Colleagues,

There is another aspect to the deterrence issue: the utility of a rudimentary nuclear arsenal for deterring a superior conventionally armed enemy.  NATO struggled for decades with how to operationalize a first use doctrine to deter the Kremlin from exploiting the strength of the Red Army.  Fear of an Arab onslaught is why Israel developed nuclear weapons and why its nuclear force was activated by Golda Mieir in 1973.  It is surely one motive that explains the Iranian interest.  If anyone of us was a policy advisor in Tehran with the United States' forces grouped around it at all points of the compass, we most likely would advise our leadership to follow exactly the course now being pursued.  Is it credible? probably, yes.  It is not a matter of fine doctrinal metaphysics.  The existential threat to American forces in the region would most assuredly deter the United States from any offensive use of conventionaql military power.  The Iranian implicit threat would have greater credibility than our implicit threat of a retort given that their stakes would be much higher than our stake in coercing them from doing whatever in the region.

As for North Korea, God only knows - and since January 21 even the HF has abandoned direct communication with the occupant of the White House.

cheers,

Michael Brenner   

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Colleagues,

There is another dimension of the deterrence issue: the utility of a rudimentary nuclear arsenal to deter a superior conventionally armed opponent.  That was question bedeviled NATO straegic planners for decades as we struggled to bring the nuclear factor into play to offset the Redy

Deterrence is easy. It’s the problem of containment that defeats us. The history of the Cold War and recent efforts by the world to deal with the dangers posed by Iran and North Korea suggests that all sides have been relatively successful at deterring direct aggression by their opponents. But they have all experienced great difficulty in containing their adversaries. Deterrence is about preventing states from using their military forces to attack one another or their vital interests. Containment refers to a strategy designed to limit the political-economic-ideological-diplomatic and non-nuclear military expansion by the target state. It is to be hoped that by preventing war through deterrence and simultaneously restricting the other policy options available to hostile states that the dangers they pose will eventual become less.

Deterrence works because it is a relatively simple policy to pursue with a small set of variables and generally modest coals. To be effective, deterrence must be based on the ability to impose unacceptable costs on the attacker. All the tedious theorizing and laborious military planning and posturing efforts of the Cold War were devoted to he struggle to maintain the certainty of an unacceptably costly retaliatory strike (and secondarily, the search for means, largely offensive, by which to reduce the certainty of retaliation,)  Once a secure second strike capability was available the challenge of deterrence because that of forcing the other side to be the one that had to choose to take the second to the last step on the escalatory ladder. In doing so, the attacker would know that he would all-but automatically trigger an unacceptably costly attack. To make deterrence work, the side implementing such strategy had to be sure that it could prevent its opponents from achieving a military victory through the use of more limited force (rapid conventional war, limited nuclear strikes, decapitating attacks on the opposing leadership, etc.)

Containment during the Cold War was both more challenging and less successful because it was a politically-driven strategy designed to prevent the target nation from expanding its area of influence. Containment of the Soviet Union can be judged a success only against that nation’s millenarian objectives. The global revolution never came, Western Europe remained free and the Soviet economy could not maintain both autarky and equal productivity to that of world capitalism. At the same time, the Soviet Union created a global system of friends and allies, exported natural gas and petroleum to its ideological adversaries, supported a range of terrorist and insurgent groups and educated tens of thousands of students from the developing world.

Both Iran and North Korea can be relatively easily deterred. Indeed, to date both have shown tremendous care and caution when employing their military power in the face of the countervailing capabilities of the United States and its friends and allies in both Northwest and Southeast Asia.

Deterrence of these two rogues has worked not because of our ability to turn both of these countries into fused silicon parking lots. It is because of our conventional superiority in these regions. It is not clear to me that nuclear deterrence is even relevant to the problems of Iran and North Korea because nuclear use against either of them by the United States is so unlikely. Absent a nuclear attack again a U.S. or allied population center what military action on their part could possibly warrant a retaliatory action that would inevitably create thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of innocent casualties?

