Professor Ferguson sees a credible realist threat behind the ISG report. His column is well worth reading, although I fear Niall’s strategy is a little too sophisticated for this White House:
"A nation can and should engage its adversaries and enemies," declares the report in a sentence that Mr Baker must surely have written, and should offer them "incentives as well as disincentives". Note that word "disincentives". Mr Baker’s idea here is not to go cap in hand to Damascus and Teheran. Rather, as he explained to the press this week, it is to "flip the Syrians" by appealing to Sunni solidarity, and to isolate the Iranian regime by exposing its "rejectionist attitude".
In other words: get the leaders of all Iraq’s neighbours into the same room and play "spot the Shia". The calculation is that if Iranian aspirations to regional hegemony can be laid bare, then it will be much easier to get broad support for some serious "disincentives".
As I’ve suggested, Niall urges using the threat of regional anarchy as the lever to get a new settlement that actually brings the regional partners into the act. My worry is that our leverage is not strong enough yet. Niall thinks otherwise. Money quote:
Hats off, then, to Mr Baker and his team. This turns out to be a classic work of persuasion. Its target audiences have been well chosen. Its worst-case scenario is plausible. And its recommendations are so carefully phrased that they sound like disengagement, while actually signifying better engagement.
Not all works of persuasion are heeded. Keynes’s call for a cancellation of reparations and war debts went unheeded in the 1920s; when it finally happened during the Depression, it was too late.
That’s the question. Is it now too late for realism to work and the project to be salvaged? And are the risks of trying greater than the risks of giving up?
The Dish 