Pushed to its logical conclusion, the dove position is an irrefutable tautology: If we are willing to live with an Iranian nuclear weapon, and we should be, then we can have a grand bargain with Iran and we can put this matter behind us. Like the Ungame, we only need to focus on moving our pieces and listening to others. Provided we don't really care about "winning," then the game is really quite simple.If you do care about winning, where winning is defined as "Iran abandons its nuclear weapons program," then the game is better viewed as multilateral chess -- strategic interaction along several vectors with multiple players holding conflicting interests. - Peter Feaver, Foreign Policy
The rest of Feaver's post goes on to describe how the U.S. should try to use the various conflicting pressure points to bring about the desired U.S. outcome but never actually gets around to addressing the central question: is war preferable to a nuclear Iran?
The Iran "doves" -to use Feaver's phrase - have concluded it is not. But where does Feaver stand?
Here is how he sees the threat of military force:
The challenge, therefore, is to convince the Russians and the Chinese that if they cooperate in imposing multilateral pressure on Iran, thus giving diplomacy a chance, they can help forestall a resort to force; but if they do not, they increase the likelihood of a U.S. (or an Israeli) resort to force. Hence the need to keep the military option on the table while also demonstrating a credible desire for a non-military solution. Structured this way, Russian and Chinese cooperation buy a peaceful resolution and Russian and Chinese free-riding hastens an undesirable military outcome
This sounds plausible enough, but there is a huge downside to this approach. Structured this way, it puts the U.S. on a sure-fire path to war with Iran or a humiliating climb-down. Surely Feaver can't believe that the administration should commit itself to a course of war with Iran if it does not, in fact, desire one? And this is the problem with the "Iran hawk" position: there is no credible way to threaten to use military force against Iran unless you are really willing to use military force against Iran.
And in this way, at least, the Iran "dove" position is intellectually coherent. They have concluded that a war with Iran is costlier than a nuclear Iran, and so can structure their policy accordingly. The hawks either believe that war is the lesser evil, or they have a naive faith that they can structure a too-clever-by-half means to convince Iran we're carrying a big stick when they actually have no intention of swinging it.