Recent events have demonstrated how difficulty it is to contain these states, even if they are directly deterred. North Korean has proliferated nuclear weapons and missile technology to a number of countries and, if recent reports are accurate, continues to do so despite a strongly worded U.N Security Council resolution. Iran provided Iraqi insurgency with IEDs specifically designed to kill U.S. military personnel, equipped Hezbollah and Hamas with thousands of rockets, and periodically harassed U.S. naval vessels in the Persian Gulf.

The overt possession of nuclear weapons is not gong to make either country more likely to directly attack their neighbors or the United States. But as events in South Asia have demonstrated, when an anti-status quo power acquires nuclear weapons it tends to become more adventuresome, often with dangerous results. Look at the Pakistani operation against Kargil in 1999. Pakistan believed that its nuclear weapons status provided a cover for conventional aggression. Miscalculation and escalation are the fastest paths to a regional nuclear catastrophe.

It must continue to be made clear to both Iran and North Korea that they can neither win a conventional conflict with the United States and its allies nor use their nuclear weapons against any military targets.  They know that to attempt further escalation against a high value target, particularly a city, would risk incalculable destruction in retaliation.

The real danger for the United States rests in the declining capacity of the United States and its allies to deter conventional aggression by Iran or North Korea and to deny them the ability to credibly threaten some form of nuclear first use. Both countries have spent decades taking steps to make it difficult to defeat them conventionally or to inflict sufficient damage against their infrastructure, military capacity and leadership. High value assets are dispersed, buried, hardened and increasingly ell-defended. Both Iran and North Korea possess significant and growing missile arsenals that can be employed to deny the U.S. access to their regions. Iran is also working assiduously to amass the means whereby it can blockade the Persian Gulf.

Recent decisions by the Obama Administration on defense programs will make it harder to deter Iran and North Korea in the future. Among these are terminating of the F-22 fighter program, delaying development of a new strategic bomber, truncating the ground-based interceptor portion of the National Missile Defense system, halting development of potential boost and ascent-phase theater missile defenses such as the Airborne Laser and Kinetic Energy Interceptor, delaying construction of the next nuclear aircraft carrier and truncating the Army’s program to build a full spectrum Future Combat System.

The ability to deter Iran and North Korea are being undermined by the Pentagon’s efforts to convert the U.S. military into a counterinsurgency and stability force., With all due respect to the Secretary of Defense, as North Korea tests more nuclear weapons and prepares to test again a long-range ballistic missile, exactly which current war is it which we should be prepared to fight.? And why should be not worry that either Iran or North Korea would take the opportunity created by our preoccupation with a conventional crisis or conflict with the other to initiate aggression in its own region? Unless we want to rely on early and massive nuclear strikes against these rogue countries for deterrence, the United States need to pay more attention to the declining state of its conventional military capabilities.

Containment of Iran and North Korea is a more difficult challenge. At one level, it does not matter much. The Soviet Union was only partially contained, yet it has ceased to exist. North Korea is self-contained largely as a result of its appalling economic and social policies. Iran can be contained if the west is willing to engage in economic warfare against Teheran. But it probably is unnecessary so long as we can render irrelevant Iran and North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, something we know how to do.

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I used to teach nuclear strategy at Georgetown University, so I have studied deterrence fairly extensively.  The most important thing to understand about deterrence is that it is a psychological process -- it unfolds within the minds of adversaries in response to cues from their environment.  Since we cannot read the minds of our enemies, we can never know for certain whether the messages we send are being interpreted as intended.  This problem presumably grows when the object of a deterrent threat does not share the same frame of reference as the country posing the threat.  What looks like a stable relationship may actually be two countries teetering on the edge of an abyss -- or maybe just conveniently matching misperceptions, as Patrick Morgan once observed.

I'm sorry if this makes me sound like a radical deconstructionist (a person who doubts the capacity for real communication between people), but it leads to a practical conclusion:  the notion of finely tuned strategies for deterring countries like Iran and North Korea is naive.  There's simply too much opportunity for misunderstandings or mistakes to believe we can precisely modulate the behavior of leaders whose actions we often find unfathomable.  Gross threats might have some impact on their behavior, but if a regime is irrational or accident-prone, it could be the opposite reaction from what we hoped for.  So let's see deterrence for what it is: an weak alternative to a few well aimed bombs that deprive the enemy of his capacity to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

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I know virtually nothing about North Korea, but I will give Iran a shot. This week’s question presupposes we have the choice of “containing” Iran. I do not think this is the case, although the only state more easily containable than Iran was pre-March, 2003, Iraq. My own view is that the die has been cast and that the current unrest in Iran will be pushed from abroad into something akin to a civil war. If the civil war does not destroy the mullahs’ regime, the Obama regime will lead some kind of coalition-style military effort to punish the mullahs for “killing and abusing their own people“; as you will recall, that was one of the same reasons Mr. Bush and the Neocons used for invading Iraq to destroy Saddam’s regime.

