At ‘Foreign Affairs’, the leading realist Kenneth Waltz has been given space to say we should stop all the threats and handwringing and let Iran get a bomb so as to balance Israel’s regional dominance and produce stability:
Should Iran become the second Middle Eastern nuclear power since 1945, it would hardly signal the start of a landslide. When Israel acquired the bomb in the 1960s, it was at war with many of its neighbors. Its nuclear arms were a much bigger threat to the Arab world than Iran’s program is today. If an atomic Israel did not trigger an arms race then, there is no reason a nuclear Iran should now.
In 1991, the historical rivals India and Pakistan signed a treaty agreeing not to target each other’s nuclear facilities. They realized that far more worrisome than their adversary’s nuclear deterrent was the instability produced by challenges to it. Since then, even in the face of high tensions and risky provocations, the two countries have kept the peace. Israel and Iran would do well to consider this precedent. If Iran goes nuclear, Israel and Iran will deter each other, as nuclear powers always have. There has never been a full-scale war between two nuclear-armed states. Once Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, deterrence will apply, even if the Iranian arsenal is relatively small. No other country in the region will have an incentive to acquire its own nuclear capability, and the current crisis will finally dissipate, leading to a Middle East that is more stable than it is today.
For that reason, the United States and its allies need not take such pains to prevent the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon. Diplomacy between Iran and the major powers should continue, because open lines of communication will make the Western countries feel better able to live with a nuclear Iran. But the current sanctions on Iran can be dropped: they primarily harm ordinary Iranians, with little purpose.
Most important, policymakers and citizens in the Arab world, Europe, Israel, and the United States should take comfort from the fact that history has shown that where nuclear capabilities emerge, so, too, does stability.
Thanks to Paul Woodward.
That’s stating the obvious. We would obviously prefer a nuclear-free Middle East but since Israel/US will not disarm themselves, the only remaining option to achieve stability is to have Iran acquire a nuclear weapons.
To those who claim that Iran’s nuclear capability would trigger a nuclear arms race, we’d have to remind them that Iran is not the one that started the nuclear arms race but rather Israel.
And the nonsensical claim that Saudi Arabia will seek nuclear weapons as a result can be easily refuted as Saudi Arabia needs no more than bb guns to protect itself as it is America’s crown jewel in the Middle East (just recall what happened to someone who tried to mess with Kuwait, a much more minor holding of the US) and its $30 billion/year in arms purchases are nothing more than Baksheesh to its protector and guarantor.
Yes, and there’s no way Iran would start a war with Israel, nuclear or other. Israel’s military is twice as large as Iran’s as well as more advanced, not even considering that the U.S. would probably join such a war on Israel’s side. Religiously speaking, I doubt Iran would want to cause Jerusalem or surrounding holy sites radiation damage. The sole reason Iran might want a nuclear arsenal is deterrence. The argument most often put forth for preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, that that such a weapon is a threat to Israel, is purely bogus. Israel is the main threat peace, it would like to see rival powers smashed to so it can achieve a more perfect regional hegemony. It would like both economic and military hegemony, any country with widespread internal disorder or external war cannot compete economically, neither do countries in civil war compete militarily against external threats. As far as it supports Israel in making war in Iran, the U.S. is also a threat to stability in the region.
This view of a nuclear-armed Iran has been floating around for years. The thesis is pretty simply — unbalanced power is unstable. The US has lusted after war for 20 years because its power has not been balanced as it was when the USSR presented a plausible threat.
In the Middle East the problem is aggravated by Israel’s warmongering supported by a nearly-as-warlike US. Iran is needed to balance the Israeli threat. (And, if Iran were to become so powerful, the irony would be that Israel would then be needed to balance Iran.)
Waltz makes a solid argument — especially on the fallacy of proliferation. But his conviction that nuclear weapons are inherently stabilizing is a bit like being convinced that the longer one lives the less likely it becomes that one will die.
Since I don’t share his conviction (“When it comes to nuclear weapons, now as ever, more may be better”), a twist that can usefully be added to his argument would be that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons then this will actually improve the chances of subsequent disarmament by both Iran and Israel since each would then have something to gain from disarming.
Agree with Walt and also Paul.
But since there is no current way/will to force Israel to disarm Walt’s solution is more realistic…to realist that is.
