Deterring the Undeterrable (Part Two or Three)

Well, Charles Krauthammer has revisited his earlier op-ed ("Deterring the Undeterrable," Washington Post, 18 April 2008, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/17/AR2008041703165.html). (See my previous post on the subject.) And, yes, I am thinking of suing him for appropriating my title.

In his new piece, Krauthammer clarifies his position on whether Iran is deterrable or not. He now states that "with its current millenarian leadership, deterrence is indeed a feeble gamble, as I wrote in 2006 in making the case for considering preemption. [I referred to this Washington Post piece in my previous post.] But if preemption is off the table, deterrence is all you've got. Our task is to make deterrence in this context less feeble." So the conclusion seems to be that the Iranian leadership is largely but not completely irrational; that deterrence, therefore, has a slim chance of working; and that because we have so few other options, our best bet is to maximize the chances that it would work. Finally, Krauthammer's calculus seems rational to me. I don't agree with it, but at least now I understand his argument.

I don't agree with Krauthammer because I don't buy his premise that "there are four ways to deal with rogue states going nuclear: preemption, deterrence, missile defense and regime change." For example, when Belarus inherited nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, other countries succeeded in persuading it to give up these weapons. Was that an example of preemption, deterrence, missile defense, or regime change? Clearly none of the above. (Regime change certainly played a role, although foreign pressure was still necessary.)

I prefer to focus instead on "the five D's": denial, dissuasion (including deterrence), defeat, and defense. Krauthammer believes that Iran can not be stopped from developing nuclear weapons and that deterrence and missile defense are the only methods to prevent it from striking at the United States (or Israel, which was the focus of the first op-ed but is almost entirely absent from this one). I still have hope that denial, other forms of dissuasion (besides deterrence), defeat, and other forms of defense (besides missile defense) may be effective in countering Iran's nuclear weapons effort and may even prevent it from acquiring such weapons in the first place.

Denial may still be effective in at least delaying Iran's nuclear weapons program. The country seems to be facing significant difficulty in enriching uranium; its P-1 centrifuges are operating far below capacity, and it has only recently begun to experiment with P-2 and IR-2 centrifuges. (Reports are not entirely clear, but it appears that Iran has recently begun to operate some of the more advanced types of centrifuge only on a pilot, not production, scale.) Furthermore, Iran has not yet succeeded in developing long-range missiles capable of striking the United States or miniaturizing nuclear warheads to fit on these missiles. (Iran could try other means of delivery, such as smuggling nuclear weapons into the United States, but it would probably prefer a long-range delivery capability.) Therefore, although Iran could probably eventually succeed in these endeavors on its own, denying it technical expertise and access to key items could at least delay its efforts.

Second, the United States still might be able to dissuade Iran from going nuclear. Many Iranians oppose the development of nuclear weapons, for various reasons. Ayatollah Khomenei declared nuclear weapons to be un-Islamic, creating a powerful moral argument against them. Their development would require (and has required) a significant investment, diverting resources from other pressing needs, creating a strong economic argument against them. Furthermore, acquiring nuclear weapons might actually put Iran in a more precarious security situation, weakening ties with countries such as Russia (which greatly fears the transfer of such weapons to Islamic terrorists) and possibly spurring other Middle Eastern states (such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey) to acquire their own nuclear arsenals, creating a strong security argument against them. Therefore, the United States and others still have an opportunity to dissuade Iran from going nuclear.

Third, although Krauthammer claims that "preemption works but, as a remedy, it is spent," defeat of the Iranian threat is still an option. It is true that the results of the U.S. invasion of Iraq (failure to find evidence of active unconventional weapons programs and the subsequent insurgency) and the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program greatly reduced U.S. options for launching a preemptive attack on Iran. However, if it poses a significant threat to U.S. security, then the next president must continue to consider such a strike as an option. An attack on Iranian nuclear weapons development facilities would probably not prevent Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon but could set the program back by a decade. (This scenario would probably fall into the "denial," not "defeat," category.) If Iran did acquire a limited number of nuclear weapons and the United States had credible intelligence about their location, a strike could eliminate the threat and would have much greater support than the invasion of Iraq did. (In fact, support would probably be plentiful from the Arab world, which has little interest in seeing an Iranian nuclear arsenal.)

Finally, although I do not believe that defensive measures are likely to prevent Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, they may limit the consequences of any attack. As Krauthammer notes, active defenses, such as missile defenses (if they work), may be effective in limiting the number of weapons that reach U.S. or allied soil and may even convince Iran not to attack in the first place (thus acting as a form of dissuasion). However, passive defenses, including collective defenses (such as bomb shelters) and individual defense (such as MOP suits), can also help to protect U.S. forces abroad and populations of states at high risk of Iranian attack (such as Israel). In addition, the United States has done woefully little to prepare for the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. The government must devote greater resources into managing the consequences of any such attack, either at home or abroad.