Since Ahmedinejad won reelection as Iran’s president Americans have been treated to the shameful spectacle of many of their fellow countrymen howling for Iranian blood, some wittingly and some because of foolish but potentially lethal naiveté. With no definitive evidence to show the election was fixed – nor any compelling explanation why the election is any of America’s business -- the Neoconservatives, a large segment of the political and apolitical left, and much of the media are trying to spark a civil war in Iran. Why? Good question. The answer has multiple parts, but each has to do with the utter disconnect that exists between how the world is and how these groups want it to be, and, to be sure, how they believe they can make it.

For the Neoconservatives the current unsettled and potentially violent situation in Iran is heaven sent. Hiding behind the false façade of their belief in democracy – they are, after all, totalitarians at heart – the Neocons are weeping crocodile tears for Iranians who, as the token Canadian Neocon David Frum wrote, have suffered under “30 years of clerical oppression.” Here the Neocons are blowing smoke. Their genuine wish is that all Iranians would be killed in a civil war that they are more than willing to cynically promote in the name of “universal” principles like the freedom of speech and assembly. Such an event would greatly aid their country of first allegiance – Israel – and would save hard work by Rahm Emanuel, Joe Lieberman, AIPAC, and the rest of the Israel-First crew to persuade President Obama to strike Iran militarily while its politics are in turmoil. As the brilliant writer and Neocon stalwart Mark Steyn wrote in the National Review, Obama must be made to understand that he “has a dog in the fight.” Alarmingly, Obama in his written statement last weekend and statement today sounded Neocon-ish in urging the Iranian regime to respect the demonstrators’ “universal rights” -- as if such things existed outside Communist and Nazi dogma.

As important for the Neocons, they know that by championing the plight of “poor, oppressed Iranians,” they: (1) can hide their authoritarianism at home and militarism abroad from Americans by puffing up a cynical fog of humanitarian rhetoric, and, (2) can support the millions of useful idiots they traditionally manipulate on the political left. Sounding like Newsweek, Time, the Huffington Post, and others who can only see the world as they wish it existed, the Neocons have moved for the moment into the mainstream, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the liberal fools who are madly trying to Twitter, Flicker, YouTube, and Facebook a secular and democratic Iran bloodlessly into existence. These folks are the Neocons’ meat. The Mullahs are not going to go peacefully into that goodnight, and the Neocons know this; indeed, they would prefer to see the Mullahs and all Iranians ground to a bloody mash in the grinder of civil war. But for now, the Necons are stepping back and putting on their populist mask. They are letting AIPAC and Israel-First journals like National Review, Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal labor to get Obama’s military hackles up. At the same time, they are being unwittingly aided by the mindless new-age computer-warriors who are unloading their deadly daydreams in an avalanche of electronic messages to the Iranian opposition. Their hope is that such peace-loving communications will produce democracy in Iran; the Neocons know the stupidity of that hope and count on the messages to help spark what they want -- civil war.

And then there is the media. Its treatment of post-election Iran is reminiscent of the claim that Bill Clinton engaged in immoral and self-destructive activities “simply because he could.” In the heat and indolence of early summer, the media has decided that an Iranian civil war would be just the thing to boost circulation, viewership, and website logons. They have given space to Neocon writers and have engaged in what can only be defined as war-making activity by giving wide, positive, and – most cynically -- positive coverage to the computer-warriors who are Twitter-ing their way toward civil violence Iran.

