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All Those Regional Conflicts

In foreign-policy circles, it is sometimes claimed that past nuclear proliferation—say, to India or Pakistan—has been less destabilizing than predicted. In the case of Iran, this is wishful thinking. A nuclear Iran would mean a nuclear Middle East, as traditional rivals like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey feel pressured to join the club, giving every […]

In foreign-policy circles, it is sometimes claimed that past nuclear proliferation—say, to India or Pakistan—has been less destabilizing than predicted. In the case of Iran, this is wishful thinking. A nuclear Iran would mean a nuclear Middle East, as traditional rivals like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey feel pressured to join the club, giving every regional conflict nuclear overtones.  ~Michael Gerson

What prevented the 1999 Kargil War from blowing up into the fifth full-scale Indo-Pak war?  The fear of nuclear escalation on both sides.  It is that same fear of escalation that has prevented numerous cross-border provocations by Pakistan-based terrorists from turning into shooting wars.  By all rights, India should be able to smash Pakistan in any conventional war, just as she has effectively done each of the four times before, but the nuclear deterrent prevents such large-scale responses to provocations and now has maintained a continued, albeit sometimes tense, peace in the Subcontinent for several years with the reasonable prospect of many more years of peace in the future. 

But this is to take Mr. Gerson’s gloomy forecast to represent something resembling reality.  What “regional conflicts” are there in the region?  When exactly have Turkey and Iran or Iran and Saudi Arabia, much less Egypt, ever been at war with each other in the post-Versailles period?  What would be the likely causes of such “regional conflicts”?  If, and this still remains an if, Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it might well prompt other nations in the region to acquire their own.  Like Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, it would be regrettable, but like Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons it is something that is manageable. 

In theory, every incident of cross-border terrorism in Kashmir and India as a whole has the potential to precipitate nuclear war.  While Mr. Bush was spinning yarns about Iraqi mushroom clouds, the world very nearly saw India and Pakistan go over the edge in the summer of 2002 in the wake of the Parliament attack of December 2001 and escalating tensions, but Musharraf and Vajpayee alike had the good sense and self-interest to step back.  To hear Mr. Gerson and Mr. Bush tell it, the peoples of the Near East are perfectly capable of adopting every manner of Western political habit, but they are apparently incapable of acting out of basic self-interest and self-preservation if and when they acquire the means to build nuclear weapons.  The calculations of self-interest do not require a democratic or benevolent polity; according to these calculations, deterrence has worked and will continue to work. 

It would, of course, be preferable if none of these nations ever acquired nuclear weapons (it would be much better if such weapons did not exist), but there are some problems for which there are no solutions; in this case, they are not really problems, but simply realities to be borne and endured and managed as best as one can.  Now we can either manage the rise of nuclear Near Eastern states intelligently and seek rapprochement with Iran in the interests of future regional peace, or we can be fools and attempt to stop Iran from acquiring the technology that Iran sought under the Shah and will seek again when all the ayatollahs are dead and buried, because it is in the strategic interest of Iran to develop these weapons and will be as long as its neighbours possess these weapons.  The alternative is to try to stop Iran which means (and everyone knows this) full-scale war with Iran, which we do not want and which we cannot, short of a return to conscription, successfully fight.  As speechwriter, Mr. Gerson has conjured up his last bogeyman; let us ignore him, as we should have ignored Mr. Bush’s dire warnings about Iraq all those years ago.

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