing—since 2003, as indicated in the report—to take the final step of building the “bullets.”

  So what does Iran’s fairly clever positioning on this explosive issue mean for the world? I have little doubt, as long as America keeps up its diplomatic pressure on Iran and consistently states “all options are on the table,” that Iran will continue moving toward an A-to-Z nuclear capability. Expect those additional reports to keep filtering in about Iran’s “secret program” on this or that link in the chain. In the end, they’ll all be true. But here’s the larger point: In combination with its growing energy connectivity eastward, Tehran is making a backdoor bid for being considered “in the club” of great powers for whom great-power-on-great-power war is no longer an option. I believe, given Asia’s rising energy requirements, that Iran has effectively succeeded in this quest, whether or not we choose to recognize it. But I believe that admitting Iran into these ranks will be a good thing. Again, remember the history cited by Schelling: Soviet nukes balanced American nukes, and those powers never dared to wage war with each other, despite all the early loose talk about wiping each other off the map. The same was true for China versus the USSR, America versus China, China versus India, India versus Pakistan, and the French versus the Brits.

  Okay, I included that last one just to be comprehensive.

  But the history is undeniable: Highly unstable two-state standoffs were—in each instance—stabilized, no matter the nature of the “ancient hatreds” or the incendiary rhetoric flowing from leaders.

  Would a nuclear Iran pass a weapon to terrorists? For most people, that’s the big question. The history on proliferation says that undeclared states are your problem, not recognized ones, which, in effect, got what they wanted from other great powers—recognition of fellow great-power status, which rules out invasive war by others. Once achieved, that status isn’t simply handed over to one’s nonstate minions to do with as they please. Moreover, when you want to point fingers on secretive sharing, the culprits have all been undeclared (e.g., Pakistan and North Korea with others, Israel and South Africa with each other). On the contrary, there’s solid logic that says a recognized nuclear Iran would necessarily become more careful in its support for violent nonstate actors in the region. Why? Any hint of technology transfer could quickly force Tel Aviv into a preemptive nuclear strike of its own against Iran, not just with American backing but very probably with American nuclear participation. So if Iran wants in the “big boy” club, I say, pull it all the way in. There are few better ways to sober up a failed revolution.

  Yes, Israel remains the big wild card in this unavoidable scenario pathway. But if Israel acts preemptively, let’s be clear that it would essentially be acting to protect its long-standing regional monopoly on weapons of mass destruction. That monopoly hasn’t kept Israel safe from conventional military attack; Israel’s military superiority does that. It also hasn’t prevented terrorism, even though Israel maintains a world-class defensive capacity there, too. All Tel Aviv’s WMD monopoly generates is diplomatic opportunity: As soon as somebody else in the region gets a few nukes to challenge Israel’s roughly two hundred warheads, the world’s great powers will collectively force direct negotiations leading to—at least—a bilateral strategic arms treaty between the two states.

  Why? The world’s great powers will find the tenuous standoff too much to bear, not just in the West but far more in the East, which relies on Persian Gulf energy too much to suffer such strategic uncertainty. What would such urgency get us? It would get us Iran having to recognize Israel to achieve its primary goal in pursuing a nuclear capacity—namely, America’s promise not to engage in forcible regime change in Tehran. Since that goal will effectively be achieved by Tehran’s looming nuclear capacity anyway, then we’re heading into a different dynamic: simultaneously creating a stable nuclear standoff between Israel and Iran, a dyad that quickly becomes a triad if Saudi Arabia decides that Arab Sunnis need their own nuclear champion to balance the Persian Shia. Let’s not forget regional great power Turkey either.

  For many regional and nuclear experts, such developments would constitute an almost unthinkably unstable strategic situation, but again, the only way to stabilize such a situation would be to force a trilateral or even regional security scheme that acknowledges each state’s nuclear weapons explicitly and links those capabilities to one another through the condition of mutually assured destruction. Thus, pursued intelligently by outside great powers, Iran’s reach for the bomb could end up being the event that makes real peace in the Middle East truly possible.

  As for the notion that such thinking will only lead to every great-power wannabe around the planet wanting nukes, I’ve been hearing since I was a little boy that the world is only a few years away from two to three dozen nuclear states. Decade after decade passes and we’re still under one dozen. That’s what America’s grand strategic patience on nuclear weapons has achieved: the end of great-power war at the cost of a stunningly slow proliferation of the technology, which has, in standoff after standoff, reproven its strategic worth. If only we were as patient with the long-term effects of a liberal international trading order.

