“The US is fighting a war in a region where we’ve been very hostile to two countries bordering the war zone. Pundita is of the mind that the top priority is to win the war, and for that we need all the help we can get.
Right now Syria’s government is overwhelmed with looking after refugees from Iraq. So I would try offering Syria considerable help in exchange for vigilance with foreign travelers.
When it comes to asking Iran and Syria for help with Iraq, I see too much halfhearted trying from the US, then waving of hands and saying, ‘See, they won’t deal.’ Try harder.”
I agree. Iran and Syria are nasty regimes whose actions we must often oppose but where they are willing to cut some fair deals we should get down to business. Freezing Castro in the diplomatic equivalent of absolute zero has only served to help preserve his Communist- caudillo regime until the dictator’s old age while irritating most of our allies and trading partners. Do we really want a 92 year old Bashar Assad still in power someday ?
When Robert Gates, the current Secretary of Defense, retired from government service after the end of the first Bush administration, he wrote a memoir , From the Shadows, in which he described the no-nonsense, George Schultz as ” the toughest Secretary of State I ever knew” who ” saw no contradiction” in bleeding the Soviets in one part of the world while negotiating with them in another. Secretary Schultz, whose opinion of the CIA on a 1 to 10 scale hovered in the negative integers, was not nearly as complimentary to Robert Gates in his own, ponderously unreadable, memoirs, but that is a story for another day.
I bring this anecdote of a less complex era up because of the furor over the Bush administration classifying the Pasdaran ( the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps) as a terrorist organization in order to take action against those business enterprises that are connected to the Pasdaran. The objections to this move appear to be two-fold: first, that it hypothetically puts American military personnel at risk of maltreatment and, secondly, that it could disrupt negotiations with Iran on a range of bilateral and international issues, most importantly, Iraq.
The critics are incorrect. It is a move a quarter-century overdue.
In the first instance, correctly identifying the Pasdaran as a state sponsor of international terrorism, which as a matter of historical record, it clearly is, does not prevent treating it’s uniformed personnel as POWs in case of an armed conflict between Iran and the United States. The Pasdaran, by contrast, has already tortured two Americans to death – Beirut CIA station chief William Buckleyand USMC Colonel William Higgins– at a time of peace between Iran and the United States.
Cry me no river of tears for Pasdaran agents in Iraq being held captive by the U.S. military or who are being whacked in some alleyway by Sunni tribals in our employ. The Iranians knew the risks, from the inception, of the rules they chose to operate under, violating the most basic precepts of international law. It did not have to be that way – even the CIA and the KGB came to a rough modus vivendi during the Cold War that prevented most escalatory incidents – Teheran though has chosen to play rough. Let them enjoy the bed they have made for themselves.
Secondly, until we have an agreement with Iran we do not have any agreement and the regime should be squeezed at every point until we do. I’m all for negotiating in earnest, making the realistic, even generous, concessions that we can easily afford, finding areas of common interest and ( eventually) normalizing relations. We should scrupulously keep our word and demonstrate to the Iranians through actions that we will deliver exactly what we promise. But until that point in time, Teheran should get no favors, no breathing space, no economic freebies of any kind until we come to an arrangement.
The leadership of Iran is a nasty and brutal group. Within that circle, Ahmadinejad represents some of the regime’s worst elements but, as a whole, the Iranians do not seem irrational, simply adversarial. We can cut a deal with them but we should proceed without any illusions.
“It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” – John F. Kennedy, President of the United States
“Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so. And if I seek to acquire these weapons, I am carrying out a duty. It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims.”
-Osama bin Laden, “amir” of al Qaida
Both the Soviet Union and the United States amassed immense nuclear arsenals during the Cold War of approximately 50,000 warheads of various sizes and a range of systems with which to deliver these terrifying weapons. A number of other second and third tier states later joined “the nuclear club“, seeking a hedge against regional enemies or desiring the totemic status in international relations brought by possession of nuclear arms.
None of these states, not even Israel which is reputed to have up to 200 nuclear bombs, ever developed a nuclear weapons capability that remotely matched that of the superpowers. A number of nuclear-capable states have either eschewed building nuclear weapons (Germany, Japan, Taiwan) or have been persuaded to disarm those that they had inherited or assembled ( Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and South Africa).
So lopsided are the throw-weight ratios between countries with small yield or primitive atomic weapons and the stockpiles retained by the U.S. and Russia that most of the nuclear club have arsenals that are useful only for deterring a military attack from their immediate non-nuclear neighbors or a nuclear peer. Pakistan’s nuclear status was of no help in warding off American demands after 9/11; had Islamabad attempted to brandish, much less use, nuclear weapons in defense of their Taliban clients, it would have surely invited Pakistan’s immediate destruction.
