Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed a U.S. "defense umbrella" over the entire Middle East should Iran fail to cease work on its nuclear complex. Other officials in the Obama administration soon attempted to repeal Clinton's remarks, while simultaneously implying that some kind of U.S. security umbrella has always been over the Middle East.
Just as the Truman and Eisenhower administration officials figured out at the beginning of the Cold War, a "defense umbrella" or security guarantee presents itself as a seemingly painless solution to an intractable security challenge. At first glance, issuing a promise to use military force later seems to be a more attractive choice than committing to use military force now. In the case of Iran, sanctions won't work before Iran has nuclear weapons. And a preventive air campaign is unappealing for a variety of reasons. Thus, a U.S. security guarantee for friends in the region seems like an easy solution.
But anyone who remembers the Cold War should recall that U.S. security guarantees for Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea were not easy, cheap, or simple. A U.S. guarantee for the Middle East against Iranian aggression will be even more problematic than were America's guarantees during the Cold War.
1) Will the supposed beneficiaries of the guarantee take the guarantee seriously? It is one thing to make a promise, it is another to deliver on it under stress. The credibility of a U.S. security guarantee would increase if there were visible presidential speeches on the subject, a Senate-ratified treaty, and permanent U.S. force structure commitments and deployments to back it up. Until these things happen, statesmen in Israel and the friendly Arab regimes will be rightfully skeptical.
2) Locking in a nuclear standoff between Iran and the U.S. will shift the conflict onto the irregular warfare playing field. Iran will have the advantage on this field while the U.S. and its friends will most likely be stuck on defense. Here again there are parallels with the Cold War. With a nuclear standoff in place, the Soviet Union's political and military subversions and proxy wars achieved success in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa and the Middle East. Quantitatively Iran is no Soviet Union. But qualitatively, Iran is organized for subversion and prolonged irregular and proxy warfare, just as was the Soviet Union. A U.S. security guarantee policy that accepts an Iranian nuclear weapons capability will have to prepare for another such "twilight struggle."
3) Be ready to relearn some old Cold War terms such as "hair-trigger alert," "launch on warning," "second strike reserve," "counter-force versus counter-value targeting," etc. This time, the standoff will be three-sided (Israel vs. Iran vs. Saudi Arabia) just like the gunfight at the end of "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly." And Middle East nuclear strategists will look back to the Cold War with envy when ICBM flight times were a leisurely 25 minutes.
Secretary Clinton's "defense umbrella" seems like an easy way out. But such comfort is an illusion. For today's policymakers trying to figure out what to do about Iran, the lessons of the Cold War are very much alive.
Comments
A broad "defense umbrella" is clearly unworkable and ill advised. A much more narrow doctrine to <a href="http://blog.usni.org/?p=3763">prevent a first use</a> of nuclear weapons by any power in the region--or perhaps world--is a better and more effective measure.
Laughable and absurd.
Preposterous.
We can no more guarantee a defense umbrella over the M.E. than we can guarantee that anything else will happen tomorrow.
Israel won't give this a minute's thought, and we should be embarrassed at such international antics. This is clownish in the superlative. Can't get get a serious foreign policy, please?
I'm rather dubious of point 2. Much of the Eastern European territory was directly conquered as part of World War 2. Similarly, I don't think I'd categorize the rise of the PRC as a driven primarily Soviet proxy war/subversion enabled by a nuclear standoff.
I think the scenario of Saudi Arabia's royal family falling is not particularly far fetched and Iran certainly does work through proxies and the like. However, even if Iran did not have a deterrent towards U.S. intervention, would we really want to engage in a non-proxy war to uphold or remake the Saudi government?