Even after U.S. diplomats met with their Iranian counterparts last week in Geneva, it's unclear what the White House's next move is, beyond more talks at the end of the month. While President Obama had promised to do everything that's required to prevent" Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the fact that "engagement" has given way to new catchwords, like deterrence and "containment, suggests that we may well choose to learn to live with an Iranian bomb. In that case, we will probably see the birth of a new Middle East, but not as we have ever envisioned it.
In the past, the ambition to create a new Middle East" was underwritten by American power. For example, in the 1990s, the U.S.-brokered Arab-Israeli peace process was supposed to usher in an era of prosperity and comity. Instead, that decade ended with the second intifada and 9/11. The George W. Bush administration decided that the Arab political culture that had engendered Osama Bin Laden was nonetheless ripe for democracy, and so it is not surprising that amid the carnage of Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza "Rice discerned,8599,1219325,00.html the "birth pangs of the new Middle East." In fact, that war was just the old Middle East explaining itself, as the region usually does, through patterns of violence.
Many were surprised when Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the other Sunni powers quietly cheered on Israel in its battles against Hezbollah and later Hamas. But this was extraordinary only to those inclined to see the region in terms of 300 million Arabs pitted against 6 million Jews. Instead, conceive of it rather like this: There is an American-backed regional system, and then there are thosefrom Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Soviet Union to Bin Laden and the Islamists and now Iran and its regional assets Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamaswho are eager to create a new Middle East of their own design.
Since 1944, Saudi Arabia, home of the world's largest known oil reserves, has been the anchor of the American order, with the other Gulf states and Jordan also safely within our orbit. Over the years, other players have jumped sidesfor instance, Egypt became pro-United States after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Iran turned against Washington after the 1979 revolution, the PLO moved more or less into the American camp in the 1990s, and Iraq shifted into the U.S. column after Operation Iraqi Freedom. Since Israel became a significant part of Washington's Middle East strategy in 1973, it should hardly come as a surprise that the U.S.-friendly Arab regimes (albeit not all the Arab masses) were pulling for the Israelis in their wars with those who want to destroy the American order.
And so, even after all the apparent upheaval of the last eight yearswar, a tenuous democracy in Iraq, and more warthe essential structure of the Middle East remained the same. However, an Iranian nuclear program would rearrange the region's political, economic, and cultural furniture. Therefore, what's most dangerous is not an Iranian bomb but the new Middle East that would issue from it.
If Iran gets the bomb, other regional powers will pursue nuclear programsif they are not already doing so. Inevitably in a region as volatile as this, there will be a few small-scale nuclear catastrophes, probably rulers targeting their own people. Saddam gassed the Kurds and slaughtered the Shiites, Hafez Assad massacred the Sunnis of Hama, and mass graves throughout the region testify to the willingness of Arab rulers to kill their own peoplein their hands, a nuclear weapon is merely an upgrade in repressive technology. Still, it's extremely unlikely the regimes will use these weapons against their regional rivals. Remember, the main reason these states support nonstate terror groups is to deter one another and thus avoid all-out war.
However, the prospect of states transferring nukes to so-called nonstate actors is a nightmare for the United States, which does not fare well against such tactics. Consider that our response to 9/11 was to use our armed forces to democratize the Middle East. Also, consider that the most convoluted reason for making war against the Taliban is to keep the nukes of a neighboring country out of the hands of its intelligence service's dangerous elements. That is to say, we cannot even deter Pakistan, our ally.
In the hands of an adversary, an Islamic bomb is concrete evidence that Iran's strategy of "resistance" to the West is a winning one. And this will change the region's political culture from radical to many times more radical.
At best, this means that even those U.S.-friendly regimes that have much to fear from "resistance" will have no choice but to raise the pitch of their anti-American rhetoric to stay in step with their rivalsand their populations. Consequently, the basing rights that we have throughout the Gulf states are likely to be terminated.
At worst, an Iranian bomb sends a message to the more ambitious actors in the region that they should feel free to make a run at the Americans. If Tehran showed it is less profitable to play nicely with Washington than it is to extort the Americans and kill their soldiers (as Iran did in Iraq and Afghanistan) and allies (as Iran did in Lebanon and Israel), why shouldn't they do the same? We will not be deterring Iran but inviting the rest of the region to shoot at us.
The one ally that shares our interests and is capable of defending them against Iran and its assets is Israel. Containment requires that the superpower persuade its allies that they should put aside local concerns and look at the big picture; but in this case it is Israel that is focused on Iran while the Obama administration has pecked away at the Netanyahu government over settlements. In Cold War terms, that is as though President Ronald Reagan had directed his "tear down this wall" speech not to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev but to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Instead, Reagan put Pershing missiles at Kohl's back and pointed them at Moscow.
Still, it is worth noting that our position will not necessarily be secured by an Israeli strike on Iran, for there are some things that need to be done by the alpha dog. Soft power, or what used to be called prestige, is effective only in proportion to how much our hard power is feared by enemies and prized by allies. If we leave Iran to Israel, we are enhancing Jerusalem's prestige at the expense of our own.
At least all the talk of deterrence and containment should remind us why we fought the Cold War: to protect our way of life, a life sustained by oil. Without cheap oil, the life we came to associate with peace would not have been the same. The Persian Gulf was the Cold War's strategic grand prize, and that we have held onto it for 65 years is a credit to the design of Washington's policy of preventing any adversary from breaking out with just the sort of game-changing threat that the Iranian nuclear program represents. In other words, the American order of the Middle East is containment; its unraveling will not allow for a different form of containment but spells the end of our hegemony in the region.
Human history is nothing but the record of nations that have miscalculated their capacity to project power, the willingness (and ability) of their allies to support them, and the determination of their rivals to reshape the world after their own image. As the debate over Iran policy has devolved from strategy to pop psychologyas, for example, in the discussion of whether the Iranians are acting rationally or whether their apocalyptic rhetoric suggests they will do anything to hasten the Mahdi's return the fact is that no regime consciously wishes to bring its own existence to an end. And yet states and regimes do nonetheless cease to exist. No sane person believes that the United States is suicidal, but if a nation will not or cannot defend its way of life, it has taken the first step toward its inevitable decline, which is tantamount to suicide.