Cheryl Rofer of Whirledview, had a post “The Necessity of the U.S. Nuclear Deterrent: A White Paper” that analyzed a recent quasi-official document “White Paper on the Necessity of the U. S. Nuclear Deterrent” authored by a cluster of national security VIPs, including several past CIA directors and current advisers to the US Strategic Command. The paper summarizes many obvious points about American nuclear deterrence and calls for a ” debate”. Cheryl found the paper to be lacking:
“No real threat assessment is offered, just vaguely threatening words about Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. For a group of folks trying to move out of the Cold War mindset, that’s an interesting ordering of countries.
….Is the white paper saying that US nuclear policy is only about deterrence? Nothing about the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and its obligations? Nothing about the uselessness of deterrence against mobile subnational groups with no territory to defend? The only thing that is important to our allies is US security assurances, backed up by the threat of nuclear warfare? ….This white paper is stuck in the the Cold War, circa 1969. “
I think the white paper authors are correct that the perceived credibility of American nuclear guarantees dampen down potential nuclear arms races among third parties, notably in Northern Asia. Cheryl however, is correct on the larger point that the analytical assumptions of the paper are shot through with Cold War legacy mentalities.
Arguably, the white paper does not even match the Cold War era in terms of nuanced thinking. In 1958, in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Henry Kissinger wrote:
“It is the task of strategic doctrine to strike a balance between the physical and the psychological aspects of deterrence, between the desire to pose a maximum threat and the reality that no threat is stronger than the belief of the opponent that it will in fact be used. A strategy which poses alternatives that policy-makers are unwilling to confront will induce either inaction or improvisation. A strategy which establishes a superior balance between power and will may then gain a crucial advantage, because it permits initiative and shifts to the other side the risks inherent in making countermoves”(Kissinger, 175)
CKR aptly pointed out the obvious alternative of non-state and subnational actors with nuclear weapons that the white paper’s authors were ” unwilling to confront” in their state-centric focus. Here are a few others that would relate to the state of American deterrence, enhancing or undermining it:
* Potential, novel, weaponization of of aspects of nuclear particle research outside classic uranium 235 and plutonium bombs.
* The need for more effective controls and tracking of trade in esoteric, dual-use, technologies of weaponization that make nuclear devices useful militarily. Increasing transparency level of same.
*Identifying non-nuclear technologies that could result in weapons of a comparable order of magnitude of destruction or loss of life as with low-level nuclear weapons.
* Strengthening and expanding the inspections regime under which NPT signatories are permitted access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Addition of automatic penalties if NPT signatories are caught cheating, subject to removal or waiver by the UNSC ( putting the burden on the accused proliferator to come clean instead of on the IAEA or UNSC states to get any meaningful sanctions applied).
* De-escalating the potential for future conflict between nuclear and nuclear capable states by instituting new regional diplomatic and security structures.
* International nuclear convention regarding the security of nuclear materials and command and control by the nuclear weapons states.
* Moral-political-legal campaigns that degrade the credibility of American deterrence by ratcheting upward the “unthinkability” of nuclear weapons use, thus tempting potential adversaries to risk the very brinksmanship scenarios ( war, apocalyptic terrorism) that would make the use of nuclear weapons possible or likely.
* Avoiding “nuclear weapons deflation” as an unintended consequence of arms control. Striking a balance between reducing large American and Russian arsenals and unduly increasing the military value of small ones and the temptation to increase them in order to reach “parity” with America and Russia ( “linkage” for all nuclear club arsenals). Or worse, the temptation to sell or use them.
* Removal of strategic nuclear materials from the global black market by vastly accelerating certified destruction or reprocessing of obsolete national stocks.
* Developing new models of deterrence that would be concurrently perceived as credible by states, non-state actors and subnational/ transnational networks who may all be within an interdependent nexus of responsibility for a catastrophic WMD attack.
* Identifying and categorizing non-state network threats to American security with potential WMD capacity.
* Understanding the parameters of the possible in terms of private networks and WMD capabilities, through intellectually honest red team exercises.
* Examining the balance of utility between emphasizing clarity and uncertainty in American nuclear response and deterrence policy in a multi-polar and non-state actor era.
Many of my variables are not new but they are of at least more recent vintage and of a broader horizon than what the white paper has considered. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts as well.
I can applaud the serious effort by Richardson, a former high level diplomat, to address foreign policy in a thoughtful way, even though I agree with Dave that many of Richardson’s proposed solutions do not logically address the strategic trends he identifies ( thought they probably appeal to regular, middle-class, Democratic activists if not the wackiest of the wingnuts).
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
