President Obama has again said that “all options are on the table” when it comes to dealing with Iran’s nuclear program. Translated into plain English, what the president is saying is this: the United States is prepared to go to war to stop Iran from getting the bomb. (Any U.S. military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities would be an unambiguous act of war; this is true whether such an attack were justified or not.)
What Obama’s statement does not mean, oddly enough, is that all options are actually the table when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program. Specifically, one option — containment through deterrence — has apparently been excluded. The White House scrambled to make this clear when then-nominee for Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel suggested in his confirmation hearings that the Obama administration supported a policy of containing Iran.
There is little to like in the Iranian government. Its human rights record is appalling. Its support for groups like Hezbollah and Hamas has undermined stability in the Levant. Its assistance to the Assad regime is complicating efforts aimed at a transfer of power to a more representative government in Damascus. And some of the comments of the Iranian leadership have been truly odious in their anti-Semitism. But there is scant evidence that Tehran is hell-bent on self-destruction.
Then why not consider — at least as a last resort — containment of a nuclear Iran through deterrence? After all, deterrence worked for 40 years against the Soviet Union, an altogether more powerful and aggressive adversary than Iran.
Containment is surely not the best possible outcome; it would clearly be preferable, from a U.S. perspective, were Iran not to acquire nuclear weapons. But in a real world, we often must settle for second- or even third-best outcomes. And we should always assess the costs of competing policies. The costs of deterrence — specifically, nuclear guarantees we might be compelled to offer Israel, Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies in the region — must be weighed against the short- and long-term costs of war with Iran.
Ironically, the chief argument against “containment” of Iran — the idea that its government is too “irrational” to respond to deterrence — contradicts the logic of our efforts to alter Iranian behavior by economic sanctions. We are supposed to believe a) that the Iranian regime is so irrational that it will commit national suicide by an attack upon Israel (which has perhaps 80 nuclear weapons) or the United States (which has in excess of 7,000) but b) that it is rational enough to make sober cost-benefit analyses when it comes to responding to sanctions.
Perhaps Obama is bluffing. To his credit, the president seems to have little taste for war with Iran. And perhaps his repeated threats to attack Iran should it develop a nuclear weapon may succeed where sanctions, to date, have failed. But President Obama and we should recall the fundamental risk associated with any bluff: somebody might actually call you on it.
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.