03/30/12
The Confidence Game Leon Wieseltier
Thirty years ago I wrote a tiny book in defense of
nuclear deterrence. Against the nuclear freezers and the nuclear war-fighters,
deterrence was not hard to defend: my argument was drearily sensible. But I was
nervously aware that I was urging good sense about a strategic situation that
was senseless, because it was premised upon the credibility of a threat of
holocaust. I was careful to note my discomfort in my book: deterrence, I said,
may be supported but not celebrated, because it is another term for an
unprecedentedly lethal danger, which it elects to manage rather than to abolish.
I was uneasy with the commonplace notion that deterrence between the United
States and the Soviet Union “worked,” because this was impossible to verify.
Having furiously attacked E.P. Thompson (thereby provoking a long response from
him to “the little blue book of Chairman Wieseltier”—a fine souvenir of battle),
I nonetheless cited with approval his remark that deterrence is “a
counter-factual proposition that does not admit of proof.” I had no doubt that
the absence of a thermonuclear confrontation between the superpowers was not
least a matter of luck. So much could have gone cataclysmically wrong. The
challenge was to defend deterrence uncomplacently, in full consciousness of its
fragility; and a few years later my insistence upon intellectually troubled
deterrence led me to publish an article in Foreign Affairs called “When
Deterrence Fails.” That contingency, it seemed to me, had to be confronted. My
piece consisted mainly in some inexpert thoughts about war termination,
following a suggestion by Bernard Brodie in a paper he wrote not long before he
died. Many people who liked my book disliked my essay. By imagining the use of
nuclear weapons I had blasphemed against its “unimaginability,” and against the
dogma of deterrence that (as I summarized it) “you cannot consider the
possibility that deterrence may fail without contributing to the likelihood of
its failure.” But the twentieth century did not give one grounds to think only
good thoughts about the world.
We are now witnessing a revival of the complacent version of deterrence. The cause of the new faith in the perfect efficacy of nuclear weapons for the prevention of conflict is the specter of a military strike, by Israel or the United States, against the nuclear installations of Iran. The discussion of the military option, writes Paul Pillar in The Washington Monthly, is “not rigorous analysis but a mixture of fear, fanciful speculation, and crude stereotyping. There are indeed good reasons to oppose Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons ... but an Iran with a bomb would not be anywhere near as dangerous as most people assume,” because “the principles of deterrence are not invalid just because the party to be deterred wears a turban and a beard.” In The American Prospect, Suzanne Maloney makes “the case for containing a nuclear Iran” in a comprehensive but confusing way. She contends that Obama’s “starry-eyed effort at engagement” has failed, and that the only solution lies in “launching direct dialogue between Washington and the Islamic Republic,” and that “a reinvestment in diplomacy is no guarantee of success.” Ruling out force and sanctions, she makes the bold recommendation that the administration “strive to move beyond P5+1,” and prepare to “live with a solution that constrained but did not extinguish Iran’s nuclear ambitions,” which is not obviously a solution at all. And on CNN.com, Fareed Zakaria, Counselor-in-Waiting to the President, declares that “deterring Iran is the best option,” because deterrence’s “record is remarkable”: in the cold war, after all, “both sides were deterred.” “The prospect of destruction produces peace,” he asserts, citing as his authority Kenneth Waltz, “one of the most distinguished theorists of international relations.”
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