Containment policy doesn't work

In what may have been her last meeting with a group of her Arab counterparts, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has offered an "American umbrella" against a possible nuclear threat from Iran.

The move sends a message to all those who had hoped or feared that President George W. Bush will not leave office without destroying Iran's nuclear ambitions. It exposes the fictitious nature of reports published by supposedly reputable American journals about Bush's "secret plans" to take out Iranian nuclear installations before his successor arrives at the White House.

The idea of preventing the Islamic Republic from developing a bomb-making nuclear capacity belonged to the old school of pre-emption: that is to say acting to forestall the emergence of a threat.

Pre-emption was first developed as a concept in the 1980s when the administration of President Ronald Reagan questioned the validity of the doctrine of containment shaped by President Harry Truman three decades earlier.

Containment meant recognising a threat but trying to counter it by promising a stronger counter threat to the adversary. The message of containment is: if you try to chop one of our fingers off, be sure that we would retaliate by cutting off your hand. The core concept of the doctrine of containment is deterrence.

The conventional view, especially in the United States, is that the doctrine of containment and the concept of deterrence were great successes. "You see, the Soviets did launch a nuclear attack," one is told. However, as is often the case, the conventional view ignores the dialectics of the situation. It ignores the fact that in containment he who contains is also contained. Deterrence means establishing parity with your adversary: He cannot attack you because he knows you will hit back, and you won't attack him because you know he won't attack you!

The doctrine of containment assumed that the only threat posed by the former USSR to the so-called Free World and its global interests came from nuclear weapons. That led to what one could describe as "nuclear myopia" among Western leaders.

The mere fact that they had as many nuclear warheads as the Soviets made them happy. The Soviet threat, however, was multiform and seldom conjectured on a nuclear arsenal. Between 1945, when containment, also known as the Truman Doctrine, was first discussed, and 1989 when the USSR collapsed, the Soviet leadership pursued its aggressive hegemony-seeking global strategy with a free hand.

It destroyed democratic governments in eastern and central European nations liberated from Nazism, replacing them with Communist client regimes. In 1951, it tested its first atomic bomb. In 1956 and 1958, it sent its tanks rolling into Hungary and Poland to destroy regimes that hoped to offer a less barbarous version of Communism. In 1968, its tanks entered Czechoslovakia to end the so-called "Prague Spring".

In between, the Soviet leadership scored other victories. Its allies came to power in China and North Korea, carved an enclave for themselves in Germany and built a wall in Berlin, and embarked on a conquest of Indochina for Marxism-Leninism. They fuelled wars of liberation in more than two dozen countries. In 1979, Soviet troops entered Kabul, just weeks after Khomeinist "students" manipulated by the KGB had raided the US Embassy in Tehran.

The Truman Doctrine of containment did not prevent Soviet expansion that continued until the very end of Communist rule in Moscow. To be sure, there was no nuclear war. But there was no need for one. Moscow achieved its objectives without a nuclear exchange. The Western powers, effectively deterred by détente, did nothing to stop Soviet expansion.

Rice's offer of an "umbrella" is another way of saying that the US is preparing to accept the Islamic Republic as a nuclear power while promising to contain it. By seeking to contain Iran, the United States will also be containing itself. It would give Tehran what amounts to the right to draw first. But why should Tehran draw first? It has no interest in doing so.

Once assured that the only power capable of threatening its existence has decided not to do so, Iran would pursue its objectives through other means at its disposal. Tehran does not need nuclear weapons to derail American schemes in Afghanistan and Iraq, to propel its clients into power in Lebanon, and to keep its allies in control in Syria. It does not need nuclear weapons to frighten its smaller and weaker neighbours into accepting "Finalandisation" under Pax-Khomeiniana.

One might have dismissed Rice's "umbrella" offer as a swan song from someone who never understood the Iranian problem. Sadly, however, the same "umbrella" is also offered by the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

This is how Senator Hillary Clinton, Rice's designated successor as Secretary of State, saw the situation last April: "I think deterrence has not been effectively used in recent times. We used it very well during the Cold War when we had a bipolar world, and what I think the President should do and what our policy should be is to make it very clear to the Iranians that they would be risking massive retaliation were they to launch a nuclear attack on Israel.

In addition, if Iran were to become a nuclear power, it could set off an arms race that would be incredibly dangerous and destabilising because the countries in the region are not going to want Iran to be the only nuclear power.

So I can imagine that they would be rushing to obtain nuclear weapons themselves. In order to forestall that, creating some kind of a security agreement where we said, no, you do not need to acquire nuclear weapons. If you were the subject of an unprovoked nuclear attack by Iran, the United States and hopefully our Nato allies would respond to that."

Clinton concluded her analysis this way: "We would try to help the other countries that might be intimidated and bullied into submission by Iran because it was a nuclear power, avoid that fate by creating this new security umbrella."

Amir Taheri is an Iranian writer based in Europe.