This has been an exceedingly weird week with respect to the escalating dispute between Iran and countries not thrilled with Iran's nuclear program.  On the one hand, you have the United States going to great lengths to widen and deepen the sanctions regime against Iran and deter Iran from trying to close the Straits of Hormuz.  On the other hand, you have U.S. officials contradicting themselves and backtracking from statements made to the Washington Post over the precise purpose of the sanctions.  On the third hand, you have signals that Turkey is brokering another round of negotiations between Iran and the P5 + 1. 

And then, in the last hand, you have... Israel.  Some weird s**t has been going down.  Following the apparent assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took great pains to "categorically deny" U.S. involvment.  In a New York Times front-pager, U.S. officials were even more explicit:

The assassination drew an unusually strong condemnation from the White House and the State Department, which disavowed any American complicity. The statements by the United States appeared to reflect serious concern about the growing number of lethal attacks, which some experts believe could backfire by undercutting future negotiations and prompting Iran to redouble what the West suspects is a quest for a nuclear capacity.

“The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to expand the denial beyond Wednesday’s killing, “categorically” denying “any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”

“We believe that there has to be an understanding between Iran, its neighbors and the international community that finds a way forward for it to end its provocative behavior, end its search for nuclear weapons and rejoin the international community,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Also this week, FP ran a story by Mark Perry describing Israel's "false flag" operation to recruit Pakistani terrorists.  In the essay, Perry gets the following quotes from retired U.S. intelligence officials: 

There's no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we're not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians....

We don't do bang and boom... and we don't do political assassinations.

Contrast this with the Israeli quotes in the NYT story:

The Israeli military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, writing on Facebook about the attack, said, “I don’t know who took revenge on the Iranian scientist, but I am definitely not shedding a tear,” Israeli news media reported....

A former senior Israeli security official, who would speak of the covert campaign only in general terms and on the condition of anonymity, said the uncertainty about who was responsible was useful. “It’s not enough to guess,” he said. “You can’t prove it, so you can’t retaliate. When it’s very, very clear who’s behind an attack, the world behaves differently.” (emphasis added)

I think the bolded section in the last paragraph suggests some intuition about what is happening.  If it's true that ambiguity about who is responsible for covert action is useful, and the United States is categorically denying its role in the assassination part of the covert action, then the Obama administration is openly and clearly signaling to Israel to cut it out. 

As to why the United States is doing this, I'd posit one or a combination of the following reasons: 

1)  Washington might have moral or legal qualms with the assassination dimension of these covert actions;  

2)  Such assasinations give the Iranian government cover to conduct its own assassinations campaign, which winnows the number of scientists the United States  can recruit for its own intelligence;

3)  The Obama administration thinks it can topple the regime, but these assassinations will be counterproductive;

4)  The Obama administration has been trying to get Iran back to the bargaining table, and this kind of covert action stops that from happening;

5)  The Obama administration is fragmented and therefore not entirely certain what it's aims are in Iran, but the policy principals know that what Israel is doing ain't helping. 

I'm leaning towards (5) at this point, but I'd entertain other explanations in the comments below.

Developing... in some very bizarre ways. 

UPDATE:  The Wall Street Journal has some further reporting that reveals a bit of the current uncertainty and the bureaucratic wrangling that appears to be going on.  Some key parts:

U.S. defense leaders are increasingly concerned that Israel is preparing to take military action against Iran, over U.S. objections, and have stepped up contingency planning to safeguard U.S. facilities in the region in case of a conflict.

President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other top officials have delivered a string of private messages to Israeli leaders warning about the dire consequences of a strike. The U.S. wants Israel to give more time for the effects of sanctions and other measures intended to force Iran to abandon its perceived efforts to build nuclear weapons.

Stepping up the pressure, Mr. Obama spoke by telephone on Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and U.S. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will meet with Israeli military officials in Tel Aviv next week....

Mr. Panetta and other top officials have privately sought assurances from Israeli leaders in recent weeks that they won't take military action against Iran. But the Israeli response has been noncommittal, U.S. officials said.

U.S. officials briefed on the military's planning said concern has mounted over the past two years that Israel may strike Iran. But rising tensions with Iran and recent changes at Iranian nuclear sites have ratcheted up the level of U.S. alarm.

"Our concern is heightened," a senior U.S. military official said of the probability of an Israeli strike over U.S. objections.

Tehran crossed at least one of Israel's "red lines" earlier this month when it announced it had begun enriching uranium at the Fordow underground nuclear facility near the holy city of Qom.

The planned closing of Israel's nuclear plant near Dimona this month, which was reported in Israeli media, sounded alarms in Washington, where officials feared it meant Israel was repositioning its own nuclear assets to safeguard them against a potential Iranian counterstrike.

Despite the close relationship between the U.S. and Israel, U.S. officials have consistently puzzled over Israeli intentions. "It's hard to know what's bluster and what's not with the Israelis," said a former U.S. official.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Well, this is just peachy:

The IRNA state news agency said Saturday that Iran's Foreign Ministry has sent a diplomatic letter to the U.S. saying that it has "evidence and reliable information" that the CIA provided "guidance, support and planning" to assassins "directly involved" in Roshan's killing.

The U.S. has denied any role in the assassination....

In the clearest sign yet that Iran is preparing to strike back for Roshan's killing, Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, the spokesman for Iran's Joint Armed Forces Staff, was quoted by the semiofficial ISNA news agency Saturday as saying that Tehran was "reviewing the punishment" of "behind-the-scene elements" involved in the assassination.

"Iran's response will be a tormenting one for supporters of state terrorism," he said, without elaborating. "The enemies of the Iranian nation, especially the United States, Britain and the Zionist regime, or Israel, have to be held responsible for their activities."

It's time to admit that I'm getting old.  I feel the aches and pains from workouts a bit more keenly.  I have to Google acronyms I see on Twitter all the time.  No matter how hard I try, I just don't feel comfortable wearing an untucked shirt with a blazer.  Only now am I discovering Alison Brie, which makes me way behind the curve.  Most importantly, however, I find myself reading threat assessments made by junior international relations scholars and shaking my head at these young-security-kids-with-their-having-no-memory-of-the-Cold-War. 

