Iran: A Nuclear Bomb Within the Next Presidency?
The United States may find the same task harder with Iran, which is not giving way in its determination to hold on to its nuclear program. A now notorious American “National Intelligence Estimate,” published at the end of 2007, punctured the United States’ threats that it would not rule out military strikes if Iran did not back down. The report, by saying that it believed Iran had stopped designing the warheads of nuclear weapons, allowed Iran gleefully to claim the moral high ground —even though the report made clear that such work had taken place and that other potential preparations for a weapon were continuing.
But while the notion of attacking Iran regularly pulses through Washington, it has always been deeply unattractive —far worse than an invasion of Iraq. An invasion of Iran is unthinkable —it is a much bigger country, with about 65 million people compared to Iraq’s 27 million or so.11 It has been helped by five years of high oil prices; it has an army of more than half a million, with 350,000 reservists as well.12 You do not have to have many conversations in Tehran pizza parlors, their walls covered with photographs of ayatollahs but their menus all-American, to work out that an attack would make instant enemies out of the many Iranians who love the United States —the best hope for prizing the ayatollahs out of power. One Iranian told Newsweek: “As a gay man living in Iran” —a phenomenon that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said doesn’t exist —“I couldn’t express myself and be what I am. My brother went to jail for eight years because he opposed this regime. . . . Despite all that, if one day America or Israel attack Iran, I’ll go back and defend my country.”13 A deliberate insult to Ahmadinejad from the president of Columbia University provoked an outpouring of support for him from ordinary Iranians, outraged at the snub to their country (which Ahmadinejad’s blog gleefully recorded).14
Even an airstrike on Iran’s nuclear targets would be formidably hard for the United States. Beyond the half-dozen known sites, Iran could have many hidden ones —and hundreds of missile silos as well. If America attempted a strike, the only likely member of the “coalition of the willing” would be Israel, though Iran’s worried Arab neighbors might quietly be supportive. Many speculate that Israel might do the job on its own, but one Israeli officer explained to me in late 2007 why that seemed unattractive. “We’d get the retaliation [from Iran] either way, but the U.S. would do it better —they’d have the scale to hit more of the targets. So only if we were completely convinced the U.S. would never move, and that the threat had reached the point of warranting immediate action, would we consider that step.”15
For all these reasons, the Bush administration has rightly been putting its efforts behind diplomacy, together with Europe. Seyed Mohammad Hossein Adeli, a former Iranian ambassador to London, said with a grin on leaving the post in November 2005, “My job was to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Europe.”16 British diplomats disagree that he achieved this goal, but there is no faulting the tactics. There are some signs now that the American drive to clamp down on Iranian banks is having an effect, which previous sanctions have not.
America Preoccupied at Home
The amount of effort Americans will want to put into these problems abroad will depend also on their stamina for handling change at home. The 2008 election campaign was an illustration —although easily overlooked outside America —of the difficult questions its politicians and people have to cope with in the immediate future. The population, which has just passed 300 million, is set to rise to 420 million by 2050. About half of that is projected to come from immigration and from immigrants’ children, but half is the result of Americans’ living longer.
That is an extraordinary wave of change for a country to handle, even before considering that many of the new people will be Hispanic. It begins to change the character of the country, pushing out the suburbs, stretching out the West and Southwest. It is a huge opportunity as well as a strain. It will leave America as the only big developed country with more children than pensioners, and with a growing population of working age.
But if you add to the issues on Americans’ minds the problem of securing energy resources and of trying to wean parts of its economy off the use of large cars, it is clear that politicians have a hugely demanding task adjudicating between all these groups at home. For other countries, it will become harder to persuade Americans that they should continue to look outward to other problems, and should risk tens of billions of dollars and their soldiers’ lives in doing so. As Michael Lind, of the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, argues, “The US is not going to be eclipsed any time soon by another superpower, but it may exhaust itself by allowing its commitments to exceed the resources that the public is willing to allot to foreign policy.”17
The Superpower Is Not Facing Eclipse
Lind is surely right that it is much too pessimistic to predict the eclipse of the American superpower. On the contrary, Russia is in no position to challenge it, and China has enormous problems to overcome before it can realistically do so. But China’s evolution, if it took a malign form, could still cause America and other liberal democracies great discomfort. So could Russia, if causing that discomfort came to seem, to its leaders, like the only attractive mission left to them.
The best way for the United States to manage those challenges is to persuade both countries to work within the system of rules and institutions it has helped build. For that, it needs other countries’ help, particularly in Europe, but those countries in turn should not take America’s effort for granted.
