Background

The prospect of Tehran acquiring nuclear weapons has evoked debate in academic and strategic circles regarding the applicability of Cold War models of deterrence to a nuclear Iran. There is first and foremost the question of whether the Iranian leadership is indeed as committed as it professes to be to its radical and apocalyptic worldview or, perchance, it is more pragmatic than it seems and therefore will be as responsive to deterrence as was the former Soviet Union. The debate also extends to whether scenarios for a “polynuclear” Middle East are likely and whether the Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons might lead to a breakdown of the whole international nonproliferation regime or to a multilateral confrontation between countries in the Middle East.

Much of this debate focuses on the relevance of the lessons of the only historical example of rivalry between nuclear powers – the Cold War between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Some invoke the experience of that era to argue that a polynuclear Middle East can still be averted by extended assurances by the United States or NATO to their allies in the region, or that a nuclear Middle East may even provide the foundation for stability based on a Middle Eastern version of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).1 According to this line of thought, the very possession of nuclear weapons tempers military adventurism and inculcates a degree of strategic responsibility commensurate with the grave consequences that would result from nuclear conflict. This point of view refers to the fears that permeated the Western military establishments of a nuclear China and the fact that a nuclear Indian subcontinent did not result in nuclear war, despite mutual hostility and frequent outbreaks of crisis. Others2 emphasize the differences between the Cold War and a nuclear Middle East and point out that most of the characteristics of the Cold War that contributed to the fact that it did not escalate into nuclear crisis are conspicuously absent in the Middle East. Some even challenge the conventional wisdom regarding the history of the Cold War and the causes for its propitious outcome, arguing that the Cold War era was far less stable than it appeared to be, that it was not the very nature of the nuclear weapons which averted confrontation but other factors, and that cultural differences, absent or different in the Middle East, played a critical role in the behavior of the parties to that conflict.

This debate coincides with a reexamination by the United States and its NATO allies of the very fundamentals of the doctrine of deterrence. The policy documents published over the last year by the Obama administration3 indicate that it believes in the efficacy of traditional Cold War deterrence as the remedy to the challenge of rogue states acquiring nuclear weapons. Moreover, these documents indicate that the key to deterrence should not be punishment (which was a key building block of MAD)4 but, rather, denial. This preference does not seem to be based on a sound strategic analysis of the efficacy of such deterrence but on the desire to project a purely defensive posture. Another assumption emerging from the administration’s policy statements is that the Iranian regime is “rational” and hence deterrable.

This analysis challenges a number of fallacies inherent in these assumptions: the fallacy that deterrence doctrine may be applied equally toward adversaries of fundamentally different cultural, structural, and political features; the fallacy that possession of nuclear weapons dictates, ipso facto, a sense of responsibility and a need to put safeguards in place against unintended use; the non-distinction between bilateral and multilateral deterrence; the disregard of the implications of religion – particularly of Islamic concepts of war – for application of deterrence; and the implications of different paradigms of command and control than those that existed in the Cold War nuclear powers.

The fall of the Mubarak regime in Egypt and the potential spillover of political unrest into other countries in the Middle East have strengthened Iran’s hand in the region and made any forceful policy of dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions much more costly. The argument which was frequently raised that the U.S. could prevent a polynuclear Middle East by assurances of extended deterrence to its allies is much less convincing in the light of the prospects of Egypt – one of the mainstays of American influence in the region – co-opting the Muslim Brotherhood into government and the possibility of regime change in countries in the Gulf such as Bahrain. The willingness of such new populist (and partially Islamist) regimes to rely on American assurances will be even less than that of their predecessors and their motivation to acquire the holy grail of a nuclear weapon will be greater. This situation is still in flux but must be in the back of our minds when addressing the issues discussed below.

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