Iran and the bomb

Speculation on Iran’s nuclear program, and what Israel may or may not do about it, has entered one of its periodic frenzies in the days leading up to yesterday’s release of the latest report from the IAEA.

Analyzing nuclear strategy has a way of inviting vertigo, what with all the contingency planning and game theory models and what-ifs. But the question that cuts through much of the clutter really boils down to this: Which is worse — the unforseeable fallout of an Israeli attack? or the unforseeable fallout from a nuclear armed Iran?

Bret Stephens, in the Wall Street Journal, argues for the latter:

… a debate needs to weigh the inevitable unforeseen consequences of a military strike against the all-too-foreseeable consequences of a nuclear Iran. Among the former: more Iranian meddling in Iraq and Afghanistan (particularly as U.S. troops withdraw), efforts to shut down the Straits of Hormuz, and perhaps an opportunistic war with Israel. Among the latter: all of the above, except this time with the added security of a nuclear umbrella, as well as a nuclear proliferation death spiral involving Saudi Arabia, Turkey and soon-to-be Islamist Egypt. If you thought the Cold War was scary, imagine four or five nuclear adversaries in the world’s must unstable region, each of them at daggers drawn with one another.

In the New Yorker, David Remnick takes the opposite tack:

It is terrible enough to imagine what might happen if Iran came to possess a bomb; but an attack now would almost certainly lead to a tide of blood in the region. The Middle East today is in a state of fragile possibility, full of peril, to be sure, but also pregnant with promise. A premature unilateral attack could upend everything and one result of many would be an Israel under fire, under attack, and more deeply isolated than ever before. 

Finally, if neither of those possibilities makes you feel all warm and cozy inside, consider this piece from Ilan Berman in today’s New York Times, which claims that both outcomes could still be avoided if Washington applied some much-needed pressure on Beijing.

Washington, worried about potentially destabilizing economic effects, has historically shied away from putting pressure on Beijing over its ties to Iran. But if the Obama administration is serious about halting Iran’s nuclear program, it must do so by sanctioning companies like the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, or Cnooc, which has been developing Iran’s mammoth North Pars natural gas field since 2006, and PetroChina (which supervises the import of some three million tons of liquefied natural gas annually from Iran). Both are publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange and therefore subject to penalties under existing law.

[U.S. Treasury Department Undersecretary David] Cohen’s recent jaunt to Beijing was intended to convince the Chinese government that it must decisively curtail its ties to Tehran, or face real economic costs. This message needs to be coupled with the application of concrete economic penalties — from bans on United States-based energy projects to prohibitions on financial transactions that fall under American jurisdiction — that are intended to persuade Chinese companies, including Cnooc and PetroChina, to scale back their economic contacts with Iran. At the same time, greater targeted sanctions and asset freezes are needed to bring to heel Chinese individuals and entities that are currently complicit in Iran’s nuclear advances.

After all, the last, best hope of peacefully derailing Iran’s nuclear drive lies in convincing Beijing that “business as usual” with Tehran is simply no longer possible.