The twin sins of Norman Podhoretz….

Lots of bloggers of the liberal/left persuasion have been linking to this debate between Norman Podhoretz and Fareed Zakaria:

Zakaraia highlights Podhoretz’s obvious sin — failing to understand the logic of deterrence. Podhoretz commits another sin, however, in that by framing the debate as being about deterring Iran he rather misses the point. Over at Democracy Arsenal, Ilan Goldenberg writes, “you can boil down the entire argument over Iran between the crazies (Podhoretz) and the sane people (Zakaria).” Er, I’m afraid it’s not that simple. If the effect of Iran’s nuclear program were limited to what Iran would do with nuclear weapons, that would be OK. But the massive negative externality of Iran’s nuclear program isn’t its effect on Israel or the United States — it’s the effect on the rest of the states in the Middle East:

This week Egypt became the 13th Middle Eastern country in the past year to say it wants nuclear power, intensifying an atomic race spurred largely by Iran’s nuclear agenda, which many in the region and the West claim is cover for a weapons program. Experts say the nuclear ambitions of majority Sunni Muslim states such as Libya, Jordan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia are reactions to Shiite Iran’s high-profile nuclear bid, seen as linked with Tehran’s campaign for greater influence and prestige throughout the Middle East. “To have 13 states in the region say they’re interested in nuclear power over the course of a year certainly catches the eye,” says Mark Fitzpatrick, a former senior nonproliferation official in the US State Department who is now a fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “The Iranian angle is the reason.” But economics are also behind this new push to explore nuclear power, at least for some of the aspirants. Egypt’s oil reserves are dwindling, Jordan has no natural resources to speak of at all, and power from oil and gas has grown much more expensive for everyone. Though the day has not arrived, it’s conceivable that nuclear power will be a cheaper option than traditional plants. But analysts say the driver is Iran, which appears to be moving ahead with its nuclear program despite sanctions and threats of possible military action by the US. The Gulf Cooperation Council, a group of Saudi Arabia and the five Arab states that border the Persian Gulf, reversed a longstanding opposition to nuclear power last year. As the closest US allies in the region and sitting on vast oil wealth, these states had said they saw no need for nuclear energy. But Fitzpatrick, as well as other analysts, say these countries now see their own declarations of nuclear intent as a way to contain Iran’s influence. At least, experts say, it signals to the US how alarmed they are by a nuclear Iran. “The rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region,” Jordan’s King Abdullah, another US ally, told Israel’s Haaretz newspaper early this year. “Where I think Jordan was saying, ‘We’d like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,’ ? [now] everybody’s going for nuclear programs.”

Just to be clear, nuclear programs do not automatically translate into nuclear weapons proliferation. But don’t tell me it’s not a distinct possibility. Zakaria might argue that none of this is a problem, since deterrence can still work. My concern is that managing nuclear proliferation in the Middle East is kind of like… managing democratization in the Middle East. In theory, the end state is robust and stable… but the road from here to there is so fraught with peril that I’m very skeptical of it actually working. This is the point Scott Sagan tried to make in a Foreign Affairs article from last year:

[B]oth deterrence optimism and proliferation fatalism are wrong-headed. Deterrence optimism is based on mistaken nostalgia and a faulty analogy. Although deterrence did work with the Soviet Union and China, there were many close calls; maintaining nuclear peace during the Cold War was far more difficult and uncertain than U.S. officials and the American public seem to remember today. Furthermore, a nuclear Iran would look a lot less like the totalitarian Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China and a lot more like Pakistan, Iran’s unstable neighbor — a far more frightening prospect. Fatalism about nuclear proliferation is equally unwarranted. Although the United States did fail to prevent its major Cold War rivals from developing nuclear arsenals, many other countries curbed their own nuclear ambitions. After flirting with nuclear programs in the 1960s, West Germany and Japan decided that following the NPT and relying on the protection of the U.S. nuclear umbrella would bring them greater security in the future; South Korea and Taiwan gave up covert nuclear programs when the United States threatened to sever security relations with them; North Korea froze its plutonium production in the 1990s; and Libya dismantled its nascent nuclear program in 2003. Given these facts, Washington should work harder to prevent the unthinkable rather than accept what falsely appears to be inevitable. The lesson to be drawn from the history of nonproliferation is not that all states eyeing the bomb eventually get it but that nonproliferation efforts succeed when the United States and other global actors help satisfy whatever concerns drove a state to want nuclear weapons in the first place.

Again, to be clear,
this does not mean we should attack Iran
. But it does mean that the U.S. shouldn’t be as blas? about the matter as Zakaria suggests. Because it’s not just about Iran — it’s about the regional spillovers as well.