To explain where I'm coming from, here's what I wrote a little more than a year ago: 

Terrorism and piracy are certainly security concerns -- but they don't compare to the Cold War. A nuclear Iran is a major regional headache, but it's not the Cold War. A generation from now, maybe China poses as serious a threat as the Cold War Soviet Union. Maybe. That's a generation away, however.... 

I'm about to say something that might be controversial for people under the age of 25, but here goes. You know the threats posed to the United States by a rising China, a nuclear Iran, terrorists and piracy? You could put all of them together and they don't equal the perceived threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

I'll stand by that statement, and I'm not the only one here at FP to believe it.  Over the past week, however, I'm seeing some young whippersnappers junior scholars evince a different estimate of threats to U.S. national security. 

Over at Shadow Government, Paul Miller has a four-part series  -- count 'em, one, two, three, four -- of blog posts arguing that the world is a more dangerous place now than before.  He sums up his argument in this concluding section: 

Essentially, the United States thus faces two great families of threats today:  first, the nuclear-armed authoritarian powers, of which there are at least twice as many as there were during the Cold War; second, the aggregate consequences of state failure and the rise of non-state actors in much of the world, which is a wholly new development since the Cold War.  On both counts, the world is more dangerous than it was before 1989.  Essentially take the Cold War, add in several more players with nukes, and then throw in radicalized Islam, rampant state failure, and the global economic recession, and you have today.

I recognize that the world doesn't feel as dangerous as it did during the Cold War.  During the Cold War we all knew about the threat and lived with a constant awareness-usually shoved to the back of ours minds to preserve our sanity-that we might die an instantaneous firey death at any moment.  We no longer feel that way. 

Our feelings are wrong.  The Cold War engaged our emotions more because it was simple, easily understood, and, as an ideological contest, demanded we take sides and laid claim to our loyalties.  Today's environment is more complex and many-sided and so it is harder to feel the threat the same way we used to.  Nonetheless, the danger is real. 

Meh.  Actually, meh squared. 

To be fair to Miller, I do think he is getting at something that has changed over time during the post-Cold War era.  First, the threat envorinment does seem higher now than twenty years ago, as the Soviet Union was about to collapse.  China is more economically powerful, Russia is more revanchist, North, Korea, Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons, the barriers to entry for non-state actors to wreak havoc has gone up.  The likelihood of a conventional great power war is lower, but the likelihood of a serious attack on American soil seems higher than in late 1991.  So in terms of trend, it does feel like the world is less safe. 

What's also changed, however, is the tight coupling of the Cold War security environment (ironically, just as the security environment has become more loosely coupled, the global political economy has become more tightly coupled).  Because the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were such implacable adversaries and because they knew  it, the possibility of a small dispute -- Berlin, Cuba, a downed Korean airliner -- escalating very quickly was ever-present.  The possibility of an accident triggering all-out nuclear war was also higher than was realized at the time.  The current threat environment is more loosely interconnected, in that a small conflict seems less likely to immediately ramp up into another Cuban Missile Crisis.  Indeed, the events of the past year support that point.  Saudi Arabia essentially invaded Bahrain, and Iran did.... very little about it.  The United States deployed special forces into the heart of Pakistan's military complex.  The aftermath of that is undeniably uglier, but it's not we-are-at-DEFCON-ONE kind of ugly.  Miller might be more accurate in saying that there is a greater chance of a security dust-up in today's complex threat environment, but there's a much lower likelihood of those dust-ups spiraling out of control. 

In Miller's calculations, it seems that any country with a nuclear weapon constitutes an equal level of threat.  But that's dubious on multiple grounds.  First, none of the emerging nuclear states have anywhere close to a second-strike capability.  If they were to use their nukes against the United States, I think they know that there's an excellent chance that they don't survive the counterstrike.  Second, the counter Miller provides is that these authoritarian leaders are extra-super-crazy.  I'm not going to defend either the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or Kim the Younger, but are these leaders more crazy than either Mao or Stalin or Kim Jong Il?  Those are three of the worst leaders in history -- and none of them came close to using nuclear weapons.   Finally, the Pakistan case is instructive -- even after getting nukes, and even after getting very cozy with radical terrorist groups, that country has refrained from escalating hostilities with India to the point of another general war. 

As for the non-state threats, they are disturbing, but I'd posit that on this front the United States really is safer now than it was a decade ago.  The only organization capable of launching a coordinated terrorist strike against the United States is now a husk of its former self.  Indeed, I'd wager that Miller's emotions, or his memory of 9/11, are getting in the way of dispassionate analysis. 

In essence, Miller conflates the number of possible threats with a greater magnitude of threats.  I agree that there are more independent threats to the United States out there at present, but combined, they don't stack up to the Soviet threat.  To put it another way, I prefer avoiding a swarm of mosquitoes to one really ravenous bear. 

In related exaggerated threat analysis, Matthew Kroenig argues in Foreign Affairs that an airstrike on Iran might be the best of a bad set of options in dealing with Iran.  This has set poor Stephen Walt around the bend in response, as op-eds advocating an attack on Iran are wont to do. 

I've generally found both sides of the "attack Iran" debate to be equally dyspeptic, but in this case I do find Kroenig's logic to be a bit odd.  Here's his arguments for why a nuclear Iran is bad and containment is more problematic than a military attack: 

Some states in the region are doubting U.S. resolve to stop the program and are shifting their allegiances to Tehran. Others have begun to discuss launching their own nuclear initiatives to counter a possible Iranian bomb. For those nations and the United States itself, the threat will only continue to grow as Tehran moves closer to its goal. A nuclear-armed Iran would immediately limit U.S. freedom of action in the Middle East. With atomic power behind it, Iran could threaten any U.S. political or military initiative in the Middle East with nuclear war, forcing Washington to think twice before acting in the region. Iran’s regional rivals, such as Saudi Arabia, would likely decide to acquire their own nuclear arsenals, sparking an arms race. To constrain its geopolitical rivals, Iran could choose to spur proliferation by transferring nuclear technology to its allies -- other countries and terrorist groups alike. Having the bomb would give Iran greater cover for conventional aggression and coercive diplomacy, and the battles between its terrorist proxies and Israel, for example, could escalate. And Iran and Israel lack nearly all the safeguards that helped the United States and the Soviet Union avoid a nuclear exchange during the Cold War -- secure second-strike capabilities, clear lines of communication, long flight times for ballistic missiles from one country to the other, and experience managing nuclear arsenals. To be sure, a nuclear-armed Iran would not intentionally launch a suicidal nuclear war. But the volatile nuclear balance between Iran and Israel could easily spiral out of control as a crisis unfolds, resulting in a nuclear exchange between the two countries that could draw the United States in, as well.

