Esquire-blogging

No doubt you, like me, were motivated to start leafing through the current issue of Esquire by a burning desire to read their interview with James Woolsey. Nevertheless, in case you somehow got distracted by the pictures of Scarlett Johansson, it's worth pointing out that it includes an interesting not-online article by Thomas P.B. Barnett author of the recent bigthink book, The Pentagon's New Map that I've been meaning to read.

Barnett argues that it's time for a Nixon-goes-to-China moment in Iran policy. This is a sort of "grand bargain" approach, though with rather different terms from what usually hears proposed:

We know you're getting the bomb, and we know there isn't much we can do about it right now unless we're willing to go up-tempo right up the guy. But, frankly, there's other fish we want to fry, so here's the deal You can have the bomb, and we'll take you off the Axis of Evil list, in exchange, not only will you bail us out on Iraq first and foremost by ending your sponsorship of Hezbollah and other anti-Israeli terrorist groups, help us bully Syria out of Lebanon, finally recognize Israel, and join us in guaranteeing the deal on a permanent Palestinian state. You want to be recognized as the regional player of note. We're prepared to do that. But that's the price tag. Pay it now or get ready to rumble.

I think that's a reasonably solid realpolitik calculation of where the real national interests lie. But we seem to be missing the dynamic scoring element here. Make a deal like this, and in a few years time Iran has a nuclear bomb and the capacity to renege on any and all of the promises its made to us. Now we have the same old standoff again, but with the balance of power now more favorable to Iran. There are also the dynamic consequences of Iranian proliferation to consider. This deal would make the shaky NPT into a dead letter, which carries with it some non-trivial problems. James Woolsey, meanwhile, predictably enough goes off too far in the other direction:

We are dealing with two radical Islamist organizations one from the Shiite side of Islam, one from the Sunni. It's Iran (as is rumored) and its affiliates, such as Hezbollah, on the one hand, Al Qaeda and its ideological supporters, such as Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, on the other. These Islamist totalitarian movements have been at war with us for some time, the Shiite Islamists since at least 1979, the Al Qaeda/Sunni Islamists since the early nineties. And along the way, the Baathists, who are the fascists of the Middle East, also decided they wanted to be at war with us. In sum, we have three totalitarian movements to deal with.

I think this is a more-than-slightly perverse way of looking at things. For starters, much as I'm glad not to live in Iran, calling the present state of affairs over there "totalitarian" renders the term so loose and baggy as to lose all utility. There's no settled definition, but this simply isn't Hitler/Stalin sort of territory we're talking about. It's a dictatorship, where opponents of the regime are subject to violence and intimidation. But it's lost all ideological vitality, there's no genocide or GULAG-scale mass repression, and there's not the totalitarian ambition to all-encompassing rule over people's lives. It's much more like today's China than Mao Zedong's.

But that's trivia. Speaking of Mao Zedong, a bona fide totalitarian mass murderer, Barnett rightly points out that the Nixon administration made quite the clever move in taking advantage of the Sino-Soviet split to bring about a bit of reconciliation with an unpleasant regime that was a distinctly second-order threat. One could also note that we allied with Mr Totalitarianism himself, Josef Stalin, as part of the war on Nazi Germany. Efforts to build a more friendly relationship with Iran would involve some abandonment of easy moral clarity, but nothing of nearly that scale. And it could bring significant benefits. History shows that Iran is willing to work at times with al-Qaeda. Many jump from that fact to the hasty conclusion that we must therefore war on them just as we fight the Salafi jihad. This neglects the crucial fact that Iran has also been willing at times to work against al-Qaeda. If you think the global jihad is some kind of trivial problem then, sure, it might make sense to say, "fuck them both." But if you take the threat seriously, then you should take seriously the notion that it might be better to have more allies and fewer enemies, rather than Woolsey-style taking on as many people as you can simultaneously. This gets back to Robert Wright's insightful essay about the trouble with "evil" as your enemy.

Barnett goes on to argue for any number of wacky schemes related to East Asia policy that I won't try and get into now, owing both to the wackiness of the schemes and my relative ignorance of the subject matter.