“The (compelling) case for an Iranian bomb.”Macron and the Europeans just made it.
4 MARCH—I have long been ambivalent, deeply so, on the question of deterrence. Any circumstance wherein deterrence is the logical course is a regrettable circumstance. There is a potential wrong that must be prevented by the prospect of punishment. Or there is the risk of aggression, a strong power toward the less-powerful, that must be reduced or, best outcome, eliminated. In all such cases, the need to deter implies the presence of animosity, enmity, one or another kind of malign intent. In our time it typically comes down to the threat of violence in response to the threat of violence. On the other side of the ledger, there are many occasions in history—anyone who lived through the Cold War knows these well—when you have to favor deterrence as an unfortunate necessity. Such an occasion is now upon us, and it may as well have a flashing red light affixed to it. Iran needs a nuclear bomb. And I will get right out there as I make this case: I hope the Islamic Republic finally determines the time has come to develop a nuclear arsenal and all those gifted scientists and technicians it has cultivated over the years can get this done with dispatch. Do I argue for proliferation in West Asia, which is nuclear-free (so far as we know) with the frightening exception of the Israeli state? What thought could be worse? But the Zionists have the bomb—an inventory somewhere in the environs of 250 warheads—and, from Golda Meir to Bibi Netanyahu, they have made it clear they are insane enough to use it. Had the Iranians possessed a bomb before 28 February, it is a near certainty the attack that began in the early hours of that day would not have begun. As is generally known, Iran has long lived according to a fatwa against the use of weapons of mass destruction of any kind. This is commonly dated to October 2003, when the just-assassinated Ali Khamenei declared nuclear and other W.M.D.s contrary to Islamic principles. Gareth Porter, my colleague and old friend, made the case in Foreign Policy a dozen years ago that the fatwa actually dates to the mid–1990s, when a government official asked the supreme leader “for his religious opinion on nuclear weapons.” This makes three decades, and there has not once been any indication that the Iranians have betrayed this principle, the countless suggestions it has notwithstanding. The councils of state in Tehran are now choosing Khamenei’s successor. Alireza Arafi, a senior cleric, is high among the candidates under consideration. According to Iran HD, a Farsi satellite news channel with head offices in London, Arafi made the following statement yesterday (and we will forgive the mixed metaphor):
Memo to Ayatollah Arafi and the senior leadership in Tehran as the Israelis and Americans attack your nation:
■ It is interesting to listen to the Europeans as the skies over West Asia thicken with fighter jets, missiles, and drones and Iran’s need for a nuclear deterrent becomes ever more urgent. The Euros have been for some time in a stifled state of freakout about the Trump regime’s apparent dismissal of the Continent as a once-was zone of little importance and the prospect that the nuclear doctrine Washington has professed these last eight decades may no longer cover them. Deterrence, deterrence, we will be naked without our deterrence, Europe’s purported leaders have been fretting for some time. Their angst has mounted in direct proportion to these leaders’ apparent determination, the Russophobic Friedrich Merz in the lead, to provoke a war with the Russian Federation within five years—the time frame various officials in Berlin have taken to mentioning. In mid–February the German chancellor initiated talks with Paris to see about the French, the only nuclear power on the Continent, “strengthening Europe’s nuclear deterrent,” as the Financial Times put it. “The discussions, centred on the possibility of Germany joining France’s nuclear umbrella,” the FT elaborated, “underline mounting anxiety in Europe over an expected reduction in the U.S. military presence on the Continent, as Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine enters its fifth year.” “I have started initial talks with French President Emmanuel Macron about European nuclear deterrence,” Merz subsequently announced, evidently with relief, shortly afterward at the Munich Security Conference, where the wobbly knees of European officials were much in evidence. Macron, never one to miss a chance for a star turn as Europe’s leader, has taken up this question with alacrity since Merz put it in play last month. And on Monday he, Macron, laid out France’s new “nuclear doctrine” in a much-noted speech delivered at Île Longue, site of a highly secretive naval base along France’s Atlantic coast— “this cathedral of our sovereignty”—that serves as home port for France’s nuclear-capable ballistic missile submarines. Macron’s running theme was “advanced deterrence.” Snippets:
And so on. The hard news of the day was that France will increase its count of nuclear warheads for the first time in decades and will no longer disclose how many are in inventory. Apart from Germany, seven other nations—Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, and Poland—are to participate in “deterrent exercises” with France’s force de frappe, its nuclear strike force. Grandly, two French bureaucrats, Héloïse Fayet and Claudia Major, declared in Le Monde that this marks “the dawn of a new nuclear era.” Macron’s take-home line, which made the rounds of social media Monday, came later in his speech: “To be free, one must be feared. To be feared, one must be powerful.” France’s purported leader, inordinately pleased with this clever-sounding but primitive-beyond-belief mot, put it around on his “X” account; Élysée Palace featured it prominently on its website, too. ■ Let us now indulge in a little immanent critique, the turning of an argument back upon those making it, for this is a brilliant case. France and every other nation on the list of those now dedicated to Macron’s “advanced deterrence”—the Brits, the Germans, all of them, as well as the rest of the West, stand vigorously opposed to any effort Iran may make to develop the nuclear deterrent it so obviously, obviously needs to defend itself against the aggressions of the Zionist regime. Every one of them. They all take as incontrovertible that any such turn on the Islamic Republic’s part would be dangerous not only to the rest of West Asia but to the rest of the world, to humanity. What are we to make of this? What of Macron’s thoughts about freedom, fear, and power? Deterrence, or deterrence theory, as the scholars put it, has a long history. The concept originated with Cesare di Beccaria, a late 18th–century jurist, social reformer, and man of the Enlightenment. He published On Crimes and Punishments in 1764, wherein he argued that crimes should be punished not as a matter of retribution or revenge but to deter crime in the cause of creating a better society. A few years later along came Jeremy Bentham, the celebrated apostle of utilitarianism. Bentham went by a lifelong code, the spine of his philosophy: “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” Simple, maybe quaint to our sensibilities, this led Bentham to conclude, with di Beccaria, that the best way to prevent malign acts is to deter them. We commonly associate deterrence with the Cold War decades, when it was the sine qua non of great-power statecraft. The spread of nuclear weapons post–Hiroshima, from the Americans to the Soviets to the British to the French to the Chinese, made this an imperative. The function of a strong military was less a matter of waging war than of preventing war: “Peace through strength,” etc. Everyone of a certain age will remember “mutually assured destruction,” M.A.D. This was deterrence at its rawest. It kept the great powers out of another world war, but the acronym, wholly appropriate, says what needs to be said about deterrence as a lowly reflection of the human consciousness even when it is necessary. However much one may regret the need of it, however grimly it expresses the human condition, deterrence as it has been in history was not by nature nihilistic. This much must be said of it. Implicit in deterrence as traditionally applied has been a certain hope that humanity can transcend its circumstances—that a better world is possible and is worth the effort of attempting it. And now to the 21st century: Deterrence as it has devolved in the hands of crude figures such as Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz, along with the many others like them across the West, is at its core sheer nihilism. There is no faith in humanity, no thought of transcendence, to be found in Macron’s “advanced deterrence,” a preposterous name for this “new nuclear era.” In this version the principle is instrumentalized to serve as nothing more than a defense of the West’s obviously waning global superiority. Cynicism replaces hope. Iran’s predicament could not be a clearer case in point. Deterrence is imperative so long as those doing the deterring are the Western powers. But traditional deterrence, deterrence as a balancing mechanism between two powers, presents a danger if one of these powers is non–Western. “Please let us deter you with our bomb and the Americans’ grotesque aresenal behind us, but you cannot deter us in return.” Is this not a fair gist of the West’s message to the Islamic Republic? In a Strategic Culture piece published two years ago, Alastair Crooke called it “a form of militarized psychodrama.” “To be free one must be feared. To be feared one must be powerful.” There are times Macron’s utterances are so stupid I wish for his own sake he were self-satirizing, but of course he never is. He lacks the necessary self-awareness. This thought is so far beyond the bounds of reason one cannot find it on the horizon. In this case the president of France betrays his ignorance of the first rule of statecraft: True, enduring security—freedom, if you like—will never be achieved if it is at the expense of another’s security. Enduring security derives only and always from settlements that leave both sides secure. Turning Macron’s strange assertions another way, to be feared by others is never the road to freedom: It is to be imprisoned in a world one has made perpetually dangerous. To obsess with one’s power as Macron uses this term inevitably leads to the depletion of one’s strength—a distinction I have made previously in these pages. (And if there a nation that demonstrates this more plainly than America I cannot think of it.) And so to “the Jewish state.” Israel, to live freely, must be feared and therefore must be powerful. Iran must therefore live in fear and accept a state of perpetual weakness. This is the Macron argument as it applies to the present crisis. It is precisely the argument coming out of the White House and most of the European capitals. There is only one response to this senselessness. Bombs are dangerous to human life, nuclear bombs more than any other. This is an obvious-enough statement, but it is not always so. Sometimes, bitter as it is, to possess them is to save lives. I hope the Islamic Republic’s new leaders set their minds to demonstrating this. |