These security threats would require Washington to contain Tehran. Yet deterrence would come at a heavy price. To keep the Iranian threat at bay, the United States would need to deploy naval and ground units and potentially nuclear weapons across the Middle East, keeping a large force in the area for decades to come. Alongside those troops, the United States would have to permanently deploy significant intelligence assets to monitor any attempts by Iran to transfer its nuclear technology. And it would also need to devote perhaps billions of dollars to improving its allies’ capability to defend themselves. This might include helping Israel construct submarine-launched ballistic missiles and hardened ballistic missile silos to ensure that it can maintain a secure second-strike capability. Most of all, to make containment credible, the United States would need to extend its nuclear umbrella to its partners in the region, pledging to defend them with military force should Iran launch an attack (emphasis added).

OK, first, exactly who is bandwagoning with Iran?  Seriously, who?  Kroenig provides no evidence, and I'm scratching my head to think of any data points.  The SCAF regime in Egypt has been a bit more friendly, but Turkey's distancing is far more significant and debilitating for Tehran's grand strategy.  Iran's sole Arab ally is in serious trouble, and its own economy is faltering badly.  The notion that time is on Iran 's side seems badly off. 

Second, Kroenig presume that a nuclear Iran would be more aggressive in the region and more likely to have a nuclear exchange with Iran.  I will again point to India/Pakistan.  Despite similar religious divides, and despite the presence of pliable non-state actors, those two countries have successfully kept a nuclear peace.  Kroenig might have an argument that Israel/Iran is different, but it's not in this essay.   Indeed, the bolded section contradicts Kroenig's own argument -- if Iran is not prepared to use its nuclear weapons, it seems unlikely that it will escalate crises to the point where its bluff is called.  If Kroenig's own scholarship suggests that America's nuclear superiority would still be an effective deterrent, then I'm not sure why he portrays the Iran threat in such menacing terms. 

There's more, but this post is long enough anyway.  Both Kroenig and Miller are correct to highlight current threats.  But, to put it gently, until all of these threats, combined, can cause this to happen in under an hour, I'm sleeping soundly. 

Am I missing anything? 

Following up on Newt Gingrich and his assessment of threats, I see that the New York Times has a William J. Broad front-pager on Gingrich's obsession with the possibility of adversaries using an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) against the United States:

[I]t is to the risk of an EMP attack that Mr. Gingrich has repeatedly returned. And while the message may play well to hawkish audiences, who might warm to the candidate’s suggestion that the United States engage in pre-emptive military strikes against Iran and North Korea, many nuclear experts dismiss the threat. America’s current missile defense system would thwart such an attack, these experts say, and the nations in question are at the kindergarten stage of developing nuclear arms.

The Missile Defense Agency, an arm of the Pentagon that maintains an arsenal of ground-based interceptors ready to fly into space and smash enemy warheads, says that defeating such an attack would be as straightforward as any other defense of the continental United States.

“It doesn’t matter if the target is Chicago or 100 miles over Nebraska,” said Richard Lehner, an agency spokesman. “For the interceptor, it’s the same thing.” He called the potential damage from a nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack “pretty theoretical.”

Yousaf M. Butt, a nuclear physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who last year did a lengthy analysis of EMP for The Space Review, a weekly online journal, said, “If terrorists want to do something serious, they’ll use a weapon of mass destruction — not mass disruption.” He said, “They don’t want to depend on complicated secondary effects in which the physics is not very clear.”

Mr. Gingrich’s spokesman, R. C. Hammond, did not respond to e-mails asking for comment. But the candidate, a former history professor and House speaker, has defended his characterizations as accurate. At a forum in Des Moines on Saturday for military veterans, Mr. Gingrich said an electromagnetic pulse attack was one of several pressing national security threats the United States faced. “In theory, a relatively small device over Omaha would knock out about half the electricity generated in the United States,” he told the veterans.

I'm neither a security expert nor a rocket scientist.  After reading Broad's article, the Space Review annalysis, the rebuttal to that analysis, and Sharon Winberger's excellent FP write-up from last year, however, I'm reasonably confident that the threat posed by EMP is remote for the near-to-medium future.  The scenarios in which an EMP would affect the United States rely on a) rogue states making serious leaps forward in their ballistic missile technology and nuclear engineering; and b) those same actors deciding that it's in their national interest to launch a first strike against a country with a reliable second-strike nuclear deterrent. 

Nevertheless, I can see why Newt Skywalker would be concerned.  Most of the taking-EMP-threat seriously essays harp on the devastating effect of such an attack.  Surely, Gingrich would argue, even a small possibility of this actually happening justifies at least some investment into countermeasures and preventive actions.  Indeed, Gingrich has explicitly made that argument: 

Without adequate preparation, its impact would be so horrifying that we would basically lose our civilization in a matter of seconds.... I think it's very important to get people to understand now, before there is a disaster, how truly grave the threat is.*

Fair enough... let's be generous and say there's a 10% chance of this being a real problem over the next two decades.  If that's the case, maybe Gingrich is right to bring it up as an underestimated threat. 

Here's my question, however.  If we're talking about threats to civilization as we know it, isn't there another possibility that has a much higher probability of occurring -- let's say, better than 50% at least -- and a similarly lax amount of preventive action?  Like, say, climate change? 

