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.
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.
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.