Diplomacy and Deterrence
Niall Ferguson on the possibility of a diplomatic solution with Iran:
Yet the reality is that the chances of such an outcome are dwindling fast, precisely because other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are ruling out the use of force -- and without the threat of force, diplomacy seldom works. Six days ago, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin went to Iran for an amicable meeting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Putin says he sees "no evidence" that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons. On his return to Moscow, he explicitly repudiated what he called "a policy of threats, various sanctions or power politics."The new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, also seems less likely to support American preemption than his predecessor was in the case of Iraq. That leaves China, which remains an enigma on the Iranian question, and France, whose hawkish new president finds himself distracted by the worst kind of domestic crisis: a divorce.
By contrast, Washington's most reliable ally in the Middle East, Israel, recently demonstrated the ease with which a modern air force can destroy a suspected nuclear facility. Not only was last month's attack on a site in northeastern Syria carried out without Israeli losses, there was no retaliation on the part of Damascus. Memo from Ehud Olmert to George W. Bush: You can do this, and do it with impunity.
This is Ferguson's last column for the LA Times, and he leaves us with his trademark combination of reassurance and uncertainty--in this case that while striking down Iran's nuclear ambitions is an absolute necessity and that a "Great Gulf War" is all but inevitable in the future, the United States is unlikely to attack Iran in the near term because we only have one aircraft carrier in the Gulf. This, Ferguson states, means that Iran is hardly concerned about being bombed by us. The key to his reasoning is that threats have to be credible. No aircraft carriers means the US is simply saber-rattling. He also suggests that the lack of any support for the US with the UN security council's permanent members emboldens Iran because they know there will be no putative consequences for their intransigence.
I find this peculiar. Iran doesn't feel threatened because we're not 30 minutes from bombing them? The regime is seriously thinking, "with the closest US aircraft carrier more than two weeks away we can act with total impunity!"? Not to mention that the US is making zero diplomatic gestures towards Iran. Ferguson matter-of-factly notes that "without the threat of force, diplomacy seldom works," but that is unconvincing. In fact, Iran has made diplomatic overtures to the United States before, and the offer was "met with dead silence" by Washington. And at that time, they were cooperating with us in Afghanistan!
Iran knows that we can bomb them at will. And neither being in a military posture to do so nor having the symbolic gesture of a unanimous UNSC vote changes that fact. Deterrence, in the manner Ferguson describes it, has nothing to do with diplomatic credibility. If the United States went to Iran as a tough but honest broker, we could probably end up with the deal we want in the end, and possibly even an ally. But we don't live in such a world, according to the neocons. In their world, the United States has innumerable existential enemies, diplomacy never works, every threat is imminent and it is always 1938. Ferguson's assessment of the situation is simply more one of resignment rather than ideological imperative.