Chapter 10
HOW AMERICA COULD HELP ITSELF
My mother, an American, was always amused after coming to live in Britain by the euphemism of “helping police with inquiries” for those who had just been arrested. “What helpful suggestions could you make?” she would say. “ ‘Have you thought of looking in the river?’ ”
It seems just as presumptuous to advise a superpower on how to repair its world image and restore its influence abroad when it doesn’t recognize the conversation. Bush administration officials, and many U.S. citizens, have often made it clear that they don’t give a damn what others think. “Oh, the envy,” said one comment from San Francisco on The Times Web site, about a piece criticizing the United States’ refusal to sign a United Nations accord against an “arms race in space,” where 160 countries voted in favor. “Most of the 160 get to work on a donkey,”1 added the writer —and he was not the only one to express such sentiments.
All the same, I have offered here suggestions for change which would improve the predicament in which America finds itself after Iraq and President George W. Bush, as it faces a breathtaking range of challenges, with economic turmoil and worries about climate change adding to the list of ugly problems left around Iraq, Iran, and the Middle East. There are practical steps it could take to improve relations with countries that should be its allies and people who should be its natural supporters.
It should immediately drop policies, such as the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, that it cannot justify by its own values. It should go a long way in softening its tone on those, such as climate change, where it has some justification for going its own way, but which are found so provocative by the rest of the world that they carry huge political cost. It should wean itself off those which represent a view of the world that it finds tempting —the “War on Terror,” the threat of China —but which represent a paranoid exaggeration of the threat it faces and blind it to a better-judged response.
The changes would help retrieve the United States’ authority in advocating its democratic values and its belief in a world governed by the rule of law and international treaties, which many people and governments are now challenging or rejecting altogether. The list may also be a balm for the self-laceration with which some Americans have tormented themselves during Iraq and the Bush years. There is a line beyond which the United States should not go in accommodating a planet full of critics. There are some actions fo
r which it should apologize, but there is a limit —which comes early, I have argued —beyond which it should concede nothing. It should not apologize for its central values or for its essential difference from those who dislike its choices.
Elect a New President
The Economist commented toward the end of George W. Bush’s presidency that “if America were a stock, it would be a ‘buy’: an undervalued market leader, in need of new management.” It added: “But that points to its last great strength. More than any rival, America corrects itself.”2 America’s unsurpassed tool for “correcting itself” is the election of a new president and Congress. The headiness felt in Britain, Germany, France —and of course in the United States itself —at the 2008 election campaign showed the exhilaration so many felt about the prospect of a new president, one who might allow Americans to feel good about their country again, and their allies not ashamed of their allegiance.
Give a Nod to Cooperation
The Bush administration, in its closing months, tried to make some correction itself, and became a partial convert to the notion of civility. It called together the Annapolis summit on the Middle East in November 2007, and tried hard not to wreck the international talks on climate change in Bali shortly afterward. It began working energetically within the United Nations system it had derided ahead of the Iraq invasion to secure tighter sanctions on Iran and a joint approach on Darfur. In November 2007, President Bush welcomed Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s new president, as a good new friend. But fully repairing the Bush administration’s relations with the world was a lost cause by mid-2007.
A mere change of tone from the abrasion of the Bush administration will not solve America’s problems abroad, but it would be a start. It is not going to dissolve entrenched opposition within a United Nations whose instincts are often profoundly anti-American, nor is it going to erase the differences that run deep between America and Europe over the Middle East and the “War on Terror.” But it would be a first defense against the charge that America is indifferent to the principle of a world governed by laws, unless they suit its own interests.
Act on Global Warming, the Economy, and Trade
A more substantial defense would be to pursue a serious deal with other countries on curbing climate change, one of the fastest ways for a new administration to say that it has brought change from the Bush years. Global warming is a problem too serious for America not to respond. Indeed, the prospect of severe upheaval to people’s lives within the next fifty years outstrips the terrorist threat on which the Bush administration has put such weight, even if it is impossible to put good numbers on either probability. And climate change has taken on too much political resonance, in Europe and in the developing world, for America not to suffer badly from seeming like the world’s villain.
The United States can justifiably argue that in the 1970s and 1980s, it helped bring environmental issues to the world’s attention and —up to a point —that in its resistance to binding targets it is protecting the well-being its economic growth brings to itself and others. But it needs to show more willingness. American leaders have claimed that the United States can battle global warming by developing new technology; it needs to show that this is happening, and that such technology is being sold to the dirtier parts of the developing world. Luckily, the rise in the price of oil has done a lot of the work in kick-starting the search for energy efficiency.