In addition, the major media have not spoken a word about the fact that however flawed the Iranian election, it was an exercise in popular democracy that could have never taken place in the polities of any of Washington’s Islamo-fascist Arab allies. Neither Egyptian President Mubarak, with whom Obama just finished hob-knobbing, nor Saudi King Abdullah, the target of Obama’s sycophantic, I-must have-oil bowing, would have allowed anything like the kind of election Ahmedinajad and the dreaded mullahs facilitated in Iran. And if they had, and large crowds demonstrated against the results, you can bet the ranch that Mubarak and Abdullah would have produced mountains of corpses, not the few dozen who that thus far been seen in Iran.

The media also has chosen to ignore what certainly is a main fomenter of post-election Iranian unrest – foreign intervention. For a decade, the U.S. Congress has publicly cAlled for regime change in Tehran, supported the Iranian opposition, and allocated taxpayer money to fund its activities. In addition, the Special Forces and clandestine services of the United States, several NATO countries, and states such as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have long been reported to be operating inside Iran to destabilize its society. And let us not forget Israel. Even more than the Neocons, the Twitter-crowd, and the media, Israel would love to see an Iranian civil war because it probably would lead to U.S. intervention when the regime and the mullahs finally decide to stop the unrest by unleashing the army, security services, and revolutionary guards to accomplish that task.

So the stage for an Iranian civil war is being set by the unholy interventionist alliance of faux peace-loving Neocons; jejune Pacifists, and the mindless, computer-armed democracy spreaders in the universities, the political left, and the media. The latter do not want war, but will be used as cover by those who do: the Neocons, Israel, and the Western and Arab states operating clandestinely inside Iran. If civil war comes the losers will be apparent: the Iranian populace; Americans’ whose soldier-children will be called on to fight the mullahs; the fools on the American political left who let themselves be used as Neocon stalking horses; and overall U.S. national security. The only winners will be those who care very little about America’s welfare or security: the Neocons and American Israel-Firsters.

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I think North Korea is deterrable and in fact, has been deterred, both by countervailing force and its own weakness.

I do not think that we can stop Iran from "going nuclear."  They have the will, the technology, and the threat perception to make having nucs appear to be a sane option.  While we can't stop them from crossing the threshold, we can do something about it. 

The first thing that we must do is to forget about a preventive war against Iran.

Unfortunately, while this option has some support in the U.S., and perhaps even more in Israel, it does not stand up to analysis. Iran’s nationwide nuclear program is robust, well-protected, redundant and often underground. A minor surgical strike would be feckless, and even a massive air operation could not be certain to get the job done. Any strike on Iran would convince the Iranian government that it was right to develop nuclear weapons, and it would drive the young people back into the arms of the hard-liners. An attack could set Iran back technologically, but it would enhance Iranian motivation to develop the bomb. Short of a massive strike, followed by an (unthinkable) invasion, an occupation and regime change in a nation several times larger than Iraq, there are no reliable military options to take out an emerging Iranian nuclear capability with a high degree of confidence.

After any preventive Israeli or U.S. strike on Iran, we would all have to live with the day after. What would Iran do in Iraq and Afghanistan? How would this affect the price of oil, or the situation in Lebanon? What effect would this have on Iran’s already considerable support for international terrorism?

Small states with nuclear weapons have never been able to use them as decisive levers to force their enemies to do their will. While threats to nuke your adversaries have been relatively frequent, nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. Nuclear weapons have limited utility beyond basic deterrence and prestige because the downsides of using them are huge and mostly incalculable. Iran, for all of its harsh rhetoric and indirect aggression in Lebanon and Iraq, is neither wild nor stupid. It is unlikely to give one of its precious nuclear weapons to a surrogate state or terrorist group. The international community, having been burned by Pakistan and North Korea, should be able to monitor or control state-to-state proliferation efforts emanating from Tehran. Iran may want nuclear weapons for protection and prestige, but it has to be made to understand that the use of a nuclear weapon in the region or in Europe would lead to a devastating response.

While we lack the leverage to force Iran’s leaders to cease their weapons-development program, we do have significant capabilities to make them regret their efforts and to contain the effects of proliferation. To begin, we must maintain strong international pressure on the current regime, with a special emphasis on sanctions on the finances, accounts and travel of Iranian leaders. To add to Iran’s cost of developing nuclear weapons, the U.S. should declare that any nation threatened by Iranian nuclear weapons would be under the protection of the U.S. If Iran were ever to use nuclear weapons in the region or in Europe, U.S. policy would be that such an act of aggression would be seen as an attack on the U.S. We should also offer to any allies our best defensive anti-missile systems and accelerate their deployment in Europe and the Persian Gulf. Finally, we should do our best to prevent other acts of proliferation in and from the region by reassuring our allies.