With Krauthammer's new op-ed piece, I sort of get where he's coming from. Now I understand his argument about the need to deter Iran from launching an attack against the United States. However, I believe that we can still prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons in the first place and that we have more tools at our disposal than only deterrence and missile defense.

Deterring the Undeterrable?

Charles Krauthammer recently wrote a Washington Post op-ed piece ("The Holocaust Declaration," 11 April 2008, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/10/AR2008041003271.html) in which he argued that the United States should declare that it would retaliate against Iran if it launched a nuclear attack against Israel. Krauthammer hopes that such a declaration would deter Iran but that acknowledges that "this will be even more difficult than during the Cold War, when we were dealing with rational actors." Yet the last time I checked, effective deterrence requires rational actors. The target of deterrence must value something (e.g., his security) and then be able to comprehend that if he took some action, then some kind of punishment would be inflicted upon him (e.g., that he would be attacked). Based on this analysis, he must decide that taking such action would not be worth the consequences. That is rational behavior.

It would probably be quite difficult to deter an irrational actor. For example, some people claim that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has spoken with messianic zeal about hastening the return of the 9th-century "hidden imam" (or Mahdi), is not entirely rational and might instigate war in order to effect the return of the Mahdi, even if doing so brought about severe retaliation against Iran. (Although one could claim that this kind of behavior was rational if Ahmadinejad valued the Mahdi's return above the well-being of the Iranian people, this kind of rationality is probably not what Krauthammer was talking about and certainly would not be useful for implementing a policy of deterrence.)

So does Krauthammer believe that Iran's leadership is irrational, which would call into question whether the United States can implement a policy of deterrence, or does he believe that it is rational, in which case implementing such a policy ought to be as easy as during the Cold War? (In fact, as Krauthammer himself notes, it should be even easier, since the United States would face relatively little threat of Iranian retaliation and therefore feel less constrained in attacking Iran.)

He tries to deal with this contradiction in the third-to-last paragraph of the piece. He acknowledges that "it is, of course, hardly certain that deterrence would work on the likes of Ahmadinejad and other jihadists," apparently claiming that Ahmadinejad is an irrational actor. He therefore tries to reconcile this issue by suggesting that "deterrence would concentrate the minds of rational Iranian actors, of whom there are many, to restrain or even depose leaders such as Ahmadinejad."

However, Krauthammer's simplistic argument fails to address several gaps. When might rational elements within Iranian society (or rather, presumably, the Iranian government) get around to restraining or deposing their president? Even if they wanted to, would they have the capability to do so? What happens in the meantime? Do we just sit around hoping that deterrence works on Ahmadinejad? And what about Ayatollah Khamenei, the ultimate authority within Iran? Does Krauthammer consider him to be rational? What would happen if we managed to deter one faction within the Iranian government but not another?

Don't get me wrong; I actually believe that Iran's leadership in general is quite rational and deterrable. However, there are many more factors in play than Krauthammer considers. For one thing, several elements of the Iranian government are involved in military decisionmaking, including the supreme leader, the president, and the supreme national security council. Furthermore, it is unclear how the decision to employ nuclear weapons would be made. Iran almost certainly has not developed any doctrine for their employment and does not seem to have ever used chemical or biological weapons. (There are some questions about whether Iran used chemical weapons during the war with Iraq in the 1980s, but this has never been proven.) It should also be noted that the extent of Ahmadinejad's authority over Iranian forces that might employ such weapons, such as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, is unclear.

Therefore, while I agree that it might be possible to deter Iran, any policy to do so would require a much more thorough analysis than Krauthammer has provided. (I guess the Washington Post only gives you so much room for an op-ed, though.) I also think that Krauthammer gives up a bit too early on preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons in the first place. If we are able to make progress in this area soon, then perhaps we wouldn't have to worry about deterring Iran after all.

Update: On 15 September 2006 Krauthammer wrote ("The Tehran Calculus," Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401413_pf.html) that Iran currently "is deterred from overt aggression against its neighbors by the threat of conventional retaliation. Against a nuclear Iran, such deterrence becomes far less credible. . . . Against millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a mere wish. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions of inhabitants on that feeble gamble?" Kudos to "The Plank" at the New Republic (http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/04/11/so-iran-is-deterrable-after-all.aspx") for digging this up.