  THE AMERICAN SYSTEM PERTURBED: THE BIG BANG LAUNCHED

  Of the dozens of reasons offered by the Bush administration for toppling Saddam, the one that most attracted my attention as a grand strategist was the notion of shaking up the chessboard of the Middle East by toppling its worst dictator. It was, to put it lightly, a very daring approach by anyone’s standards, but one buttressed by the cynic’s knowledge that whether we succeeded or not in Iraq, the region would be forever changed by the sheer connectivity triggered by such a massive intervention. But because the Bush administration was purposefully uninterested in attracting sufficient allied support (the primacy instinct), its primary public arguments centered on the twin possibilities that Saddam Hussein’s regime was both close to achieving some semblance of a nuclear threat and had sufficient ties to al Qaeda to suggest that a transfer could someday be made. When such accusations later proved spurious, the botched postwar execution—which if done well would have discouraged the subsequent debate all together—naturally triggered the counteraccusation that “Bush lied, thousands died.” So instead of keeping the focus on a brutal, mass-murdering dictator’s justified demise, Iraq—and by extension its people—was recast as the “innocent victim” of an unjustified American invasion.

  Worse, because of the deep and close political divide back home, President Bush was loath to admit his postwar mistakes in Iraq, and almost as soon as he won reelection in 2004, he began to slowly build a strikingly similar case against Iran. Once Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president and began shooting off his mouth very cleverly in this direction, the die was cast and America would take its eye off the ball in both Iraq and A
fghanistan. In this manner, the entire promise of extending the Big Bang beyond Iraq, which at several points in 2005 looked entirely possible given all the positive political events going on in the region, was sacrificed to the extremely myopic security fixation on nukes plus terror—the strategic sales job that would not end. This was a poor choice in grand strategy, because what Iran represents in the region is more promise than peril, when all factors are objectively weighed and America stops surrendering its entire strategic flexibility to that dynamic duo of threats. As long as Pavlov’s dog keeps salivating on cue, more and more troublemakers are going to keep ringing that bell.

  According to two former National Security Council officials, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann, who worked the region in the years surrounding the Big Bang, the Bush administration went out of its way to discount any help Iran offered in the region, ostensibly to foreclose any possible rapprochement. Right up to when she joined Condoleezza Rice’s National Security Council a few weeks following 9/11, Hillary Mann had conducted secret negotiations with an Iranian diplomat at the United Nations. This diplomat had signaled Tehran’s willingness to “cooperate unconditionally” with America’s impending retaliation against Iran’s neighbor to the east, Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, whom the Iranians despised almost as much as their immediate neighbor to the west—Saddam Hussein. Mann saw it as an offer that “could have changed the world.” Flynt Leverett, sitting high up in the State Department at the time, saw similar offers coming across his desk from longtime enemies Syria, Libya, and Sudan.

  Were these rogue regimes looking to advance American interests? Are you kidding? Just like Iran, these states were hoping to take advantage of the suddenly changed strategic circumstances to come in from the cold and rehabilitate their relations with an angry America, something only Libya later achieved by surrendering its nuke program.

  As part of the Big Bang strategy, Iran’s offer of unconditional cooperation could have been put to magnificent use in Afghanistan and Iraq—not to mention the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the White House decided to pass on Iran’s offer, citing what became known as the Hadley Rules, so named for then Deputy Director of the National Security Council Stephen Hadley. From a December 2001 memo stating the administration’s approach: “If a state like Syria or Iran offers specific assistance, we will take it without offering anything in return. We will accept it without strings or promises. We won’t try to build on it.” This is, of course, a ridiculous proposition, and ignores the fundamental truth in diplomacy that linkages are good. Tehran subsequently—and quite rationally—accelerated its pursuit of the bomb as protection from anticipated U.S. invasion. You could say that, as in the case of Stalin’s USSR, America’s conflict with Iran was inevitable, so better to pursue it sooner than later. I would reply that in strategizing war and peace, timing and sequence are everything.

  Bush’s push to isolate Iran was consistently undermined by Russia’s desire to maintain its status as Iran’s main supplier of nuclear energy infrastructure, as well as India’s and China’s growing thirst for Iranian oil and gas. All three naturally fear being denied such access to a post-regime change Iran, just as they were initially with Iraq. Ironically enough, thanks to our poorly run postwar there, Iran, Turkey, China, and Russia now appear to be cleaning up when it comes to winning Iraqi government reconstruction contracts (with China winning the first major oil deal), indicating that they were our silent partners all along, despite their unwillingness to support America’s decision to go in, and despite Washington’s attempts to keep them out of the postwar rebuilding process as much as possible by favoring American firms. Simply put, the Baghdad central government is trying to diversify its nation-building team, something we should have sought from the start and certainly can’t blame the Iraqis for engineering today.

  The Bush administration blew it by refusing to strike while Iran’s iron was hot. Negotiating with the mullahs doesn’t mean simply making demands and expecting utter capitulation. It means that we’d get some of what we want, but we’d likewise need to give Tehran some of what it wants and is already achieving, thanks to a Shia revival—significant regional influence. The alternative is that Iran achieves the same rough level of regional influence and owes us nothing in return. Worse, Iran achieves this position and is hostile to our interests, and generates violence to veto America’s efforts at stabilizing several ongoing regional crises. So how to engage such a confident enemy? How did the United States pull off such a mix of engagement and containment with Leonid Brezhnev’s superconfident USSR in the early 1970s? And look what that got us a mere generation later.