As Uri Friedman and Joshua Keating have documented for FP, however, Gingrich's assessment of that threat has changed recently.   Last month, on this issue, he said the following: 

I actually don't know whether global warming is occurring.... The earth's temperatures go up and down over geologic times over and over again. As recently as 11,000 years ago the Gulf Stream quit for 600 years. And for 600 years you had an ice age in Europe because there was no warm water coming up. And then it started up again. Nobody knows why it quit, nobody knows why it started up. I'm agnostic.

This is fascinating.  On the one hand, you have a long-term cataclysmic threat to the planet that commands the consensus of an overwhelming majority of experts in the field.  On the other hand, you have a long-term cataclysmic threat to the United States that commands nowhere close to the same level of consensus.  Based on his rhetoric, Gingrich wants urgent action to be taken on the latter, but not the former.  Why? 

I'm not bringing this up to suggest that Gingrich is a buffoon.  He could plausibly argue that a lot of people are harping on climate change while only Gingrich can call attention to the EMP possibility.  It's possible that the costs of preventive action on climate change are much greater than dealing with EMP (though if that includes preventive attacks on Iran and North Korea, I'm dubious). 

What I'm wondering is whether there is a partisan divide in assessing threats, as there is in assessing economic principles.  I wonder if conservatives are far more likely to focus on threats in which there is a clear agent with a malevolent intent, whereas liberals are more likely to focus on threats that lack agency and are more systemic in nature (climate change, pandemics, nuclear accidents, etc.) 

What do you think? 

*Incidentally, this is the same logic I used to justify greater research into the threat posed by the living dead.  Just saying.... 

A little more than a month ago I wrote the following:

The sanctions and the lack of technical competence are probably helping [slow down Iran's nuclear program], but if I had to guess, I'd wager that the covert attempts at sabotage are yielding the most promising results.  The thing is, no administration can publicly say, "hey, everyone should relax about Iran's nuclear program, cause we've got covert operatives crawling all around Natanz, Bushehr, and Qom.".... 

Now, I don't know this to be true -- it's possible that covert action has yielded little in the way of results.  Still, this might be a situation in which no news on Iran is actually good news.

I still don't know this to be true, but after reading this Financial Times story by Joseph Menn and Mary Watkins, my confidence in this assertion is rising: 

A piece of highly sophisticated malicious software that has infected an unknown number of power plants, pipelines and factories over the past year is the first program designed to cause serious damage in the physical world, security experts are warning.

The Stuxnet computer worm spreads through previously unknown holes in Microsoft's Windows operating system and then looks for a type of software made by Siemens and used to control industrial components, including valves and brakes....

At a closed-door conference this week in Maryland, Ralph Langner, a German industrial controls safety expert, said Stuxnet might be targeting not a sector but perhaps only one plant, and he speculated that it could be a controversial nuclear facility in Iran.

According to Symantec, which has been investigating the virus and plans to publish details of the rogue commands on Wednesday, Iran has had far more infections than any other country.

“It is not speculation that this is the first directed cyber weapon”, or one aimed at a specific real-world process, said Joe Weiss, a US expert who has testified to Congress on technological security threats to the electric grid and other physical operations. “The only speculation is what it is being used against, and by whom.”

Experts say Stuxnet’s knowledge of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, the Siemens program and the associated hardware of the target industry make it the work of a well-financed, highly organised team.

They suggest that it is most likely associated with a national government and that terrorism, ideological motivation or even extortion cannot be ruled out.

Stuxnet began spreading more than a year ago but research has been slow because of the complexity of the software and the difficulty in getting the right industry officials talking to the right security experts.

Unless there's an Iranian John McClane running around Iran, this looks like something that could help retard Iran's nuclear program. 

Now, I'm very uncomfortable with a lot of the rhetoric surrounding the notion  of "cyberwarfare." It needlessly equates actions in cyberspace with real-world warfare, when I'm not at all sure that either the logic of consequences or the logic of appropriateness are the same in both spheres. 

That said, I do wonder about the long-term effects of this kind of cyberattack. The very way the FT is reporting this story suggests that some kind of line has been crossed. Not to mention the fact that the news coverage itself suggests that this gambit has run its course. 

Developing... in ways that I cannot begin to fathom. 

Well, it appears that Jeffrey Goldberg's warnings about Israel attacking Iran within the next year have been -- for now --  overtaken by events: 

The Obama administration, citing evidence of continued troubles inside Iran’s nuclear program, has persuaded Israel that it would take roughly a year — and perhaps longer — for Iran to complete what one senior official called a “dash” for a nuclear weapon, according to American officials.

Administration officials said they believe the assessment has dimmed the prospect that Israel would pre-emptively strike against the country’s nuclear facilities within the next year, as Israeli officials have suggested in thinly veiled threats.

As a general rule, a lack of bombing certainly seems like good news.  The question is, why?  What's slowing down the Iranians? 

It is unclear whether the problems that Iran has had enriching uranium are the result of poor centrifuge design, difficulty obtaining components or accelerated Western efforts to sabotage the nuclear program....

Some of Iran’s enrichment problems appear to have external origins. Sanctions have made it more difficult for Iran to obtain precision parts and specialty metals. Moreover, the United States, Israel and Europe have for years engaged in covert attempts to disrupt the enrichment process by sabotaging the centrifuges.

The sanctions and the lack of technical competence are probably heloping, but if I had to guess, I'd wager that the covert attempts at sabotage are yielding the most promising results.  The thing is, no administration can publicly say, "hey, everyone should relax about Iran's nuclear program, cause we've got covert operatives crawling all around Natanz, Bushehr, and Qom."  So, the public face of U.S. foreign policy towards Iran's nuclear program remains sanctions and a willingness to negotiate.  The optics of this policy posture don't look good. 

Now, I don't know this to be true -- it's possible that covert action has yielded little in the way of results.  Still, this might be a situation in which no news on Iran is actually good news. 

Developing....

I'm behind the curve on this, but as someone who's written a bit on sanctions I feel the need to comment on the latest round of UN sanctions applied against Iran. 

