Robert Haddick has an interesting article in the American sketching out the costs of any potential Iranian containment regime. Haddick writes:
'Left alone, the likely response would be a nuclear and missile arms race between Iran and the Persian Gulfâ??s Arab states. During the Cold War, U.S. security guarantees, backed up by U.S. military forces and theater nuclear weapons, allowed U.S. allies in Western Europe and East Asia to avoid having to develop their own nuclear weapon programs. Now, once more, Cold War-style deterrence over the Persian Gulf, bolstered by a United States security guarantee and military deployments, may seem an appealing option. But a security guarantee has its costs and risks, for which U.S. policy makers and the American public must prepare.'
I tackled this issue a bit here, and Haddick provides a good tour of the horizon of some of the challenges and risks of a containment regime - but he overlooks the huge elephant in the living room when it comes to containing Iran - the threat of Sunni terrorism.
Any Iranian containment regime would, as Haddick writes, see the U.S. strengthening its forward military presence in the Middle East and its partnership with the sundry autocrats of the region. This is the very dynamic that propelled al Qaeda in the 1990s. It stands to reason that such a dynamic will funnel recruits to the movement in the future.
What makes this situation rather perverse is that Iran's nuclear program poses no threat to the U.S. homeland, while al Qaeda terrorism most assuredly does. Iran's nuclear program is clearly a threat to U.S. military deployments in the Middle East and is threatening to other nations in the region. You can make a plausible case that a nuclear Iran will become a hegemonic Iran and that the result would be a sharp spike in the price of oil. But you cannot claim that a nuclear Iran will lead to the deaths of U.S. citizens inside the United States. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the threat from al Qaeda.
The typical counter-argument here is that the geopolitical consequences of a nuclear Iran (higher oil prices, greater regional terrorism, etc.) trump concern for however many Americans wind up being slaughtered by al Qaeda terrorists. And it's not like declining to erect a militarized containment regime around Iran would prevent al Qaeda terrorism - that genie is long out of the bottle. But we need to be mindful of what the Cold War taught us about containment - there are a multitude of unintended consequences, especially with respect to terrorist movements and once-useful proxies. Reasonable people can weight these costs and arguments differently - but it's important to acknowledge them up front.
It's also worth pointing out that after years of living under the American defense umbrella, Germany, South Korea and Japan developed strong market economies and democratic institutions. Their citizens may have resented various American policies, but never got it into their heads to plow commercial airliners into American office buildings and launch an international terrorist war against Western interests. Can we say the same for our protectorates in the Middle East?
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