The Costs of Containment
It is always possible that Iran will be deprived of its nuclear option by military action, that the current regime in the Islamic Republic will be overthrown, or that sanctions will bring the regime to the table with meaningful concessions, but there is every possibility that none of these scenarios will come to pass. Indeed, the history of aspiring nuclear powers is relatively uniform: barring military action (or the perception of imminent military action in the case of Libya), would-be nuclear states such as Pakistan and North Korea have achieved their goals.
Should Iran acquire nuclear weapons, these options will remain on the table, but there will be a new layer of strategic challenges and constraints—not simply the day after, but well into the future. Many have suggested that containing a nuclear Iran is a reasonable option, possibly more desirable than confrontation. Thus, we may consider that containing and deterring a nuclear Iran is the least-worst option before us.
We appear to be backing into containment, not making a choice; the policy will be thrust upon us and we will discover only after the fact what the true risks and costs are. Consider that until now debate about Iran has assumed transparency about Iranian acquisition of sufficient nuclear material and subsequent breakout from nonproliferation regimes. News articles report authoritatively on centrifuges running, stockpiles of fissile material, and specific months and years until the bomb. But the clarity in these deliberations—both public and classified—is belied by history. Both Pakistan and North Korea broke through to bomb-making capacity sometime in the 1980s and 1990s respectively. To this day, intelligence agencies are uncertain when the line was crossed. As a result, we were left discussing preventative options when the question was already moot.
In other words, if we are unwilling to strike a nuclear-armed Iran, we may be forced into containment. The requirements of containment are burdensome, and the American footprint in the region is shrinking rather than growing. This is not a strategy that can simply be subcontracted to others; arming Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and others is unlikely to provide assurances to those countries, let alone to Israel, that Iran is, to use the 1990s vernacular, in a box. The force brought to bear against Saddam Hussein in the 1990s—including substantial basing rights in the region and an underlying and justifying UN resolution—are unlikely to be in place vis-à-vis a nuclear Iran.
Some will insist that containing Iran is hardly an epic challenge, arguing that
Iran is, if anything, more vulnerable to long-term pressure than the USSR was. It is smaller and weaker in every dimension. Its economy is a mess. Its oil weapon fires backward as well as forward, because oil sales keep Iran’s economy afloat. And, unlike the Soviet Union, Iran has no conceivable hope of disarming or crippling America with a first strike; America’s deterrent against Iran is massive, credible,
and impregnable.137
This analogy reflects a mangled understanding of what containment and deterrence require when they are applied to Iran; the underlying structures of the policy and strategy are relevant, but the particulars are not. Worse, the analogy casts Cold War containment is an excessively rosy light. Containing the Soviet Union was hardly a cost-free exercise. Take just one measure of those costs: wars were fought in Korea and Indochina and between Soviet and US proxies in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. Are these tolerable consequences to a nuclear standoff with Iran? And what of the likely proliferation of weapons of mass destruction regionwide in response to an Iranian nuclear acquisition? Would we welcome a Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons?138 What if the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Turkey, and others followed suit?
There is also an underlying question about US strategy and influence in the Middle East and around the world. US national security strategy in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decade of this one has rested squarely on the premise that the Middle East is a critical region for the United States. Since the creation of what has become US Central Command in 1979, our commitment to the region has risen consistently. Americans have deployed, fought, and given their lives to prevent a hostile hegemon, whether an outside power like the Soviet Union or a local aspirant like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the regime in Iran, from dominating the region. In this regard, Obama has proven to be no different that George W. Bush or any of his predecessors.
The US position in the region is also a critical element in the global balance of power. Our preeminence assures our allies in Europe and East Asia that the region’s energy supplies will remain available and that the region’s political problems and violence will be mitigated. It is the presumption of those who promote the policy of containment and the strategy of deterrence of a nuclear Iran that this will preserve the current order, the status quo. We cannot agree. How, in the face of an Iranian nuclear capability, ought we respond to an escalation of support for Hezbollah? For Hamas? For terrorists and insurgents elsewhere, in an alliance of convenience with al Qaeda or Los Zetas? Iran is doing its best to preserve the Assad regime in Syria from the wrath of its people; we choose not to intervene for the moment but would we have the option if Iran had nuclear weapons? One need not be especially imaginative or alarmist to understand the crippling effect of an Iranian nuclear breakout. The object of deterrence in the region would not reside in Tehran but in Washington.
For the United States to adopt a policy of containment based upon a military strategy of deterrence toward a nuclear-armed Iran would be a risky and costly course. It would be risky because revolutionary Iran has proven itself to be an expansionist and ambitious power prone to provocation; the likelihood that it would continue to threaten fundamental US national security interests, even when red lines are clearly and repeatedly drawn, would not diminish. We can conclude only that obtaining a nuclear arsenal, particularly one that creates a
survivable-deterrent capability, will embolden the Tehran regime.
It should come as no surprise that the costs of containment and deterrence will be high for the United States and its coalition partners. These costs are not limited simply to the Middle East, as the recent plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador while he dined at a Washington restaurant suggests. The issues raised by Iran’s increasing activities in Latin America are beyond the scope of this paper and remain to be fully appreciated, but they add a further dimension of complexity to the contain-and-deter approach.139 The diplomatic, strategic, and military costs of containing and deterring are already high. Consider the military costs alone: a renewed offensive nuclear deterrent, both in the United States and extended to the region; prolonged counterintelligence, counterterrorist, and counterinsurgency operations around Iran’s perimeter; a large and persistent conventional covering force operating throughout the region and a reinforcing force capable of assured regime change; and energetic military-to-military programs with coalition partners. Such a deterrent posture is not only near or beyond the limits of current US forces—and we know of no substantial body of studies that has analyzed in sufficient detail the requirements for a containment posture—but would certainly surpass the capabilities of the reduced US military that proposed budget cuts would produce.
In conclusion, we find that though containment and deterrence are possible policies and strategies for the United States and others to adopt when faced with a nuclear Iran, we cannot share the widespread enthusiasm entertained in many quarters.
Indeed, the broad embrace of containment and deterrence appears to be based primarily on an unwillingness to analyze the risks and costs described. It may be the case that containing and deterring is the least-bad choice. However, that does not make it a low-risk or low-cost choice. In fact, it is about to be not a choice but a fact of life.