Is An Iranian Nuke Really a Big Threat? 08/17/2010
Greg Scoblete thinks not:
...[T]he real threat from Iran [to America] is not nuclear bombs going off in Western cities, the wiping of Israel off the map or anything close to that. It's the possible threat Iran poses to America's "top country" status [i.e. hegemony--top country is Elliot Abrams's odd phrasing] in the Middle East.
Wars have frequently been waged for balance-of-power concerns, but in this case, how significant would the balance of power shift out of America's favor? Pakistan has nuclear weapons and is not the top country on the subcontinent - it can barely curtail its own home grown insurgency and it was threatened/cajoled by the U.S. to allow us to bomb portions of the country almost at will. North Korea has nuclear weapons and you'd be laughed out of a room if you suggested they had anything resembling "hegemony" in Asia.
Iran with a crude nuclear weapon would still be poor, weak and surrounded by unfriendly states. The U.S., by contrast, would not be.
Many political theorists have noticed that the nuclear bomb ain't what it used to be. Of the regimes that have pursued nukes/gone nuclear in the past 30 years, none are respected. Most importantly, nukes are useless against internal unrest, which is Iran's greatest weakness. The big worry of course is that these nukes could get loose, which leads to the actual biggest threat to of America posed by an Iranian nuke: an increasingly meaningless non-proliferation regime. Shoring up this regime, if anyone still remembers, was at one point the main reason why the US invaded Iraq.
...[T]he real threat from Iran [to America] is not nuclear bombs going off in Western cities, the wiping of Israel off the map or anything close to that. It's the possible threat Iran poses to America's "top country" status [i.e. hegemony--top country is Elliot Abrams's odd phrasing] in the Middle East.
Wars have frequently been waged for balance-of-power concerns, but in this case, how significant would the balance of power shift out of America's favor? Pakistan has nuclear weapons and is not the top country on the subcontinent - it can barely curtail its own home grown insurgency and it was threatened/cajoled by the U.S. to allow us to bomb portions of the country almost at will. North Korea has nuclear weapons and you'd be laughed out of a room if you suggested they had anything resembling "hegemony" in Asia.
Iran with a crude nuclear weapon would still be poor, weak and surrounded by unfriendly states. The U.S., by contrast, would not be.
Many political theorists have noticed that the nuclear bomb ain't what it used to be. Of the regimes that have pursued nukes/gone nuclear in the past 30 years, none are respected. Most importantly, nukes are useless against internal unrest, which is Iran's greatest weakness. The big worry of course is that these nukes could get loose, which leads to the actual biggest threat to of America posed by an Iranian nuke: an increasingly meaningless non-proliferation regime. Shoring up this regime, if anyone still remembers, was at one point the main reason why the US invaded Iraq.
Comments
Anonymous
08/31/2010 15:49
The thing about it is this...Iran is in an extremely unstable region of the world - in fact it is dead in the center of it. With the bomb comes power, and with that power comes, well we do not know what comes, but we don't want to find out. Threatening the existence of Israel and increasing influence and control over other regional neighbors seem very likely. The amount and possible severity of the unknowns that accompany the accompany the acquisition of a bomb by Iran is what really makes the US and Israel tick.
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