Last Friday, the Maroon ran a convincing and insightful op-ed by Ajay Ravichandran regarding the dangers of war with Iran. One especially persuasive point, among others, was this: If Iran’s leaders are rational enough to be deterred by a conventional strike on its nuclear program, then they ought to be deterred from using nuclear weapons in the first place. I do not wish to take up any argument with Ravichandran’s points, but rather to extend the conversation.
Much of the debate over Iran’s nuclear program centers on whether its leaders can be characterized as “irrational.” But of course Iran’s leaders are irrational! They are responsible for an undeclared proxy war against Israel, have sponsored international terrorism from Argentina to Thailand, and have savagely oppressed their own people. However, insanity comes in degrees, and it is unlikely that the Iranian regime would be able to survive the wrath of the international community—or even its own generals—if it did something as foolish as use nuclear weapons against another state.
The danger of a nuclear Iran is not that Iran would actually use nuclear weapons, but rather that it would further proliferation in the region.
To Iran’s west, rival powers such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the potentially soon-to-be anti-Iranian government of Syria may seek their own nuclear deterrent, unsure of Iran’s future intentions. The same may be said of Iraq, which possessed a nuclear program in the past. A nuclear Iran would also make it politically impossible for Israel to give up its own stockpile. As tensions in the Persian Gulf rise, so might oil prices, since shipping companies and oil conglomerates demand a higher risk premium for doing business in the region. Soothing words by our handsomest political scientists about nuclear deterrence and the stability-instability paradox are unlikely to assuage these economic actors.
One could make the argument that if the U.S. provides a nuclear shield over Iran’s Arab rivals, it would no longer be necessary for those states to develop their own nuclear weapons. But even if the U.S. took such a course of action today, there is no guarantee that it would commit to it tomorrow. When one takes into account the United States’ declining power and influence, promises of a long-term nuclear umbrella over the Gulf have little credibility.
An oft-neglected aspect of this discussion concerns the countries to Iran’s east. Pakistan would find itself surrounded on two fronts by nuclear powers, making it more difficult to convince that country (and, therefore, to convince India) to disarm. When Iran’s influence in the Muslim world expanded after the 1979 revolution, it also provoked a murderous reaction from a slew of bigoted militias in Pakistan, such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipah-e-Sahaba, who continue to attack Shiite worshippers. These groups are generally sympathetic to the ideology of the Taliban. Another expansion of Iranian influence today might enrage and embolden these thugs yet again.
Though the debate on Iran has raged furiously for many years now, the risk of nuclear proliferation is especially acute in the post–Arab Spring world. The intervention in Libya would not have been possible had Gaddafi retained his nation’s weapons of mass destruction, and there would not even be a debate on a humanitarian corridor or no-fly zone in Syria if that regime had nuclear weapons. In effect, possession of nuclear weapons immunizes homicidal regimes from external pressure. That is good news to those who oppose the principle of Responsibility to Protect, but bad news for the future victims of the next state that decides to mow its people down like flowers.
So when we are talking about a nuclear Iran, we are talking about more than just one extra member in the nuclear club. One could of course enumerate even more gloomy scenarios; I do not claim to know the specific chain of events that an Iranian nuclear bomb may set in motion. But this is precisely the point: Any foreign policy that requires one to predict the future is generally an ill-advised one, especially when it comes to this region of the world. One simply needs to consider the monumental changes that have occurred in the Middle East and South Asia over the past 40, 20, 10, or even five years to appreciate the extent to which this whole affair is a black box. The last thing we should want to add to this chaos is more nuclear weapons.
Chase Mechanick is a fourth-year in the College majoring in political science.
You provided no reason to believe that Iran’s leaders are uniquely “irrational.” The USSR invaded Poland and Afghanistan among others, supported communist guerillas the world over, savagely oppressed its own people. The USA invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, Korea, the Phillipines, and bombed many other countries, overthrew many regimes, and savagely oppressed many peoples around the world. England ran a worldwide empire and oppressed many people. France did the same. China invaded and oppressed Tibet, and killed tens of millions in a collectivist agriculture atrocity.
All of these countries have nuclear weapons. There hasn’t been a nuclear exchange between them yet. And yet they are “irrational” under the same criterion you use for Iran.
Please start over, Mr. Mechanick. Why do you think Iran is irrational? What have its leaders done that is irrational? Why do you think it is?
Ari, is your prior assumption is that mass murder can be a rational policy choice? Is it your assumption that the atrocities committed in Ukraine in the 30′s, the Chinese countryside in the 50′s, or Vietnam in the 70′s should be considered rational decisions? Unless this is the case, I don’t really see your logic.
Of course rationality can be simply defined as instrumental thinking, in which case “rational” motives can be ascribed to just about anything. The Holodomor was a “rational” decision to starve Ukrainian nationalism out of existence, for example. But that kind of definition doesn’t quite nail what we really mean when we talk about rationality. The word doesn’t just connote instrumental and calculated thinking about one’s problems, but also a preference for solutions that are restrained, diplomatic, moderate, and “reasonable,” rather than ones that are violent, extreme, and illegal. States that are consistently partial to solutions of the latter type over the former should be treated with suspicion.
Beyond that, I think you and I agree. Khomeini, like Stalin, may be biased towards violent and extreme methods of conducting policy, but he is smart enough to obey the logic of nuclear deterrence.
*Khamenei
Chase, what? Whether actions are rational is entirely relative to what your goals are. If your goal is something evil and depraved, like, say, to exterminate the Ukrainians, well, then, systematically starving them is very rational. Thus, brutal and violent acts can be very rational.
The point was that, even assuming brutal and despotic goals for the USSR, like “enslave the globe with Stalinist tyranny” and “bring down the western capitalist system,” it was also true that they wanted to retain power and to stay alive. And given these combined goals, and an environment of mutually assured destruction in the event of a nuclear war, igniting such a conflict would be irrational, i.e. counterproductive to them, given their own goals and motivations. Thus, regarding them as rational actors, we would conclude that they were not likely to launch a nuclear war.
This time-honored definition of “rational,” the one you’ll find in the dictionary, and underlying all the “rational actor” theories in international relations, is the one we should use.
If you intend to redefine “rational” as “virtuous,” I have no further interest in discussing whether Iran’s government is rational.
I believe I already indicated that Iran would not use a nuclear weapon, though I disagree that it is living in an environment of “mutually assured destruction.” If Iran were to use nuclear weapons, it is highly unlikely that the US would retaliate with nuclear weapons, since the only purpose of doing so would be to penalize the government of Iran by killing thousands of its citizens. Counter-value operations are still prohibited and highly stigmatized, even in retaliation to an unprovoked attack (c.f. Operation Cast Lead). It seems to be taken for granted that if Iran were to use a nuclear weapon, the world would be perfectly fine slaughtering scores of Iranians in response, but it’s not all too clear to me that that would actually happen, and if it did, it would be heavily debated and condemned. The only scenario in which I could imagine the US using nuclear weapons against another country is to use very low-yield nuclear weapons in order to take out THEIR nukes, and only in the event that their weapons were protected by super-bunkers that could not be penetrated by conventional weapons.