The Infrastructure of Containment

George Washington’s advice in his Farewell Address to “Beware foreign entanglements” has always been well heeded by Americans, to the point of having become a cultural value. That value is strengthened by our isolation  on the American continent from other worlds, with only friendly Canada and Mexico as our neighbors. That is why Americans in general are so skeptical of the recent Iran Agreement. It goes against the American grain to enter into a ten-year entanglement between far away nations neither of whom really understands or trusts the other. The problem is compounded when success with this entanglement will involve creating many more with other nations, some of whom are old antagonists. It is, as they say, a hard sell.

The Iran Agreement was reached while I was vacationing in Maine (one of the thousand ways you can tell my views had absolutely no effect on it), leaving me away from the keyboard long enough to research and reflect a little. It is, as various analysts have noted, a subject complex enough that people of sense and good will can easily differ widely on it, and the cultural bias is against it. My thinking has been influenced most by an article on it in the Foreign Affairs Journal and by an excellent discussion on the Charlie Rose Show by Bill Burns, President of the Carnegie Endowment. The Foreign Affairs article provided an even-handed discussion of the Agreements strengths and weaknesses, and provided some interesting insights into some possible ramifications not often discussed. The Burns discussion provided insights into what it will take to make it work. Both raised the basic question of which was better, a regulated but untrusted Iran or an Iran actively developing nuclear weapons with no monitoring or regulations.  Both agreed that the agreement was worthwhile and in fact necessary, and both emphasized the fragility of it and the urgent work to be done for it to succeed. And both believed it was an enactment of the long-term Obama policy of Middle East containment through limiting the danger of really violent confrontation, a policy with which I agree. So, to start, it involves creating an entanglement to avoid the dangers of more dangerous ones.

The Foreign Affairs article emphasized my own view that the Agreement was a holding action to keep Iranian nuclear development in bounds and well monitored, while awaiting a generational change in Iranian leadership. The success of that strategy depends on avoiding ideologically based impulsive action by current Iranian leadership in the meanwhile. That in turn involves things we and they are not good at, like avoiding inflammatory rhetoric and perceptions that the other is gaining control – something like the school yard situation in that neither of us is good at “plays well with others.” Our political leadership has to reach new levels of sense and sensitivity. And it will involve building up a web of understandings and agreements with other interested parties, some of which may be surprising. For example, both Israel and Saudi Arabia are opposed to Iran’s influence and activities throughout the Middle East. Nothing promotes friendship like a common enemy, so those two nations, usually at odds with each other, may move toward rapprochement and become working partners in containing Iran. Help in doing so becomes part of our task. Russia and China, who are both our sometimes adversaries and sometimes working partners, are suspicious of the intrusion of Iranian-driven Shiite expansionism into their territories, and we may find ourselves working with them against an expansionist Iran. Iran is, in the meantime, as interested as we are in curtailing Sunni ISIS violence, and arrangements with Iran may not always be mutually hostile ones.

Similar ideas were expressed by Bill Burns in his discussion with Charlie Rose. He emphasized our need to maintain international consensus about regulation of the Iranian nuclear program by continued demonstration of our willingness to negotiate peacefully. That consensus is required to build coalitions capable of acting successfully to constrain Iranian nuclear activity. He cast the challenge as one of purposefully building an infrastructure of containment via coalitions of nations sharing a common interest. And that is indeed our challenge. We are used to thinking of international relations as “us versus them” except in times of active war, when “The Allies” are grudgingly acceptable. In this global world we must learn to think differently and begin “we versus them” thinking. Old George to the contrary, other continents are no longer faraway places with whom entanglements can be avoided.