The Israelis may well force the president's hand at some point -- striking Iran and triggering a U.S. intervention too. But this president will go to great lengths to prevent that. He knows that hitting Iran's nuclear sites will only set the program back a couple of years. Perhaps he's prepared -- and his successors would be too -- for a strategy of striking Iran's nuclear facilities every so often, like some grand game of whack-a-mole (the Israelis call it "mowing the lawn"). But I'm not sure that's a sustainable policy.
The fact is, there's probably only one country that can stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapons capacity, and that's Iran. But I'm not at all sure Tehran will determine that the costs of its nuclear program are prohibitive. Indeed, the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime will only sharpen Iran's sense of vulnerability and accelerate its quest for a weapon.
If Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini hadn't overthrown the shah in 1979, Iran would be a nuclear weapons state today. Why? Because the four countries that have developed nuclear weapons in the past several decades -- Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea -- are all fundamentally insecure. They were determined to acquire nukes and had the means and motivation to pull it off. Iran is the poster child for insecurity, but it's even more than that. Throw in its conception of itself as a great power, its regional ambitions, and its grandiosity, and poof -- you're on the road to Nukeville.
The odds that the United States can stop the mullahs from acquiring the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon, should they truly want one, are long indeed. With regard to military action, the risks are probably overstated. It's the efficacy that bothers me. Will a military campaign work? Does America try some eleventh-hour, high-level secret talks with Iran first? Great questions; no answers. But the moment is approaching later this year, or early in 2013, when Israel and the United States will probably face a choice. Bomb, or accept the bomb.
The Rest Is Discretionary
But wait, you say, what about America's other interests, particularly the peace process and democratization?
Great questions. Let me give you some harsh answers. Watch the U.S. government's hands on these two; don't listen to its words. And what that disconnect tells me is that however much the United States says it cares, it really doesn't all that much.
On the issue of a conflict-ending agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, wake me up when the current Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority get serious about doing something real. Every previous breakthrough was preceded by some act -- positive or negative -- that the locals initiated and that gave Washington the means and motivation to intervene successfully. Unless that ownership is present, the United States should stop worrying about this plan or that and stop pretending that it can somehow fix this.
On the issue of the Arab Spring -- or Islamist Winter, depending on your viewpoint -- it's going to be a very long movie. The United States should do what it can to help but stop inflating its rhetoric and realize that it's in no position to act decisively. The country is still involved in a devil's bargain with authoritarian monarchies in the Gulf, military elites in Egypt, and a strongman in Iraq (not to mention a corrupt regime in nearby Afghanistan). Nor did it ever have the capacity or the will to remake these lands. The fact is, Arabs own more of their own politics now than ever before. And that's a good thing.
If America wants to pretend to the rest of the world that it's serious about Arab-Israeli peace or that it'll stand up to defend nascent Arab democracies, that's one thing. All governments dissemble and use idealized arguments to package their policies.
But there are certain things the United States cares about and others it doesn't -- certain issues it's prepared to do something about and others it chooses not to. At the very least, we should stop fooling ourselves about what those really are.
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