In the end, an Iranian nuclear capability may not be preventable, but it is containable and of limited utility. If we use our heads, we won’t again adopt a policy of preventive war because we have convinced ourselves that that we don’t have any other options.

Note:  The last few paragraphs here were in an article that I wrote in the Armed Forces Journal in 2008.  jjc

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My German born grandfather used an aphorism that applies to both Iran and North Korea -- "the situation is serious, but not hopeless."  For a guy who came to America from Oldenberg, Germany with literally the clothes on his back and became a millionaire who literally built a town in Minnesota, I took him at his word.

First things, first. All bellicose, political rhetoric aside from armchair soldiers, the United States has neither the stomach nor the resources to engage at the moment in open conflict with either of these nations; particularly a well armed North Korea.  The best we can do in either case right now is a form of behavior modificiation.  Part of that behavior modification begins with us.  We must go back to our Cold War roots of success -- long term consistency and constant pressure.

Iran -- the regime of the Ayatollahs is effectively over.  As with Poland in the early 1980's, they can crack down on the populace all they want.  The seeds of freedom and revolution are there.  And, please forgive the pun, the genie is not going back in the bottle.  The young are alienated and they are a ticking time bomb.

So far, the Obama Administration has been understandably cautious in dealing with the election riots.  They do not want America to become the main issue; the main bogeyman for the current regime.  Fair enough.

That being said, Washington cannot continue to sit around admonishing Tehran to stop beating and killing their people.  It is time for the President and the current Administration to do what Reagan did for Poland -- recognize that it might take years, but those who want regime change need open and clear rhetoric from DC and steady support.  That support needs to take the form of continued covert support of groups within Iran who want to change the behavior and the regime in Tehran.

 Notice, I did not say try to immediately overthrow -- I said help the young Iranians change the behavior as anything more would only antagonize a lot of Iranians and remind them of America's past actions in their country.  Remember, it took us nearly ten years for the the people of Poland (with our open and covert support) to regain their freedom.  We need to be set for the long haul and its ups and downs, but understand the inevitability of the process.

As for North Korea, they require a tougher hand.  The current set of Pyongyang tantrums likely has more to do with internal political changes than us.  Kim Jong Il is trying to keep the Kim Dynasty in place with his 26 yrs old son lined up as heir apparent.   It is tough to say whether the military wants this to happen.  And thus Kim is once again pushing our buttons (a Fourth of July missile launch!) to show his strength and thus keeping the military happy at home.

How do you deal with this (from the outside world perspective) crazy regime -- with a firm and steady voice like you would deal with any mad dog.  First, keep pressing Beijing to put the screws on Pyongyang -- trade sanctions, diplomatic measures, etc..  Beijing would rather not touch this mess. But, they are deathly afraid of a mass immigration in the event of a North Korean state collapse which will land an even larger population of Koreans on their side of the Yalu.  This can be used to "pursuade" them to calm the waters.

Second, and this is key, show no fear.  Keep up the heaviest sanctions possible. If a missile is launched our way, shoot it down.  If the current suspect ship continues toward Myanmar use the UN resolution to stop it and board it.  Pyongyang will scream bloody murder, fire off a few missiles, test another bomb, ramp up their readiness state and -- ultimately -- do nothing.

Here is the guilty little secret about North Korea we keep forgetting -- they cannot win a war with us and they know it.  And, whatsmore, if they did start it, a war would bring down the government in Pyongyang.  The military knows it and so does most of the government.

North Korea is about pushing our buttons and survival.  We should ignore the first issue of their bloviations and focus on the second.   With a little luck (and it will take luck), the military will not tolerate a Kim the Third and begin to modify its behavior and open slowly to the outside world.

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Long Telegram Redux

Eight thousand words scribbled in the drafty apartments of the U.S. embassy in Moscow could be the secret to dealing with both Iran and North Korea. Their author was George F. Kennan, an ambitious, erudite Foreign Service officer with Victorian principles and a penchant for controversy. Kennan’s Long Telegram became the touchstone for US “containment” strategy during the Cold War—but good strategy, is good strategy, and if it will work now why not use it.