At FP, Christopher Wall and Kori Schake effectively douse any enthusiasm optimists like Gideon Rachman might have had about the sanctions working in an of themselves.  One could argue that the true assessment depends on how much and how effectively the United States and European Union are able to leverage the sanctions resolution language into effecive action against the Iranian Central Bank and other financial entities.  That said, David Sanger's NYT story suggests the gloom that pervades this foreign policy problem:   

So what, exactly, does President Obama plan to do if, as everyone expects, these sanctions fail, just as the previous three did?

There is a Plan B — actually, a Plan B, C, and D — parts of which are already unfolding across the Persian Gulf. The administration does not talk about them much, at least publicly, but they include old-style military containment and an operation known informally at the C.I.A. as the Braindrain Project to lure away Iran’s nuclear talent. By all accounts, Mr. Obama has ramped up a Bush-era covert program to undermine Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure, and he has made quiet diplomatic use of Israel’s lurking threat to take military action if diplomacy and pressure fail.

But ask the designers and executors of these programs what they all add up to, and the answer inevitably boils down to “not enough.” Taken together, officials say, they may slow Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon, which has already run into far greater technical slowdowns than anyone expected. If the pressure builds, Iran might be driven to the negotiating table, which it has avoided since Mr. Obama came to office offering “engagement.”

But even Mr. Obama, in his more-in-sadness-than-anger description on Wednesday of why diplomacy has so far yielded nothing, conceded “we know that the Iranian government will not change its behavior overnight” and went on to describe how instead the sanctions would create “growing costs.”

So no, this ain't going to accomplish much.  One thing I would like this episode to do is force a reconsideration of the whole idea of "smart sanctions."  I've been reviewing the literature on this subject, and further study is clearly needed.  Nevertheless, the evidence to date suggests that smart sanctions are no better at generating concessions from the target state.  In many ways they are worse. 

The comparative advantage of smart sanctions is that they appear to solve several political problems for sender countries.  Smart sanctions really do reduce the suffering by civilian populations.  Because they are billed as minimizing humanitarian and human rights concerns, they receive only muted criticism from global civil society.  Because they do not impede significant trade flows, smart sanctions can be imposed indefinitely with minimal cost.  They clearly solve the political problem of "doing something" in the face of target state transgressions.  What they don't do is solve the policy problem of coercing the target state into changing its policies. 

The comparative disadvantage of smart sanctions is their ability to lull policymakers into believing that they're doing something when they're not.   Now, to be fair, sometimes that's the idea -- maybe policymakers don't want to take more aggressive or risky action against a target state.  In that situation, smart sanctions are perfect.  My concern, however, is that policymakers believe that another multilateral round of smart sanctions will actually force the Iranians to do what the rest of the world wants it to do -- because it won't.  Short of comprehensive sanctions, nothing in the economic statecraft policy tool kit will work. 

The story of the day, from David Sanger and Thom Shanker: 

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.

Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President' Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, came in the midst of an intensifying effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a set of military alternatives, still under development, to be considered should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran to change course....

One senior official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the memo, described the document as “a wake-up call.” But White House officials dispute that view, insisting that for 15 months they had been conducting detailed planning for many possible outcomes regarding Iran's nuclear program.

In an interview on Friday, General Jones declined to speak about the memorandum. But he said: “On Iran, we are doing what we said we were going to do. The fact that we don’t announce publicly our entire strategy for the world to see doesn’t mean we don’t have a strategy that anticipates the full range of contingencies — we do.”

But in his memo, Mr. Gates wrote of a variety of concerns, including the absence of an effective strategy should Iran choose the course that many government and outside analysts consider likely: Iran could assemble all the major parts it needs for a nuclear weapon — fuel, designs and detonators — but stop just short of assembling a fully operational weapon.

In that case, Iran could remain a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while becoming what strategists call a “virtual” nuclear weapons state.

Now, if one doesn't read carefully, the obvious implication to infer from this lead is that the Obama administration has been lax on both policy planning and thinking about military contingencies. 

If one reads the entire story carefully, however -- something I highly recommend -- two important facts stand out.  First, Gates wrote this in January, but it's being leaked now, in mid-April.  As Spencer Ackerman notes, the Obama administration has geared up on a variety of fronts on both Iran and nonproliferation.  You can criticize the response as inadequate or misguided -- but it's safe to say that there was a policy response. 

So why leak the memo now?  The Power Line's Scott Johnson asks that very question: 

As always with stories like this, one wonders about the motives of the Times's sources. Why would anonymous officials leak word of a highly classified memorandum suggesting that the administration has no policy beyond what has proved to be empty talk? These apparently well-informed officials must think that we have something to worry about.

That's one possibility.  Another (not mutually exclusive) possibility is that whoever leaked was on the losing side of the policy debate.  The White House has been centralizing the foreign policy process, which inevitably leads to some hurt feelings.  Furthermore, the bureaucratic politics on Middle East policy have become both nasty and personal.  It wouldn't surprise me if someone in the administration thinks that it's payback time.  Which isn't to say that the leaker is necessarily wrong, but Marc Ambinder is right -- there are multiple possible motivations for the leak in the first place.  

The second useful nugget of information comes from this paragraph: 

Mr. Gates’s memo appears to reflect concerns in the Pentagon and the military that the White House did not have a well prepared series of alternatives in place in case all the diplomatic steps finally failed. Separately, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote a “chairman’s guidance” to his staff in December conveying a sense of urgency about contingency planning. He cautioned that a military attack would have “limited results,” but he did not convey any warnings about policy shortcomings (emphasis added).

If the senior uniformed officer is skeptical of the utility of a military attack, that strikes me as pretty important.  Sure, one option could be to really ramp up the military option to include a ground assault, but even Iran hawks acknowledge that this is off the table. 

So, what do I know now that I didn't know prior to reading Sanger and Shanker?  I'd say the following: 

1)  All policy options on Iran stink. 

2)  The bureaucratic politics of U.S. Middle East policy are getting worse;

3)  The administration has responded to the Gates memo, but not in a way that pleases all of the bureaucratic heavyweights inside the administraion. 

4)  January is apparently a month of foreign policy "wake-up calls" and "bombshells" in the White House. 

What I don't know, after reading Sanger and Shanker, is whether someone like Gates would approve of the administration's current contingency planning on Iran. 

