Let that be a lesson to those who wait for the collapse of regimes in Iran, North Korea, or Palestine because of long-term economic failure and/or economic sanctions. Yes, popular uprisings happen (as in Iran against the Shah). Yet it’s also clear that a posture of anti-Western defiance, combined with nationalism, ideology, and dictatorial rule is perfectly capable of sustaining a miserable, poverty-stricken, failed system far, far beyond the point that Westerners would consider tolerable or believable. ~Stanley Kurtz, National Review

Via Rod Dreher

Does this mean that Mr. Kurtz, the “gloomy hawk,” will be supporting a lifting of sanctions on any of these regimes as a means of integrating them into the world and destroying the powerful drug of solidarity in isolation and adversity that their governments have used to keep them in line?  Certainly not–you can’t go around “appeasing” people like this, because they are unappeasable!  Yes, it’s very troubling when you put yourself on the horns of a false dilemma–I would get gloomy, too. 

There is actually not one example where sanctions brought down a regime.  Sanctions can weaken regimes in some ways, but they are usually incapable of doing this in the way that matters most: it does not undermine the legitimacy or popularity of a regime, but tends rather to reinforce both as the regime can plausibly point to foreign interlopers as the cause of the people’s distress.  The more isolated the people become from the outside world, the easier it is for them to credit everything the government says about itself, the conditions in the country and the outside world.  (Here in the States, the people manage to isolate themselves from the outside world through a devotion to stunning ignorance about foreign countries and a steady diet of FoxNews, which has much the same effect in reinforcing credulity and obedience.)  

If the entire world seems to be ganging up on your country’s government, you will probably be prone to see this as unfair and excessive, especially if you believe as, say, a majority of Iranians do that developing nuclear technology is a sort of “inalienable” national right.  It is almost impossible to overstate how infuriating some Iranians will find Western attempts to dictate the use of their internal resources and the running of their internal affairs, since this has been the theme of modern Iranian relations with Great Powers in the last century from the Anglo-Russian division of the country into spheres of interest to Mossadegh’s overthrow to today.   

In time, contact with foreigners and interest in their countries or languages become grounds for suspicion of being an enemy agent, and the government makes the world’s relative isolation of it into an advantage for retaining control (which is, of course, the main thing they care about).  The obsession of the Soviets with foreign currency, spoofed so brilliantly in The Master and Margarita, was an example of rooting out such “contamination,” as if the economic woes of the 1920s had been caused by foreign currency.  But given a state of relative isolation, or given a state when the entire world seems bent on vilifying your country, do we expect the people in these countries to respond in any way other than rallying around their governments out of a sense of national and ideological loyalty?  Would we do any differently, even under the most difficult circumstances?  It puzzles me how solidarity and persistence in adversity seem to be virtues to many Americans when, say, the Brits endured the Blitz or the Russians resisted Nazi depredations, but we seem incapable of understanding that the same reaction–and the same virtue–is present in the peoples of hostile states and that this genuine reaction bolsters the regimes we are trying to overthrow in such a way as to make future conflict increasingly likely.

However, I should acknowledge that Mr. Kurtz has hit on something here that I agree with strongly, namely the power of a potent ideological cokctail of national solidarity, anti-imperialism (however that might be defined) and postcolonial resentment can not only make people endure terrible hardships but convince themselves that the austerity and harshness of conditions in their country make them morally and perhaps spiritually superior to the decadent bums of the West.  In the sense of acquiring a certain powerful virtu that is the will to endure and resist, they may have a point there.  The implacability of the ideologically committed, who are by definition more resilient after setbacks and repudiations because they are certain that they are right and because they view life in terms of struggle against long odds, is as notorious as it is powerful. 

This is one reason why I am convinced that persisting in confrontations and punitive policies with these militarily weak, economically chaotic, second or third or fourth-rate powers can only bolster the regimes that we find so obnoxious, prolong the misery of their peoples and guarantee senseless and destructive conflicts down the line.  We are not going to “break” them psychologically or politically with sanctions, and we will not intimidate the others with another “preemptive” war, because we have signally failed to intimidate anyone with our first “preemptive” war.  Frankly, Mr. Kurtz is wrong that there is no possibility of bargaining with these people, and it is this ideological commitment to the notion that hostile regimes are purely irrational enemies that continually blinds Mr. Kurtz and friends to the possibility of reaching an arrangement with them. 

There has probably never been a political movement more insane and destructive than Maoism, yet we managed to broker a deal with Mao that helped force the USSR into a corner and reduced the possibility of an outbreak of war.  We can wait, as we did with China, until Iran has nuclear weapons, or we can seize the initiative and strike a deal with them while it will still seem as if we are conceding their development of nuclear technology.  Once it is a fait accompli, our options will be much more limited.    

As I have argued before, there would be no better time for a grand rapprochement with Iran than at this time.  To minimise or neutralise Iranian hostility and take the steam out of the general pan-Islamic solidarity that Iran and Hizbullah are managing to cook up now, the time to make the Nixon-to-China move is now.  It would be bold, daring and risky, but Iran, which is still ultimately ruled by the Ayatollah and not by Ahmadinejad, would take the deal rather than face international ostracism and opprobrium that the regime does not want.  For his part, Ahmadinejad needs to avoid an economic meltdown if he is to carry through on his domestic policies, which are the source of his political power and the main reason why he is President, and this cannot happen if Iran is put under a strong sanctions regime. 

I have come to distrust profoundly claims about hostile regimes’ sheer irrationality, because each time it has been invoked in the past to justify some sort of confrontational policy–in Yugoslavia and Iraq most notably–it has been shown to be an erroneous assessment of the self-interest these regimes have in self-preservation.  “Don’t let the madman do this!  Don’t let the madman do that!” earnest voices cried at the time, when the man was neither mad nor likely to do the things in question.  Now that we have a religious “madman” in view, the rhetoric has doubled and trebled in intensity, because we purport to know Ahmadinejad’s apocalyptic vision and we assume that his apocalyptic vision has something to do with Iranian security policy. 

When Khatami was president, the hawkish line was that the Iranian President had no power and no control over anything and that it was stupid to treat him as anything other than a figurehead (which was a fair point, but typically one used in the service of agitating for conflict with Iran), but now that Ahmadinejad, whom the clerics opposed in the election, is in charge the Iranian Presidency is the font of apocalyptic doom and nuclear nightmares.  Pardon me if I don’t take this very seriously at all.  The histrionics of the usual suspects who have pushed for every war in living memory rather confirm that this alarmism is wrongheaded and dangerous. 

It seems as if for the past fifteen years we have had a new Hitler every year or so, and every year we were assured that he was unstoppable, could not be contained or checked or reasoned with, and on the basis of these tired analogies and sloppy thinking we entered into a conflict or confrontation.  In every episode, realistic incentives and disincentives would have elicited some measure of cooperation, but our political class was convinced in each case that there could be no bargaining or reasoning with the regime because of just this sort of stark, apocalyptic rhetoric about this or that dictator being the very essence of evil.  Far from being right or productive, this sort of thinking has gotten us into at least two significant wars that were entirely unnecessary.  If we heed the voices of the Kurtzes of the world, there will be more unnecessary wars that might have been avoided had we given these people the slightest credit for being rational, self-interested actors. 

No politician or revolutionary leader gets into the business of politics or leading a revolution because he wants to die for his cause (he may want other people to die for his cause, but his instincts of self-preservation are quite intact), but because he wants power and wants to stay in power, which is a powerful check on any supposed fanatically suicidal motivations he might have.