From the indispensable Small Wars Journal, a biting reality check to Secretary Clinton’s Mid-East trumpet blast:
…anyone who remembers the Cold War should recall that U.S. security guarantees for Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea were not easy, cheap, or simple. A U.S. guarantee for the Middle East against Iranian aggression will be even more problematic than were America’s guarantees during the Cold War. 1) Will the supposed beneficiaries of the guarantee take the guarantee seriously? It is one thing to make a promise, it is another to deliver on it under stress. The credibility of a U.S. security guarantee would increase if there were visible presidential speeches on the subject, a Senate-ratified treaty, and permanent U.S. force structure commitments and deployments to back it up. Until these things happen, statesmen in Israel and the friendly Arab regimes will be rightfully skeptical. 2) Locking in a nuclear standoff between Iran and the U.S. will shift the conflict onto the irregular warfare playing field. Iran will have the advantage on this field while the U.S. and its friends will most likely be stuck on defense. Here again there are parallels with the Cold War. With a nuclear standoff in place, the Soviet Union’s political and military subversions and proxy wars achieved success in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa and the Middle East. Quantitatively Iran is no Soviet Union. But qualitatively, Iran is organized for subversion and prolonged irregular and proxy warfare, just as was the Soviet Union. A U.S. security guarantee policy that accepts an Iranian nuclear weapons capability will have to prepare for another such “twilight struggle.” 3) Be ready to relearn some old Cold War terms such as “hair-trigger alert,” “launch on warning,” “second strike reserve,” “counter-force versus counter-value targeting,” etc. This time, the standoff will be three-sided (Israel vs. Iran vs. Saudi Arabia) just like the gunfight at the end of “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.” And Middle East nuclear strategists will look back with envy to the Cold War when ICBM flight times were a leisurely 25 minutes.
Apropos of points 2 and 3, sound nuclear deterrence is predicated on credibility. Though our nuclear forces remain capable and strong, the Obama administration is stretching out Strategic Command’s target list while sharply reducing the actual arsenal. That is, more targets to negate with less vehicles to do it. Further, while we do have a nuclear arsenal that’s capable of knocking out one or two of the heavy hitters, we’re currently in the process of trading away our second-strike capability. Second-strike is our survival mechanism, as the deterrence mission wouldn’t disappear after a mass nuclear exchange with sluggers like Russia or China. If the administration is going to widen the nuclear umbrella to cover the entire Middle East, one hopes that such an ambitious defense pact would factor into the upcoming START negotiations with the Russians.