First, Kennan’s strategy was not really about “containing” Soviet power. Indeed, we never really contained the Soviets. What we did do is exactly what Kennan advised—we out competed the enemy. In the end, the Evil Empire could just not keep up. If that work against the Soviets, it ought to serve well enough against minor powers like Iran and North Korea.  All we have to do is remember Kennan’s caution. The use of American might, Kennan cautioned in the concluding paragraphs of the Long Telegram, had to be measured in two important respects. “Much depends,” he wrote, “on [the] health and vigor of our own society.” In addition, Kennan argued, “We must have the courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us…is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.” At the root of Kennan’s proposals were the essential concepts for prevailing in any long war—whether it be taking down a rival superpower, responding to the challenge of shadowy, transnational terrorist networks or dealing with a nuclear “wanna-be” like Iran or North Korea.

Second, strategy is about setting the conditions of competition—not sitting back and waiting for the other side to drive events—shame on the White House for more fence-sitting than action taking. For starters, the Administration has to get much more serious about missile defense. Cutting $1.4 billion from the program in practice puts missile defense in neutral—setting a low bar for defenses, a bar so low it encourages Iran and North Korea to move their programs along faster and jump over. Rather than scaling back, the US ought to be ramping up missile defense, devaluing any strategic leverage either country might hope to gain in threatening the US or its allies with a mushroom cloud.

Robust missile defense ought to be step one in a serious effort to show North Korea and Iran they can’t compete with us. Honestly, scaling back on the US missile defense program has to rank as near the most grave strategic errors of this young administration. 

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Beware of Iran. We very well could be in for an unpleasant change there, a country more expansive, more dangerous.

As the smoke clears in Tehran, it is almost certain that what occurred on June 12 was not an election but rather a classical military coup d'etat. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, through the Supreme Leader Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, seized the reigns of power from the old guard. Evidence of this is the Baseej's role in putting down the demonstrations, Monday's warning from the IRGC, the attacks on former president Rafsanjani, the leader of the old guard.

The IRGC has a long, nasty history of spreading Khomenei's revolution. Whether Khomeinei's revolution is dead or not, the IRGC's impulse, now in firm control, will at the very least be to continue to expand Iranian influence across the Middle East. No matter how much the regime in Tehran is shaken, this administration will have an uphill battle trying to talking Iran down from external aggression. 

I'm a pessimist when it comes to counter-proliferation based on sanctions.  Unfortunately, the North Korean and Iranian regimes see their survival at stake, so it is unlikely that the United States and its partner states can raise the costs of proliferation to the point that these regimes will abandon it. 

I am a believer in the efficacy of deterrence, both nuclear and conventional.  To make it work, the United States needs to make very clear to North Korea and Iran that certain actions will result in their destruction.  And it needs to have the nuclear forces, conventional forces, and defenses to make this threat realistic. 

One of the actions which should result in the destruction of the North Korean and Iranian regimes is the provision of nuclear or biological weapons to terrorist groups.  And we should make clear that we would not feel compelled to prove "beyond the shadow of a doubt" that such an exchange had taken place, but only to be reasonably certain.

I also believe we should extend our nuclear umbrella to all states.  We should make clear to North Korea and Iran that any use of nuclear weapons will result in the destruction of their regimes by whatever means are necessary.

That said, I do not think we should reward proliferators with assistance or normal relations.

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The assigned question is quite broad and diffuse, not least because the two countries concerned present much different challenges. Too much bad policy flows from throwing “rogue regimes” into a single, oversimplifying pot. One obvious difference is that North Korea already has nuclear weapons while Iran does not. Another difference is that the North Korean regime is far more mercurial, penurious, risk-acceptant, blatantly criminal, and vulnerable to implosion than the Iranian regime, notwithstanding the most recent uncertainty and excitement in the streets of Tehran. Something akin to a normal relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran can be envisioned, notwithstanding all there still would be to dislike and distrust about it. It is hard to envision anything that could be called normal in relations with the gang in Pyongyang.

