DiA is on point: The best America can do is to treat Iran the way it treated South Africa or Communist Eastern Europe, building an international consensus among democracies on isolating them while offering an olive branch to keep local populations yearning for change. Already, America's recent conciliatory stance on Iran, and Iran's aggressive responses, … Continue reading The Strength Of Restraint
This Bret Stephens op-ed is fascinating less for what it says than the assumptions it makes:
The conclusion among Israelis is that the Obama administration won't lift a finger to stop Iran, much less will the "international community." So Israel has pursued a different strategy, in effect seeking to goad the U.S. into stopping, or at least delaying, an Israeli attack by imposing stiff sanctions and perhaps even launching military strikes of its own … The problem, however, is that the administration isn't taking the bait, and one has to wonder why.
Really? It baffles Stephens why the US doesn't simply do what Israel tells it to do? Well, here's one possible response: maybe the US doesn't actually like being forced to calibrate its entire foreign policy to the interests of one foreign country alone, however close and unbreakable the alliance. There are distinctions and nuances between Israel's national interests and the United States' national interests – a fact that has been largely erased from the neocon psyche, but which any American president is bound to consider in the current delicate moment. Those distinctions make a difference.
Here are arguments that do not seem to have occurred to Stephens. It may be in the long-term interests of the US not to confront Tehran over the one policy the Iranian people strongly support it on right now: the nuclear question. Given the strength of the internal resistance to the regime, it might be better to accept some nuclear development while trying to exploit internal divisions with economic carrots. Containment, in other words: a policy that was once quite acceptable on the mainstream right.
And what's so awful about a nuclear stand-off between Iran and Israel in the Middle East? It is not necessarily a stable situation in a region when one country – and one country alone – has nuclear weapons in a region like the Middle East. In fact, it might encourage that country to act militarily with impunity, to over-reach and generate excessive hostility. Nuclear deterrence worked very well for much of the world for a long time in preventing conflict rather than exacerbating it. It may be the one thing preventing an India-Pakistan war. Why is it unthinkable in the Middle East?
Of course, we'd all rather Iran did not have the bomb.
by Chris Bodenner Peter Scoblic sat in on Clinton's address yesterday: The key idea of the speech was that, because no nation can meet modern threats like proliferation and climate change on their own and because most nations worry about those threats, the United States should establish an "architecture of global cooperation." […] Clinton made … Continue reading We’re Number One! – Of Many
Shadi Hamid says that I am mistaken when I write: "What we have learned is that once Islamists actually wield power, their popularity collapses." Hamid: It is not true that once Islamists wield power, their popularity collapses. An important, but often overlooked, distinction should be made here. Islamist parties that win power through the democratic … Continue reading Islamists Can Govern?
A reader writes: You wrote: "What we have learned is that once Islamists actually wield power, their popularity collapses. Religious fanatics do not know how to run countries; their real interests lie elsewhere (you can apply that on a much lesser scale, of course, to the competence of the Bush administration). The place where Shiite … Continue reading Dissent Of The Day
A reader writes:
I just read your post on ‘Preparing for the worst’ and I agree any attack on Iran will lead to many sleepless nights. My question for you is, do you not think a nuclear Iran could be worse?
There are many curious digressions, many incoherences, and some painful writing, as Dan points out: For too long, we have been constrained because our dependence on imported oil has forced us to support repressive regimes and conduct our foreign policy with one hand tied behind our back. I will free that hand from its oil-soaked … Continue reading Huckabee And The War
Here’s a challenging analysis of the war on terror thus far: The Strategic Energy Ellipse (SEE) is a region of extreme strategic importance to the United States. It stretches from the northern shore of the Caspian Sea to the southern terminus of the Persian Gulf. Within this region are oilfields that hold approximately 70 percent … Continue reading An Accidental Victory?
One wants to admire Victor Davis Hanson. And then he says something like this: They’re talking about a country that once fought Italy, Japan and Germany all at once, defeated them, and then turned around and started the Cold War … I mean, the Cold War resistance of the Soviet Union, and they’re saying that … Continue reading Denialist Watch
A reader writes: The first response to your complaint that liberal bloggers don’t offer alternatives is to quote your hero Sir Winston: "The opposition is not responsible for proposing integrated and complicated measures of policy. Sometimes they do, but it is not their obligation." Beyond that I’d say a perfectly responsible liberal take on the … Continue reading The War and the Democrats
