When is a threat deferred a threat deterred? Posted by Suzanne Nossel

There is debate underway among proliferation experts about whether a country like Iran, assuming it gained nuclear capabilities, would be subject to the traditional logic of deterrence credited with helping avert a nuclear catastrophe over the last 50 years among the existing "club" of nuclear states.

The same question underlay the debate over whether to go to war with Iraq:  if those who were convinced that Saddam had (or was close to having) nukes were also confident that he'd never use them for fear of annihilation, the rationale for war - even assuming his nuclear program had been real and not imaginary - would have been much weaker.

This reminds me of a remark by Madeleine Albright shortly after leaving office as Secretary of State.  She was asked about Iraq and, to paraphrase, said:  "we were handed the problem by our predecessors and . . .  we've now handed it back to them."  It was a witty line, but at the time Bush's rhetoric about the folly of standing back while threats gathered still seemed plausible.   

In retrospect, though, the Clinton Administration's policy of containing the threat and preventing it from getting worse looks a whole lot better than the alternative of confrontation turned out to be.   With the perils of preemption exposed, it seems worth asking whether there are circumstances when deferring a threat - preventing it from ripening and stopping it from getting worse, but not confronting or eliminating it - may be an acceptable outcome.   

After 9/11, the realization that apparently latent or invisible threats could erupt and bite hard led to a broad consensus that threats must be confronted and rooted out, almost at any cost.  That principle drove the Iraq invasion and seems to be guiding the Administration's thinking on Iran. 

But is failure to confront a threat always risky and cowardly, or are there times when its sound policy?  What distinguishes the appeasement of Munich from the shrewd waiting game that led to US victory in the Cold War?  Part of the answer will obviously lie in how aggressive a potential threat is, and to what degree the failure to confront enables the threat to grow more imminent or destructive. 

At times, though, the passage of time may blunt a threat.  For example, if a country is seeking advanced weaponry as a show of strength against a perceived aggressor, or because a specific leader (like Ahmadinejad) has delusions of grandeur, time may result in a dampening of tensions or a change of leadership.  While the threat may linger in the meantime, the long-term outcome may be better than had the US pressed for a confrontation at an inopportune time or without global support.

All this thinking is implicit in the arguments against military action in Iraq:  the logic is that diplomacy and patience will yield better results than confrontation, that not all threats need to be faced head-on.  It's an obvious point, but one that's become markedly less so, for understandable reasons, since 9/11.  The challenge now is to integrate the combined lessons of 9/11 and the Iraq War and do a better job of distinguishing what threats need to be met face to face, and when a threat deferred may amount to a threat deterred.

Comments

[ChrisP]

One key lesson of 9/11 that proponents of war with Iraq (and now with Iran) seem never to have learned:

The most deadly threat to the US has come, not from any of the so-called axis of evil states, but from an independent terrorist organization operating in a failed state and supplied by recruits and financing from a state that is an ostensible US ally.

[J Thomas]

To a lesser extent that was true for the british, too.

Northern ireland wasn't exactly a failed state, though IRA funding did mostly come from the USA, an ostensible british ally.

[SoldierOutOfIraq]

Well, there is the nettlesome realization that we didn't go to war mostly for our direct interests, but for our regional allies.

The usual rogue's gallery of antisemites will now say, loudly, "Israel," but this isn't the ally I'm thinking about.

Rather, it's all of our Gulf State friends, the states that are resource-rich, but militarily poor and quite vulnerable to a Baathist Iraq that planned on rearming as sanctions withered: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, et al.

It's tough having these states as friends. They can't defend themselves, yet they own things the global market needs to survive (various and sundry petroleum products).

We do quite well having resource-poor but military-rich friends in the north of the region (Turkey), and the far west (Israel, Egypt), but we shall continue to find ourselves embroiled in regional intrigues along the seams of the Sunni/Shi'i Arab world so long as we don't have a regionally dominant friend in the eastern neighborhoods of the region.

Saddam wasn't fretting over the Qatari or Saudi hordes sweeping across the desert to evict him from Kuwait, which is why 82d Airborne and a large portion of the USMC ended up between Iraq and a hard place in 1990-91.

It's also, to some extent, why we're trying to build a somewhat functional, Shi'i-dominated allied government (and military) in Iraq. Someone has to be the bulwark in the east against Iran, and it's not about to be UAE.

[SoldierOutOfIraq]

Well, there is the nettlesome realization that we didn't go to war mostly for our direct interests, but for our regional allies.

The usual rogue's gallery of antisemites will now say, loudly, "Israel," but this isn't the ally I'm thinking about.

