Forget About China: The West Needs To Consider Intervention in Iran
Iran Has to be Stopped from Acquiring a Nuclear Weapon. China and Russia Should Be Careful What They Wish For—if they want a Great Power Competition, They Can Have it
“The Biden administration’s policy toward Iran reflects a clear and consistent preference for diplomacy over the use of force, and understandably so. But the White House treats the two as contradictory, rather than complementary. For over two years, the administration has demonstrated its reticence to use, or even credibly threaten to use, force against Iran. Manifestly undeterred, Iran has continued and accelerated its drive toward the nuclear threshold” Jonathan Schachter “The System is Blinking Red Over Iran” ~ The Hudson Institute
Especially in light of the twenty year anniversary of the widely condemned Iraq war, it might perhaps be the most unpopular opinion I have expressed in this newsletter yet. But if only because Iran has the wherewithal to build a nuclear weapon in a matter of months, the West urgently needs to consider regime change in Iran with military force.
We’re so focussed on Russia and distracted by China’s pretensions, we seem to have forgotten that the US’s relations with Iran, since the Iran deal fell through, have deteriorated worse than with any other global power (China is a close second in this regard), as American influence in the Middle East wanes, and our foreign policy/diplomacy in the region between Trump and Biden—withdrawing from Afghanistan, cutting ties with Saudi Arabia, pulling out of the Iran Deal, our inability to talk with Israel—is more poorly managed now than it ever was.
Meanwhile the regime—emboldened by alliances with Russia and China, filling the vacuum left by America’s isolationist policies of retreat—is becoming increasingly more despotic and getting closer and closer to building a nuclear weapon. Indeed they will have the capacity within months. Just weeks ago the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Iran had 84% enriched particles of uranium. You need 90% to have “weapons grade uranium” to build a nuclear bomb. As Michael Doran of the Hoover Institution writes,
“If Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei were to give the order tomorrow, Iran could produce highly enriched uranium to build four nuclear weapons within about one month. It could explode a nuclear device underground within approximately six months.”
Doran claims, “Only American military action could deter such moves.“
I’m strongly inclined to agree. My concerns about Iran peaked last week, with a newsletter from the neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, announcing Iran had achieved nearly weapons grade enriched uranium; as well as with a Foreign Affairs article, “After the Iran Deal” by Brookings Institution scholar Suzanne Maloney.
In addition to Russia in my opinion, Iran should be the West’s, and in particular America’s, most urgent foreign policy priority; whatever people say about Xi’s military build up and his rhetoric about American containment or encirclement, and Taiwan, which is likely bluster. Xi’s regime—as I am at pains to describe in my “Biden’s Leviathan” series (I’m sorry it’s taking me so long to write part two; you’ve probably forgotten about it by now; I keep getting sidetracked)— is a lot less threatening, and China is actually more fragile and brittle than it likes to appear. And while I think Xi is crazy to talk such a big talk, and I think he’s deeply, even profoundly conceited, I think—I hope—he has intelligence enough, notwithstanding all his ridiculous thirst for great power glory, not to invade Taiwan or wage actual war on anybody.
All China really has on us at the moment is its navy, its large though increasingly decrepit economy, and long-range missiles—advantages we can correct for simply with dramatic increases in defense spending, which we should increase NOW. China is even less of a threat with all our allies America has cobbled together in the Indopacific, with revamped US military bases in Guam and the Phillipines, allies such as South Korea, Japan, Australia, and now India and Taiwan itself. Simulations have already shown China would fail to capture Taiwan. All the military might in hell would come down on China were they to start shooting at America or Japan, for example. And all the sanctions in the world and the kitchen sink would fall on China’s trapped economy.
Moreover I don’t think Xi will actually move on Taiwan unless he is encouraged to. And it would be very, very foolish and dangerous to assume armed conflict with China is inevitable, and that Xi will invade Taiwan. It is not enough to deter him either with pugnacious rhetoric or provocative demonstrations of American military might in the pacific, alone. Xi’s potential designs on Taiwan hinge on the moral and commercial alliances he is attempting to forge in the Middle East and Africa, North Korea, the Americas and elsewhere, or everywhere if you like. As well of course as the alliance he already has with Russia, as Putin wages his insane war in Ukraine.
The Reagan Doctrine for the 21st Century
In fact the better way to deter Xi’s new world-order-making is to help Ukraine to defeat Putin and also crush Xi’s influence and alliances in the Middle East. With regime change in Iran, we can at once stop Iran from building and acquiring nukes to menace the Arab world and the Western international rules-based order, and serve to defeat and/or deter or contain Putin and Xi. Iran is already killing US troops in Syria. They have also plotted assassinations against US former government officials. It is no exaggeration to state that Iran hates the US and the west as much as, if not more than ever.
To intervene in Iran, we could reassert American-western hegemony in the competition between democracy and autocracy for global dominance, stop autocracies from cornering the world’s energy markets, thwart Russia’s weapons supplies of Iranian drones and missiles, liberate Iranian civilians from tyranny (if anyone needs reminding Iranian citizens are being persecuted en masse, women are being butchered by their government for refusing to wear the hijab, and school girls are being poisoned) and deter Xi by breaking the fulcrum of anti-American alliances he’s trying to build all over the world. A cornerstone of the rise of autocracy is Iran, one of America’s most long-standing enemies.
AP
With the UAE and Saudi Arabia turning towards China, Afghanistan basically lost, and Israel in turmoil, America and our allies need to consider how to assemble a coalition to take out the Iranian regime by force.
—Jay
Invading Iran is like saying Yugoslavia was the most important communist power during the Cold War not China or the USSR or saying during World War II the strongest Axis power was Italy. If anything, the non-proliferation regime rested on an implicit bargain that the designated nuclear armed states would respect the territorial integrity of the non-nuclear states a bargain Russia has now violated in Ukraine. At this point it would be quite logically and defensible for both Ukraine and Taiwan to want nuclear weapons. Lastly the US' allies in the region if they could even be called allies are weak and lackadaisical even compared to Germany and Taiwan. I would expect almost no boots on the ground from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE in any type of military action against Iran. Nor, I am sure the US would even want them if offered.
I don’t see the analog between Iran and communist Yugoslavia or fascist Italy. Those countries did not have the scope to influence the region and the world in Europe that Iran does in the Mid East. You know Iran funds terrorism everywhere. Particularly they were essential to keeping Assad in power. They’re Russia’s biggest military supplier, key to propping up Putin’s military when China won’t. They’re revanchist. And they want to build an empire of Shia Islam. Now they’re on the verge of building WMD’s. And you’re right no one in the Arab world would help us if Iran gets weapons. Israel is the only country that would. That’s why I think we should unite with Israel to cripple the IRGC’s nuke program