Obama’s Nuclear Deal is the Most Likely Path to War

This is the specter that President Obama summons when he warns that congressional rejection of his nuclear agreement with Iran would lead to “some form of war . . . . if not tomorrow . . . then soon.”  But it is Obama’s deal itself that is more likely to lead to such a regrettable outcome. It is all but guaranteed to make a region that is already convulsed in violence, thanks to Obama’s strategy of reducing America’s presence, that much more violent. The administration virtually acknowledges this by suddenly promising all our regional allies vast new transfers of weapons to allay their anxieties about his Iran deal. 

When he warns of “war,” clearly Obama does not mean merely a U.S. air campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities (as I and a few others have openly espoused) for by that token he has embroiled us already in “wars” in Iraq, Syria and Libya. Rather, he means to evoke the image of a protracted, bloody struggle, like what we faced in Iraq last decade. What scenarios could lead to that? 

The United States and other democracies have gotten into wars more often by excess dovishness that has tempted expansionist dictators to overreach than by the hawkish “mindset” that Obama cited as having gotten us into Iraq and would somehow do likewise in Iran. The best-known example is the policy of appeasement that paved the way to World War Two. But something analogous led to World War One, when England’s announced aversion to fighting on the European continent emboldened the German military; and to the Korean War which was preceded by U.S. declarations that the Korean peninsula lay outside America’s “defense perimeter”; and to the 1990-91 Gulf War when U.S. ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam Hussein: “We have no opinion on your Arab – Arab conflicts.”

In today’s Middle East the principal expansionist power is Iran. Through Hezbollah it already largely controls Lebanon and as much of Syria as is still ruled by Damascus. It is also the sole backer of the Houthi movement that now dominates Yemen, and it is the most influential outside force in Iraq. 

Iran’s ambitions go much farther. In a speech in March, Ali Younesi, an advisor to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and a former minister of intelligence, gloated that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “acknowledged . . . Iran’s might and influence” by saying that “Iran has taken over four countries.” But, Younesi corrected, “Iran was only trying to help” them. He added that, likewise, Iran would “support all the people living in the Iranian plateau, and we will defend them.”  He defined this plateau as stretching “from the borders of China and the Indian subcontinent to the north and south Caucasus and the Persian Gulf.” (Translation by MEMRI.) If this sounds grandiose, recall that Ayatollah Khomeini viewed the birth of the Islamic Republic of Iran as but the first shot in a worldwide Islamic revolution.

Obama’s nuclear agreement will stoke Iran’s ambitions in three ways. First, the lifting of sanctions will provide Tehran an infusion of funds, estimated by some experts as $150 billion although Obama puts the figure at $56 billion by counting only the sums of Iranian money frozen in foreign banks, not any of the new profits and investments that will be undammed. Whatever the number, it means billions for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and its proxies (as well as the apparatus of domestic repression). Second, the agreement will assure that Iran can make nuclear weapons sooner or later. Even a delay of ten years means little in a region where rulers often hold power for thirty and the sense of historical drama sweeps over millennia in a way that it is hard for us denizens of the new world to understand. Iran’s looming nuclear power will begin at once to generate power shifts as well as threats, accommodations and counteractions. Third, Iran and its proxies feel they have won a victory over the West. Iran secured “more than what was imagined,” boasted President Rouhani, while the leader of Hezbollah’s bloc in Lebanon’s parliament exulted that thanks to the nuclear agreement, “Iran is now a superpower” that has “succeeded in humiliating the world’s ruling powers.” 

All this means Iran will grow more daring and aggressive, perhaps leading to more direct conflict with its archrival, Saudi Arabia, whose alarm at the nuclear deal may well equal Israel’s although it is expressed less volubly. Already Tehran and Riyadh are at war in Yemen, in part through proxies but also with their own forces. There are numerous imaginable flashpoints at which this could intensify. Iran’s Yemeni allies, tutored by Hezbollah, could strike on Saudi territory. Bahrain’s restive Shiite majority could rise against their Sunni monarch and Saudi forces would intervene, but now an emboldened Iran, which claims Bahrain as its own territory, might take action on the other side. In Saudi Arabia itself, Iran has in the past stirred revolt among the Shiite minority, ten percent of the population concentrated in the east where the oil is. In short, a more direct and violent Iranian-Saudi confrontation is easily imaginable. The United States, which sent half a million soldiers to rescue Kuwait from Iraq, would do anything in its power to defend Saudi Arabia from Iran.

There are other scenarios in which the current violence in the Middle East will redouble thanks to Iran’s imperial appetite being whetted by its new nuclear status. Tehran might stir up Kuwait’s sometimes restive Shiite minority which amounts to one-third of the population. More Sunnis may be impelled to view ISIS and al Qaeda as necessary shock troops against surging Shiite power. The consequent infusions of money and volunteers could bring these fanatics new conquests in Iraq, Syria, Libya, the Sinai, and perhaps elsewhere. Israel might be confronted with its largest war since 1967, pitting it against Hamas and Hezbollah and even Iranian forces. The distraction of mounting Middle Eastern violence might embolden Vladimir Putin to new steps toward his goal of reassembling the USSR, perhaps devouring more of Ukraine or even attempting a go at Latvia or Estonia, using their large Russian minorities as a pretext as in Ukraine.

Any of these scenarios could draw the United States into just the kind of briar patch that President Obama says he wants to avoid. He mocks his critics as warmongers, but it is his ill-conceived policy that is most likely to get us into a war.

Joshua Muravchik is a distinguished fellow at the World Affairs Institute.