  If America wants to encourage democratization in the region, we have to recognize the inescapable reality that half of the Persian Gulf’s population is Shia, and that, outside of Iran, Shia have historically played the role of the repressed minority/majority in country after country. If we pursue a “one man, one vote” policy (long allowed by Tehran’s theocrats, mind you) in the region, we will have to figure out how to co-opt Iran as some sort of regional pillar—plain and simple. This is not a fantastic scenario, for as Middle East expert Vali Nasr points out, many American perceptions of Iran remain hopelessly outdated. Yes, in the 1980s it was the Shia that represented the radical elements of Islam and the Sunni regimes that epitomized stability, but today that situation is largely reversed: Now it’s the Sunni groups, including al Qaeda, that constitute the bulk of the region’s radicalism and intolerant fundamentalism (much of it bankrolled by the House of Saud), and it is Iran that is far more open to tolerating the regional balance of power, which, thanks to our creation of modern Islam’s first Arab Shia state in Iraq, inevitably turns in its favor.

  Frankly, when I see a country with that sort of strategic confidence, that’s not when I try to get the regime to back down on the basis of military threats that everyone knows I will have a hard time delivering on. No, that’s when I remember that Nixon went to China in 1972, and that’s when I start looking for a grown-up of similar symbolic stature to engage Iran in direct talks (following all the necessary preliminaries, of course). As Beijing did then, Tehran now shows the classic signs of a revolution that is completely spent, with no victories to show after decades of trying to export revolution: a tired authoritarian regime looking to end its isolation, consolidate its regional influence, and remove the threat of outside invasion; a population that’s overwhelmingly pro-American in orientation despite decades of indoctrination to the contrary; and shared enemies (namely, radical Sunni Islamic transnational terrorist networks) in regions of shared concern (e.g., the Persian Gulf, Central and South Asia). When Tehran’s hardliners employ extreme anti-Israeli and anti-American rhetoric and threats, they’re looking to consolidate their power internally and hold off a conservative-but-pragmatic wing, as well as the reformist wing that seeks a more normal relationship with the outside world. By continuing to play into the radicals’ hands, Washington effectively denies itself the one regional ally most inclined to acquiesce to our long-term goals of triggering widespread political pluralism in the region. Why? Because Shia will be empowered as a result of this process.

  As always, can we trust the Iranians to be anything but Iranian? First, don’t buy into the notion that Iranians and Israelis are natural enemies. Before the 1979 revolution, after which Ayatollah Khomeini sought to rally a pan-Islamic banner in opposition to Israel and the United States, Iran never really had a sustained period of anti-Semitism. Indeed, Iranians, as Shia, have more in common with Jews than they do with much of the Sunni world, being, as the Jews were in Europe, longtime sufferers of discrimination. Second, despite the obvious control exerted over the political system by the ruling mullahs, Iran is the one country in the region where political leaders are actually voted out of power peacefully and allowed to retire or even continue political life. Considering that across the rest of the region the usual retirement package is death or violent overthrow, Iran is about as good as it gets—for now. Finally, as we’re a
lready managing a two-country intervention in the region, let me submit that Iran is not the third country (smack dab in the middle, mind you) we should want to add to the mix, especially when America’s ongoing efforts in Afghanistan have already drawn us into the far larger problem set called Pakistan (172 million to Iran’s 66 million).

  Again, timing and sequencing matter, as does strategic patience. This is not a point in our grand-strategy storyline where we should all of a sudden go wobbly over Iran, hysterically inflating its threat to Hitlerian or Soviet proportions. Nor do we need a Maginot Line of missile defense in East Central Europe (another Bush-Cheney beauty). We never offered Western Europe a zero-deductible strategic defense policy during the Cold War, and we shouldn’t be talked into one for Israel today. By not letting America paint itself into any strategic corners over the combined bogeymen of nukes and terrorists—two potentially intertwined issues that we successfully processed at much higher risk levels with the Soviets decades ago—we get a whole lot more realistic about what our power can achieve in this world of our making.

  THE NEW RULES: FROM INDISPENSABLE SUPERPOWER TO INSOLVENT LEVIATHAN

  Madeleine Albright, secretary of state to Bill Clinton, liked to describe America as “the indispensable nation.” She was right. Without the prospect of American military force—the only military that can be projected to distant regions and sustained there—most attempts by the international community to stem endemic conflicts go absolutely nowhere. The post-Cold War period has so far been much bloodier than it needed to be, reflecting our learning curve on the question “How much is just enough to manage this world being transformed by globalization?” The administration of George H. W. Bush declared a “new world order” that was based on little more than temporary Soviet acquiescence to American global leadership during clearly defined military crises. Bill Clinton spoke of “enlargement,” which meant we’d lead NATO’s effort in the Balkans but shy away from anything having to do with expansive military operations in Gap regions. And so Central Africa burned very brightly across his eight years, swallowing up the equivalent of a Holocaust in victims. Where Clinton tried to do too little, Richard Haass asserts, George W. Bush tried to do too much, proving that “in the end, the United States does not need the world’s permission to act, but it does need the world’s support to succeed.”