The Financial Times' indefatigable Goeff Dyer has an excellent story about Israel's efforts to lobby Beijing to take a tougher line on Iran.  Actually, that's really just the news peg for a story about the myriad ways in which Beijing is becoming enmeshed in Middle East politics: 

Beijing... has to weigh up a growing web of other interests in the Middle East which could have some influence on its approach to sanctions.

Indeed, parts of the foreign policy establishment in China are warning that it would be against the government’s interests in the Middle East to get too close to Iran.

China should not “undertake to please Iran and at the same time hurt the feelings of the Arabs and other countries,” said Yin Gang, a Chinese expert on the Middle East in a recent article.

Israel is part of that web of interests. Although China has taken a pro-Palestinian position in international forums and is critical of Israel’s nuclear capability,Beijing has over the years had an unusually close relationship with Israel, which has been a key military supplier.

“The relationship with Israel is an important one,” says Willem van Kemenade, a China analyst who has written a book on Iran’s relations with China....

According to diplomats, Beijing has been quietly lobbied by Saudi Arabia, which has been its biggest supplier of oil for most of the past decade and which has warned of the dangers a nuclear Iran would pose to Middle East stability.

Chinese analysts admit that a nuclear arms race in the Middle East could pose a risk to its energy security.

Yet China has interests in Iran that go beyond energy investments.

Chinese scholars mention that China’s own nuclear weapons capability was achieved in the face of western sanctions. Chinese leaders share with Iran a suspicion of what they regard as western interference in their domestic politics.

Many Chinese observers consider the unrest in Iran to be partly inspired by US interests. China also sees Iran as a future partner in a Middle East in which the US is less dominant....

There is also the added question of China’s Muslim population. After the riots in Xinjiang last summer, China was criticised for its treatment of its Uighur minority by Turkey and by two Iranian ayatollahs.

Given how sensitive Beijing is about political radicalisation of Muslims in Xinjiang by people outside the country, “the incident was a warning to Beijing that it must exercise caution when dealing with Iran’s political and religious elites”, according to a recent report by the International Crisis Group. 

So, just to review: 

1)  China is cozying up to a powerful country on the periphery of the Middle East;

2)  Because of its religion and periodically bellicose foreign policy, that country is viewed as an outsider by the Arab Middle East;

3)  This country is pursuing internal security policies that would generously be described as "controversial" by the rest of the world;

4)  It's Middle East policy can have pronounced effects on China's own domestic politics; 

5)  All the while, Chinese energy dependence on the region is increasing rapidly.

Welcome to the Middle East, China!!

Anyone else intrigued by this BBC report? 

Imposing more sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme would not be a quick enough solution, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister has said.

Prince Saud al-Faisal said the threat posed by Iran demanded a "more immediate solution" than sanctions....

Speaking at a joint Riyadh news conference with Mrs Clinton, Prince Saud said: "Sanctions are a long-term solution. They may work, we can't judge.

"But we see the issue in the shorter term maybe because we are closer to the threat... So we need an immediate resolution rather than a gradual resolution."

While the Saudi minister did not detail his vision of a quick solution in public, it is likely that options were discussed behind closed doors in the meeting between Mrs Clinton and King Abdullah, says the BBC's Kim Ghattas, who is travelling with the top US diplomat.

Um.... beyond appeasement, what exactly are the policies that could lead to an "immediate resolution" of the Iranian nuclear program?  

Seriously, I'm stumped on this point.  All of the possible "immediate" options on the table -- Israeli airstrike, a Saudi deterrent capability -- seem equally ludicrous. 

UPDATE:  This Financial Times story by Abeer Allam appears to be an attempt at clarification:

Saudi foreign policy official told the French press agency on Tuesday that the kingdom was not advocating military action when Prince Saud said that sanctions were not a solution.

Riyadh was arguing that the Middle East peace process was a faster and more effective means to ease tensions in the region, the official said.

”There is no point in our spending all our time on sanctions which will not have an effect in the short term. We need something more tangible,” the offical told AFP.

”We don’t want a military strike ... A military strike, we still believe, will be very counterproductive,” he said. (emphasis added)

Um..... I agree that sanctions are not a quick fix, but does anyone, anywhere believe that the Middle East peace process will be faster than other policy options?  Anyone? 

Here is a quick list of things that I believe will happen more quickly than a successful Middle East peace process:

1)  Cold fusion;

2)  Bermuda wins gold medal in men's luge;

3)  Miley Cyrus nominated for Best Actress Oscar

Steve Walt effectively vivisects Adam Lawther's op-ed yesterday on the alleged positive externalities that an Iranian nuclear bomb would have on the Middle East and American foreign policy.  Rather than dogpile on, I'm going to go meta again. 

I'm intrigued by what op-ed editor David Shipley is trying to do on the Iran debate.  Lawther's op-ed is hardly the first strange op-ed on Iran to appear in the past few months.  We've also had Alan Kuperman's analysis for why bombing Iran is such a good idea, and the Leverett's pay-no-attention-to-the-protestors-behind-the-curtain argument for enhanced engagement with the current Iranian leadership. 

As the links above suggest, I'm not a fan of any of these arguments.  That said, I am a fan of having these arguments inserted into the public discussion over Iran.  Ever since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a common lament has been that was no public debate about the wisdom of different policy options.  Both foreign policy mooseheads and scholars have highlighted this pre-invasion consensus.  These analyses might be somewhat exaggerated, but I think it would be difficult to deny that in the opinion pages of the major newspapers, the deck was somewhat stacked in favor of military action. 

My hunch is that Shipley is thinking:  "Won't Get Fooled Again"  He wants as heterogeneous an array of views as possible as the Iran situation develops. 

There is something laudable about this if it's true -- it's exactly what the Times op-ed page should be doing as a foreign policy crisis unfolds.  My only concern is the caliber of reasoning in these op-eds.  They are, as Walt put it, "silly arguments."  On the other hand, if these ideas are vetted and then shot down, maybe the foreign policy community actually knows what it's talking about this time around. 