And if the US were to back off Iran it would signal some US impartiality.
Even if I were a Sunni kingdom like Saudi I would rather have Iran in the US circle than out of it with the US acting as a arbitrator of differences instead of a enforcer for favored countries—-being an enforcer for the favorite few hasn’t worked to make a damn thing more stable in the ME as everyone ‘should ‘ be able to see by now.
The flaw in the balance of power equation (i.e. US vs USSR) is that your policy becomes limited to what their policy is not. Think of a Venn Diagram that contains communism and anti-communism. The communism allows itself to change and get into the anti-communism zone. The anti-communism zone is forever changing to make sure that it gets out of that part of its old zone where the communism has moved to. Such a policy is entirely reactive and prevents both initiative and its corresponding imagination..
It’s true, of course, but then “stability” has always been something of a red herring. When someone says the US is interested in the stability, it largely means the US is interested in maintaining things exactly as they are now. An Iranian nuke would indeed help produce stability, in that it would de-incentivize war and and attacks, but it would be a different “stability” than the current “stability” based on Israel’s freedom to attack anyone, anywhere, anytime. Israel in its current conception could not survive such a new stability, it would be forced to change.
And that, of course, is what the game is all about, preventing a situation in which Israel is forced to change.
I would frame the issue differently.
First and formost, Iran declares that it is not pursuing nuclear weapons, and the diplomacy can proceed on that basis, and without avoiding the pitfall of demanding proofs of the negative: they are never possible.
Second, indeed, if the arrangement with Iran leaves some possibility of Iran surrepticiously making a bomb, this is by no means end of the world. Nukes in a stable world cannot be used. Israel may worry more about purely conventional missile weapons, but again, the situation is more stable if the conflict is more symmetric: Israel avoids temptations to sends missiles and assassins to Lebanon, and this is enough to keep the quiet in the north.
Waltz is calling israel out – well done
BTW….Stephen Walt says sign this petition..it has 100,000 names so far..pass it around.
link to walt.foreignpolicy.com
What you can do to stop a war with Iran
Posted By Stephen M. Walt
Finally someone has the courage to say it. Nukes are essentially defensive weapons; not only would Iran having nuclear weapons be much less destabilizing than the present situation, as the constant threat of an Israeli or US attack would disappear, but the current brinkmanship and warmongering is probably the biggest incentive the Iranian government has to actually developing a military-grade enrichment program, in order to safeguard the regime from a much foretold attack. At this point it would be a perfectly rational choice on Iran’s part (if they have in fact made that decision; the CIA and even the Mossad say they haven’t) and would be entirely explained by Israel and America’s aggressive posturing, not any devious 4,000-year plot against Israel/Ancient Hebrews.
Alastair Cambell Tony Blairs Communications Director wrote in his memoirs that in late 2002 Areil Sharon threatened to nuke Bagdad if Saddam hit Israel with rockets again and later that ..“Campbell also relays another nuclear threat a year later when George Bush told Blair he feared that Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister, was planning to launch a nuclear attack against Iraq. In an account of a conversation with Bush at a Nato summit in Prague in November 2002, as diplomatic pressure intensified on Saddam Hussein, Campbell writes: “[George Bush] felt that if we got rid of Saddam, we could make progress on the Middle East. He reported on some of his discussions with [Ariel] Sharon, and said he had been pretty tough with him. Sharon had said that if Iraq hit Israel, their response would ‘escalate’ which he took to mean go nuclear. Bush said he said to him ‘You will not, you will not do that, it would be crazy.’ He said he would keep them under control, adding ‘A nuke on Baghdad, that could be pretty tricky.’”
That the threat was made so cavalierly can only provoke some speculation as to whether current Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is behind the scenes once again playing this bargaining chip with regard to Iran. I have long wondered why Western leaders pay so much attention to Netanyahu, the leader of a small country of 7.5 million with a gross domestic product only a little bigger than that of Portugal. Is it because, behind closed doors, they still talk the way Sharon did? Does Israel regularly use its nuclear warheads to blackmail the US and the West more generally? [Juan Coles Informed comment 21-06-2012]
Balance?
Sane balance would see to it that Israel’s nuclear arsenal is dismantled and that no one in the region has nuclear weapons.