The World Obama Faces: Muddle East

The pundit class is all a-twitter speculating on how Obama's campaign pledges to change course on Iran and Afghanistan/Pakistan will play out. Will talking to Iran's leadership prevent Iran from going nuclear? Will committing more troops to Afghanistan prevent the situation from deteriorating further?

Unfortunately for Obama, different strategies are unlikely to get us better outcomes, as many of the problems we face in the Middle East and Central Asia are intractable by nature. Building on what Edward Luttwak has argued elsewhere, though we may be less able to affect outcomes in these difficult societies than we hope, the very worst consequences may not be as existentially important to us as we think. Therefore, rather than working to prevent these unpleasant outcomes, Obama would be wise to instruct his staff to do careful contingency planning for the worst-case scenarios.

The most obvious thread tying all these problems together is nuclear proliferation. The goal of preventing terrorist groups from attaining nuclear weapons is a worthy and noble one; but it's a goal that, despite the protestations of the Bush administrations, is a matter best left to international police work supplemented by tactical military strikes when appropriate. It cannot be addressed by invading sovereign nations and instituting regime change as was attempted in Iraq. Luckily for Obama, with the Status of Forces agreement nearing ratification, Iraq will occupy less and less of his time going forward.

The threat of sovereign nations like Iran developing nuclear weapons is a beast of a different color. Short of somehow managing to integrate Iran completely as a responsible stakeholder and putative ally of the Western global order, there's little to suggest that any Iranian leader would abandon something as popular as his nuclear program. It's a potent symbol of national pride, technological progress and a guarantor of respect and autonomy on the world stage, and it enjoys up to 75% support among the populace in some surveys. Given that Iran's peaceful integration into the international system is probably not at hand, we ought to start coming to grips with what we cannot change: namely, that Iran will probably go nuclear in the next few years.

And indeed, that may not be as catastrophic as we think. Apart from some questionable translations of Iranian political speeches, there's no evidence to suggest that Iran would commit national suicide by launching a unilateral nuclear attack against Israel. The most plausible worst-case scenario would be if Egypt and Saudi Arabia decided it was then necessary to develop their own nuclear deterrents. That would be pretty bad, because multipolar nuclear standoffs are inherently much less stable than bipolar arrangements like that between India and Pakistan and the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

But that would not the end of the world either. Rather than focusing on preventing something that's largely inevitable, the Obama administration would do well to think strategically through the post-nuclear-Iran landscape. Could we offer Iran's adversaries the protection of our nuclear shield, whereby an attack on them would precipitate massive retaliation from us? And what are the pressure points we have at our disposal against Saudi Arabia and Egypt to encourage them to not develop weapons of their own? This kind of thinking needs to be built up institutionally and made into a transparent proposal to the region ahead of time. Dealing with the situation reactively can lead to disaster.

The enduring instability in Afghanistan and Pakistan's territorial disintegration present a related, if much more complicated conundrum. In Afghanistan, we're determined to build a stable, functional society lest a terrorist incubator take its place, as it did in the wake of the defeat of the Soviet Union. And in Pakistan, we are becoming increasingly determined to defeat secessionist forces in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas out of a fear that should Pakistan fall apart, nuclear weapons would go unaccounted-for and might fall into the hands of terrorists. In both cases, we are unlikely to prevail. History is not on our side, as the British and Russians know well.

So again, rather than trying to determine the outcome of a probably unwinnable regional conflagration by relocating more troops to Afghanistan, Obama should come to terms with the Taliban's existence as a feature of the landscape. As Zbigniew Brzezinski has been arguing in various network interviews, the U.S. should make an attempt to separate Al Qaeda elements and foreign fighters from the indigenous Taliban, whether through negotiation or threats of targeted military strikes and police actions. We should be mindful of continuously bolstering the forces of moderation inside Pakistan's government, as they are the main guarantor that nuclear materiel does not go missing, but no efforts should be expended on securing Pakistan's territorial integrity for it. The metaphor is the containment of an infection, not the cure.

At the end of the day, these are all rather small-bore problems for America, especially when compared to the financial crisis and all that it implies for our future.  Of course we don't want more countries joining the nuclear club if we can help it, and we certainly don't want rogue terrorist regimes getting access to nuclear weapons. But while nuclear proliferation complicates geostrategy, there's no doubt that we are adequately equipped, both intellectually and militarily, to deal with a multipolar nuclear landscape. And while the prospect of small groups of determined crazies wielding nukes is deeply unsettling, there's little in recent history to suggest that tackling the challenge on a deeply reactive basis that looks for satisfying solutions will make us any more secure.

Damir Marusic is editor of Doublethink Online and Associate Publisher of The American Interest.