I was wondering how the Leveretts would respond to the Ashura protests from last month.  Now I have my answer:  an op-ed in the New York Times in which they argue "The Islamic Republic of Iran is not about to implode. Nevertheless, the misguided idea that it may do so is becoming enshrined as conventional wisdom in Washington." 

Their op-ed is worth a good hard look, precisely because it does push back against the conentional wisdom in Washington.  It's not the popular thing to say that the Obama administration should double down on engagement, and I respect that they're willing to make the exact same arguments for engagement that they did before the June protests. 

However, it is also worth remembering Drezner's Eleventh Commandment for Policy Wonks:  just because you're going against the conventional wisdom doesn't mean you're right. 

As the Leveretts note on their blog site, "It is hard to do serious political analysis of a contested political environment when one is, in effect, 'rooting' for one of the contestants."  So true* -- but scanning their op-ed, the Leveretts appear to have their own rooting interest.  Consider these two paragraphs:

[A]ssertions that the Islamic Republic is now imploding in the fashion of the shah’s regime in 1979 do not hold up to even the most minimal scrutiny. Antigovernment Iranian Web sites claim there were “tens of thousands” of Ashura protesters; others in Iran say there were 2,000 to 4,000. Whichever estimate is more accurate, one thing we do know is that much of Iranian society was upset by the protesters using a sacred day to make a political statement.

Vastly more Iranians took to the streets on Dec. 30, in demonstrations organized by the government to show support for the Islamic Republic (one Web site that opposed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election in June estimated the crowds at one million people). Photographs and video clips lend considerable plausibility to this estimate — meaning this was possibly the largest crowd in the streets of Tehran since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s funeral in 1989. In its wake, even President Ahmadinejad’s principal challenger in last June’s presidential election, Mir Hossein Mousavi, felt compelled to acknowledge the “unacceptable radicalism” of some Ashura protesters.

The possibility of a backlash to the Ashura protests is certainly an interesting one, and should be explored further.  I want to focus on the numbers bandied about in these two paragraphs, however.  The first graph suggests that the number of protestors on Ashura ranged from 2,000 to "tens of thousands," placing those as the acceptable bounds.  OK, but multiple news outlets, including the New York Times, have mentioned "hundreds of thousands of Iranians" out on the streets on that day.  It seems a bit odd to cap the upper bound at "tens of thousands."

The second paragraph suggests a million supporters came out on December 30th in Tehran to support the government, citing one website.  OK, but there are other press reports that suggested a much lower number -- "tens of thousands," according to the Los Angeles Times.  Again, it seems odd not to suggest the range of estimates. 

[UPDATE:  as Andrew Sullivan,  Scott Lucas, and several commenter have observed, a distinction should be made between government workers told to march without repercussions, and the hundred of thousands risking their lives challenge the Khamenei regime.]

Again, I'm not saying that there were more Ashura protestors than government protestors -- I too would like to see the data on this question presented in an objective manner.  I am saying that the Leveretts seem to be cherry-picking their protest numbers -- which makes me seriously doubt the objectivity of the rest of their analysis. 

UPDATE:  I see that my FP overlords FP's editors have the good sense to publish Hooman Majd's assessment of the situation in Iran, which is well worth reading -- as is Robin Wright's analysis of recent opposition manifestos in the Los Angeles Times. 

 ANOTHER UPDATE:  Kevin Sullivan at RealClear World is correct to point out that the Leveretts are asking the right analytical questions in their op-ed -- questions others have also been asking.  Based on the way they've skewed framed their data, however,  I simply don't put much faith in their answers. 

LAST UPDATE:  The Leveretts respond in the comments section -- and be sure to check out the follow-ups as well. 

*And I should now fully disclose that I've received funding and/or affiliation and/or membership from at least six seven eight of the organizations now blacklisted by Iran's Ministry of Intelligence (hat tip:  Steve Clemons, whose New America Foundation received the double-dip, along with the International Republican Institute). 

Two articles worth reading this AM: 

1.  Ali Ansari's history of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in The National Interest.  Ansari explains exactly how the IRGC has become intermeshed with the Iranian economy, and what that means going forward.  His key point:  it's not about the ideology anymore: 

Though the IRGC started its life as a defender of the revolution, over time the organization has become increasingly involved in commercial interests. Divisions within the Revolutionary Guard, particularly between its veterans and their heirs, have deepened. Now in bed with an increasingly radicalized elite in Iran, the IRGC seems to be less about protecting the people of the country and more about protecting its own material interests. Iran is rapidly becoming a security state.

2.  Blaine Harden's Washington Post story on the fallout from North Korean protests of the government's controversial currency reform last month.  Yes, you read that correctly, North Korean protests.  The good parts:

Grass-roots anger and a reported riot in an eastern coastal city pressured the government to amend its confiscatory policy. Exchange limits have been eased, allowing individuals to possess more cash.

The currency episode reveals new constraints on Kim's power and may signal a fundamental change in the operation of what is often called the world's most repressive state. The change is driven by private markets that now feed and employ half the country's 23.5 million people, and appear to have grown too big and too important to be crushed, even by a leader who loathes them....

The currency episode seems far from over, and there have been indications that Kim still has the stomach for using deadly force.

There have been public executions and reinforcements have been dispatched to the Chinese border to stop possible mass defections, according to reports in Seoul-based newspapers and aid groups with informants in the North.

Still, analysts say there has also been evidence of unexpected shifts in the limits of Kim's authority.

"The private markets have created a new power elite," said Koh Yu-whan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. "They pay bribes to bureaucrats in Kim's government, and they are a threat that is not going away."

Why did something like this take 40 years?  This is an overdetermined answer, but I have to think that the DPRK leadership has become so materially impoverished that North Koreans with ambition have decided that they are better off going outside the syatem rather than trying to achieve a bureaucratic sinecure. 

The common thread in both stories?  Ideological zeal only takes you so far, even in a totalitarian society.  Market forces will worm their way into even the most theocratic or communist societies.  What will be interesting is how those getting rich will respond to political instability, even as they have profted from the existing rules of the game. 

