Arthur Herman has a must-read piece on Iranian nukes: “The Islamic revolutionary regime in Tehran is poised to hand the United States its worst foreign-policy setback since the fall of South Vietnam.”
Why?
The terms of this approach have been the problem all along. Military action — whether it was bombing Iran’s nuclear sites or blockading the Hormuz Straits at one extreme, or providing arms and cover aid to the country’s many anti-regime groups at the other — has been treated as the last option, or the ultimate stick, instead of the U.S.’s first and most important diplomatic asset. Both Bush and Obama saw military action as an alternative to diplomacy, and vice versa. This is a severe miscalculation, one that has consistently hobbled American foreign policy from Vietnam to North Korea, and now Iraq [sic].
The alternative is to see force and diplomacy as mutually supportive aspects of the same exercise of power in defense of our national interest.
Sometime during the Bush administration’s second term, the powers that be in Iran decided America’s threat that “all options are on the table” to stop the mullahs from obtaining nukes was no longer credible. In the years since, America has given Khamenei and Ahmadinejad no reason to change their minds. Which is why the globe is moving steadily toward an international crisis of terrible proportions.