An economic slump will make climate change targets easier to meet, although it may take some political momentum out of the movement as well, as attention switches to the turmoil in the financial markets and the threat of a crash in house prices. That economic challenge may be, for Bush’s successors, as big as 9/11 was for him; it lacks the hideous drama, but it affects far more people, in America and abroad. Here other countries will look to America for leadership. That may not mean dramatic action —in such a crisis, there are always calls for ambitious new rules or institutions to prevent it happening again. But America could help by overhauling its antique and tangled regulation of banks, and by making careful decisions about when, if ever, to use taxpayers’ money to bail out banks and people who can’t pay their mortgages.
Unfortunately, trade talks are rarely made easier in tough times for the economy. Protectionism will rise, as countries fear that their own people’s jobs will be lost. It would be a huge pity if the United States indulged itself in one of its spasms of protectionism when it is better placed than any other country to give the lead in promoting liberal trade. In particular, it would help to let go of its grotesque subsidies of nearly $20 billion a year paid to its dwindling band of farmers, which have outstripped even the European Union’s notorious excesses in that realm.
Stop Demonizing China
Trade is America’s best chance to pull China further within the laws and institutions of the developed world. It would help to tone down the fearmongering about China, an area where Congress presents a more extreme face to the world than do America’s presidents (although European governments are now rivaling it). But the saber rattling and antagonism help America in nothing: not in enforcing trade rules, nor in racing to buy up energy supplies, nor in heading off the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran, North Korea, and the Middle East.
That is not to say that China is benign. But America would get further by pointing out to China that engagement in these problems is in its own interest, and that its traditional distaste for involving itself in diplomacy is unsustainable.
Stay Engaged in Iraq and the Region
Economic threats may rival Iraq and the Middle East as the greatest challenge for President Bush’s successor, but America will still be judged across the world by its handling of the Iraq debacle after Bush. It can pull out troops, but it cannot cut and run from the problem overall, out of responsibility to Iraqis and out of its own self-interest.
Part of that solution will be continuing to work to unblock the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock, to which the Bush administration gave only sporadic attention. The problem has worsened during that neglect, with the rise to power of the Hamas Islamist group and Israel’s expansion of settlements on the West Bank, toward which Bush was extraordinarily accepting, even given that support for Israel is an unwavering commitment of American policy, no matter who the president. “Engagement” is an overused word, but it means, at the least, recognition that the United States is the only party that can put pressure on Israel to make the concessions that will be a central part of any deal. It also means persistence, even when a deal seems impossible, as now. It is an honorable principle that few situations are so bleak they cannot be improved, even if they cannot be resolved.
But for all the inflammatory power the conflict retains, in the images now instantly broadcast across the Arab world on Arabic television, it has arguably been eclipsed as a problem by the other consequences of the Iraq invasion —and the rise of Iran as a regional giant is the worst.
Consider Talking to Iran
Iran’s determination to give itself the ability to make its own nuclear weapons —which it might manage during the American presidency after Bush’s —is one of America’s most difficult foreign problems. Bombing Iran’s suspected nuclear sites —and there might be hundreds —was never attractive. But the unfortunately phrased conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate, published at the end of 2007, allowed Iran to claim the high ground. The report asserted that Iran had stopped actually trying to design a nuclear warhead but did not give enough emphasis to its other conclusion that more difficult work, also crucial to making a weapon, had continued.
No option is attractive, but one clearly open to Bush’s successor —which Bush emphatically ruled out —is to consider talking to Iran about mutual interests for security in the region. The policy of withholding mere contact with the United States as punishment, a core tactic of the Bush administration, has manifestly not worked.
Work with Europe on Handling Russia
Iran would not be such a problem i
f it did not have Russia’s support. It is overdramatic to pronounce the start of a new cold war, but Putin’s threat in June 2007 to point nuclear missiles at Europe again, and his decision in December 2007 to send Iran the fuel for its first nuclear reactor, show he intends to defy the West where it has most explicitly asked for his help. For Britain and America, Putin’s antagonism suddenly seemed to be coloring every issue: Kosovo, gas supplies to Europe, America’s desire to base a new missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, and Russia’s decision to suspend the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty.
In all of these instances, Europe’s interests are very close to those of America. But for the sake of getting on with Russia, and not provoking their huge neighbor, some countries have conceded it points that America rightly does not want to do. At the NATO summit in April 2008, Germany blocked the United States’ call to bring Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance, for fear of upsetting Russia. The United States took an honorable position in that argument —even if it knew it would lose —but to win those debates with Europe is going to take effort. America cannot take the alliance with Europe for granted, even if that means a degree of perpetual courtship which it feels should be unnecessary given the military protection it extends to the continent.
Don’t Neglect Eastern Europe
On that note, America is in serious danger of neglecting the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and of taking for granted their enthusiasm for all things American. Their expressions of gratitude to the United States when the Iron Curtain fell were genuine and overwhelming, but such loyalty is no longer automatic.
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