My FP colleague Marc Lynch has dissected Alan Kuperman's New York Times op-ed on the wisdom of bombing Iran.  Lynch takes great pains (more on that in a moment) to rip apart Kuperman's argument so I don't have to, but I can't resist pointing out the most tendentious point in the essay:

As for the risk of military strikes undermining Iran’s opposition, history suggests that the effect would be temporary. For example, NATO’s 1999 air campaign against Yugoslavia briefly bolstered support for President Slobodan Milosevic, but a democratic opposition ousted him the next year.

Now, this assertion contains facts, but is so radically incomplete as to  be f***ing insane.  

To add a bit of detail:  maybe, just maybe, the reason Slobodan Milosevic was ousted had less to do with the bombing itself, but because the Serbian leader completely capitulated to NATO's demands on Kosovo after eight weeks of airstrikes.   The bombing angered those already on the outs with Milosevic; the acquiescence after costly punishment angered Serbian nationalists and technocrats.  So it wasn't just the bombing that affected Serbian politics -- it was Milosevic's decision to alter Serbian policy in a manner favorable to NATO.

So, yes, if the Iranian leadership does what Kuperman wants them to do after being bombed -- acquiesce on the nuclear program -- then yes, they'll be gone.  Now, raise your hand if you think the current Iranian leadership will respond to a bombing campaign by shifting their position closer to the U.S. position. 

So, yes, this is a pretty silly op-ed, and the New York Times wasted an awful lot of column inches on it.  Go ahead, heap some calumny on them. *

That said, the venom directed at it by Lynch and others seems a bit over the top.   Lynch's explanation for why is that unless these arguments hit some strident pushback, we'll be going to war again:

The Obama administration almost certainly doesn't want to make such a wrong-headed move --- but, then, there are a lot of things which the Obama administration doesn't want to do but has been forced into by political realities (Gitmo, the public option, escalation in Afghanistan) and intentions aren't enough.   Many people may have assumed that the legacy of Iraq would have raised the bar on such arguments for war, that someone making such all too familiar claims would simply be laughed out of the public square.  The NYT today shows that they aren't.  I suspect that one of the great foreign policy challenges of 2010 is going to be to push back on this mad campaign for another pointless, counter-productive war for the sake of war. 

I would interpret things differently.  Changing the policy status quo is really, really hard, and it's normally pretty easy to gin up significant political opposition to any proposed change.  The status quo on Iran is that we're not bombing them , so I expect that to continue for a good long while. 

Indeed, the reactions to this op-ed remind me of the panic among progressives in 2007 that the Bush administration was gearing up to bomb Iran.  The truth was somewhat different.  

By all means, critique Kuperman's argument.  But let's not pretend that Dick Cheney is still vice president, or that Bill Kristol can start a war with a Weekly Standard column.  The world really has changed a bit. 

*UPDATE:  The more I think about the massive flaws in this op-ed, the more I'm beginning to wonder if this wasn't a strategic move by the New York Times op-ed page editors to subtly undercut the neoconservative argument for war.  Indeed, I would not describe the GOP links to the essay as terribly enthusiastic.  I do love Tom Gross' characterization of it as, "dry and academic and long (it runs to two pages online)."  Yes, because if you can't make the case for military action in under 400 words, there's just no point in bothering. 

Seth Robinson has a interesting essay over at The New Republic that explains why Russia is loathe to sanction Iran over nuclear issues.  The key part: 

How does Russia benefit from its nuclear cooperation with Iran? Simple economics provides a compelling first answer: The Russian economy has not only reaped the benefits of the Bushehr deal, but it has also been bolstered by the sale of fuel and the potential sale of additional reactors. What's more, the nuclear project is only one of many economic agreements between the two countries. Total bilateral trade hovers around $2 billion, as Russia supplies Iran with consumer goods, oil and gas equipment, and military technology. Russia also enjoys privileged access (along with China) to Iran's Southern Pars gas fields.... Second, Iran is still a powerbroker in the Caspian oil trade; its position on the Caspian Sea, which is estimated to hold more than 10 billion tons of oil reserves, makes it an important and influential partner for Russia. Tehran has been extensively involved in coordinating transnational oil and gas deals, arranging transportation of exports with a number of regional states. Russia is in a position to use its good relations with Iran to challenge Washington's efforts to create new pipelines and foreign direct investment in the Caspian region. Iran has already proven an effective regional ally for Russia--in addition to cooperating on energy deals, Tehran has pointedly refrained from criticizing Moscow's Chechnya policy and has held strategic meetings with Moscow on the Taliban.  Finally, Russian nuclear cooperation with Iran provides the Kremlin with leverage over the United States. Moscow remains guarded against Western advances into its "near abroad," and has fought to keep neighboring states from being brought into the NATO fold. By dangling the Iranian nuclear issue in front of the United States, Moscow may believe it has a means to maintain regional dominance. Russian leaders have already extracted concessions from Washington, as the United States recently altered plans for missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic. Yielding on the Iran issue would strip Moscow of the ability to coerce the United States and damage its own ability to reassert local influence.  

The first reason is both sufficient and compelling; I'm not entirely sure I buy the latter two.  Iran's nuclear program gave the United States just cause to insert missile programs into Eastern Europe in the first place -- so Iran's nuclear ambitions have caused as many problems for Russia's near abroad as they have ameliorated.  As for the Caspian argument, it's not clear how a Russian-Iranian axis challenges U.S. energy diplomacy in the region.  If anything, that axis probably incentivizes the smaller energy producers to find a viable pipeline alternative that flows outside of Moscow and Tehran's orbit. 

That said, the economic interest argument is pretty powerful.  So, does this mean sanctions would be fruitless?  Not necessarily.  The paradox about economic sanctions is that although allies are more reluctant to coerce each other, they are also more successful once they make the decision to coerce.  At the same time, successful sanction efforts almost always end at the threat stage.  So if Russia ever signaled that it would seriously contemplate a cut-off in bilateral exchange, the Iranians would be likely to concede before implementation. 

This is the outcome the Russians would prefer the most -- a mild threat from the P5 + 1 prods Tehran into taking just enough action to avoid further isolation, and any further implementation of sanctions.   

But I could be wrong.  Persuade me in the comments.