Attractive alternatives to what the United States and its four principal partners (South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia) have been doing lately in confronting North Korea are not readily apparent. The North Koreans’ latest nuclear test appears to have had some favorable (from the U.S. point of view) effect on Chinese and Russian attitudes, with China, as always on this issue, the most important player. The U.S. policy of tracking and trailing, but not forcibly boarding, suspect North Korean shipping seems sensible. The United States and all the other players need to avoid putting Kim’s regime in a position where it sees nothing but a losing hand for itself unless it tries some stunt even more drastic and dangerous than what it has tried so far.

It is by no means a foregone conclusion that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons, or even that it eventually will want to acquire them. There is much that the West and especially the United States can do to shape Iranian incentives in the direction of not wanting to acquire them. While not giving up the goal of a non-nuclear-weapons-armed Iran (which is not the same as an Iran with no nuclear program), we need to take a much more sober approach to the prospect of what Iran and the Middle East would look like if that goal is not achieved—more sober than has been true of most discourse on the subject.

Specifically, the attitude that “there would be nothing worse than a nuclear armed Iran” needs to be firmly and decisively discarded. I can think of many things, including many things in the Middle East, that would be worse. One thing that would be worse is a military strike in the name of setting back the Iranian nuclear program. Such an action would not kill the program, it would increase Iranian incentives for accelerating the program (rather like Iraq’s response to the Israeli strike on its nuclear reactor in 1981), it would lead Iran to show us what it really means to be the “no. 1 state sponsor of terrorism,” it would kill for probably another decade or more any chance of the kind of U.S.-Iranian relationship that could be the core of a more stable Persian Gulf, it would erase what repair to the standing of the U.S. in the Muslim world the United States has begun by committing to a withdrawal from Iraq, and it would throw the oil market into at least short-term turmoil. A military strike against Iran would be folly.

Among all the vague talk about the ill effects on Middle Eastern security of an Iranian nuclear weapon, one hears almost no specific and convincing strategic logic about exactly how Tehran would use its possession of such a weapon in a damaging way. No plausible scenarios come to mind where terrorism comes into play, or where Tehran ever would have any reason to share nuclear capability with a terrorist client. The same is true with questions of how Iran would try to exert influence in the Persian Gulf region. It would have no advantage in any conflict escalating to a level where nuclear weapons became relevant. To use Cold War terminology, the United States (and Israel) would retain escalation dominance. Iranian leaders (unlike Kim Jong-Il) have been risk-averse in their foreign policy for the last couple of decades. And they are not suicidal. The principles of deterrence are not repealed just because one of the parties in a deterrent relationship happens to wear a turban and a beard.

There are several possible structures for building a more stable system of security in the Persian Gulf region. I would favor the OSCE model—universal in membership, not based on competing alliances, and not being just limited to strictly security matters.

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The short answer to the question is that I have no idea. Making confident predictions about how hostile states will react to U.S. efforts to rein them in is a sucker's game.

One thing I am willing to assert is that framing Iran and North Korea as generically similar strategic problems is a mistake. Containment was grounded in a correct assessment that, prevented from expanding by conquest, the U.S.S.R. eventually would implode on its own. In Iran, as recent events suggest, it's quite possible that a similarly self-generated transformation may eventually take place. In contrast, there currently is no prospect whatever of such a development in the Hermit Kingdom.

Thus, with respect to Iran, my own perhaps over-optimistic objective is not containment, but instead, ultimately, partnership. Historical animosities aside, there are no irresolvable grounds for U.S.-Iranian hostility and a bunch of incentives on both sides for the opposite. The question is whether we have the strategic patience to allow the animosities to dissipate and common interests to emerge. Iran's nuclear development complicates that challenge, but in my view doesn't invalidate it. As for attempting to curtail that development by force, it would be hard to imagine a more serious blunder.

As for North Korea, I can do no better than to quote a recent column on the subject: "Of the other five parties to the six-power talks from which North Korea withdrew in high dudgeon last month, at least three -- China, Japan, and South Korea -- are far more at risk from continued North Korean misbehavior than the United States...[Accordingly it's] past time for the U.S. to back out of the lead in dealing with the fractious Kims, one and all. We already have more than enough on our foreign policy plate."

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