Rather, it's all of our Gulf State friends, the states that are resource-rich, but militarily poor and quite vulnerable to a Baathist Iraq that planned on rearming as sanctions withered: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, et al.

It's tough having these states as friends. They can't defend themselves, yet they own things the global market needs to survive (various and sundry petroleum products).

We do quite well having resource-poor but military-rich friends in the north of the region (Turkey), and the far west (Israel, Egypt), but we shall continue to find ourselves embroiled in regional intrigues along the seams of the Sunni/Shi'i Arab world so long as we don't have a regionally dominant friend in the eastern neighborhoods of the region.

Saddam wasn't fretting over the Qatari or Saudi hordes sweeping across the desert to evict him from Kuwait, which is why 82d Airborne and a large portion of the USMC ended up between Iraq and a hard place in 1990-91.

It's also, to some extent, why we're trying to build a somewhat functional, Shi'i-dominated allied government (and military) in Iraq. Someone has to be the bulwark in the east against Iran, and it's not about to be UAE.

[SoldierOutOfIraq]

Well, there is the nettlesome realization that we didn't go to war mostly for our direct interests, but for our regional allies.

The usual rogue's gallery of antisemites will now say, loudly, "Israel," but this isn't the ally I'm thinking about.

Rather, it's all of our Gulf State friends, the states that are resource-rich, but militarily poor and quite vulnerable to a Baathist Iraq that planned on rearming as sanctions withered: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, et al.

It's tough having these states as friends. They can't defend themselves, yet they own things the global market needs to survive (various and sundry petroleum products).

We do quite well having resource-poor but military-rich friends in the north of the region (Turkey), and the far west (Israel, Egypt), but we shall continue to find ourselves embroiled in regional intrigues along the seams of the Sunni/Shi'i Arab world so long as we don't have a regionally dominant friend in the eastern neighborhoods of the region.

Saddam wasn't fretting over the Qatari or Saudi hordes sweeping across the desert to evict him from Kuwait, which is why 82d Airborne and a large portion of the USMC ended up between Iraq and a hard place in 1990-91.

It's also, to some extent, why we're trying to build a somewhat functional, Shi'i-dominated allied government (and military) in Iraq. Someone has to be the bulwark in the east against Iran, and it's not about to be UAE.

[SoldierOutOfIraq]

Wow. Sorry for the triple shot. I must've hit the key too many times.

[SoldierOutOfIraq]

Wow. Sorry for the triple shot. I must've hit the key too many times.

[J Thomas]

That's a plausible geopolitical reason, SOOI.

So, our choices were to wait and maybe in a few years iraq would have built up another threatening military, and we might have to fight another Gulf war to stop them from attacking our oil.

Or we could invade iraq now, and hope we could turn iraq into a solid ally that would protect our oil from iran.

Tough choice. I guess we're seeing how badly the choice taken is going, but we don't get to look at the alternative. It might have been very very hard to do a repeat on Gulf War I. Yes, that might have been too high a price to pay.

I guess there was a third choice. We could have built up the egyptian army and used them to defend against iraq, while iraq stood in the way for iran. Egypt has a giant unemployment problem, they have a lot of guys who'd welcome the chance to be paid soldiers in kuwait and saudi arabia. There's the question how much we could trust the current egyptian strongman and the one after him, but probably the biggest concern is that israel wouldn't want us to build a functional egyptian army.

As iraq fails maybe we should consider egypt after all. Better them than us.

[chew2]

Suzanne,

In economics there is value in being able to wait before having to make a choice.

From a cold blooded analysis we always had that time option in Iraq, even if the probablistic intelligence estimates about his WMD capabilities had been justified. He was no short term military threat to attack us, although he was a threat to the region.

It was our own fear and lack of courage which impelled the "liberal hawks" to feel they had to act. There was also the fear and lack of self confidence of looking weak. To pose the Iraq choices as comparable to Munich is again to fall into that exagerated sense of momentousness and fear.

Deterrence worked with the Soviet Union, with whom we were engaged in a world struggle for dominance and supposed "survival". It has just as much a chance of working with Iran, Pakistan, India, Israel, North Korea and others. Clearly the chances of failure increase with the multiplication of nuclear powers.

Let me ask you this? What would happen if Iran or North Korea detonated an atomic/nuclear weapon on U.S. soil? Would we survive?

Of course we would.

So what is the special and vital reason that we should fight a war against Iran in the near future in order to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon 5 to 10 years from now? And of course when beginning a war, you have to think about finishing the war? Any war with Iran would be a limited war. What would be it's aftermath?

Do we have time to wait?

[Kitty]

Interesting to know.