Experts Consider Ability to Deter Iran

By Paul Starobin, National Journal

WASHINGTON — In the summer of 1963, a secret report handed to John F. Kennedy’s White House generated colossal anxiety. The “Special National Intelligence Estimate,” prepared by the CIA, found that Communist China was close to obtaining nuclear weapons. Yikes! The very idea of Mao Zedong and his band of Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries possessing nukes was enough to prompt the Kennedy squad to consider a pre-emptive military strike to take out China’s weapons program. The American public, accustomed to sensationalist (and often blatantly racist) propaganda portraying the Chinese as “the Yellow Peril,” might well have cheered such an assault (see GSN, May 18).

But the intelligence appraisal contained too many uncertainties for the military option to gain traction. And so, a little over a year later, on October 16, 1964, Red China joined the nuclear club: It successfully tested a uranium fission bomb in the remote western region of Xinjiang. “This is a major achievement of the Chinese people in their struggle to increase their national defense capability and oppose the U.S. imperialist policy of nuclear blackmail and nuclear threats,” the Beijing regime declared in its official statement. In Washington, Secretary of State Dean Rusk blandly noted, “The United States has fully anticipated the possibility of Beijing’s entry into the nuclear weapons field and has taken it into full account in determining our military posture and our own nuclear weapons program.” The translation: The U.S. would rely on the strategy of deterrence, based on the implied use of its own considerable nuclear arsenal, to protect America and its allies from Mao’s bomb.

That was a delicate and dangerous episode, but it passed without crisis. Mao didn’t try anything rash, like grabbing for Taiwan, and with the benefit of a few decades of hindsight, it can be seen that Communist China’s acquisition of the bomb probably nudged it closer to the lofty position it occupies today — as a “stakeholder” in the global political system, in the recent words of George W. Bush. China’s passage of the atomic rite of geopolitics — in 1964, only the two superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, along with Britain and France, possessed the bomb — made it inevitable that a U.S. president would one day come along and treat the nation as a true heavyweight, as Richard Nixon did in his historic trip to Beijing in 1972. And indeed, China’s pursuit of the bomb in retrospect appears to have had less to do with Mao’s revolution at home than with the nation’s craving for respect from foreigners who had so often trampled on its sovereignty. Mao himself famously called the bomb a useless “paper tiger.”

For today’s Washington, a vital question is — or at least ought to be — whether another nuclear-weapons-aspiring revolutionary band, the mullahs of Iran, could be kept at bay by the bracing strictures of deterrence, as Mao’s regime was. A “deterrable” Iran, in the long run, could become a “stakeholder” Iran, if not under the mullahs then perhaps one day under a less truculent successor crew.

This may sound like a dubious proposition. The mullahs are the leaders of a self-proclaimed “Islamic Republic,” which has sought legitimacy in the bloody glories of martyrdom. They have run this nation of 70 million for 27 years, with no immediate end in sight, despite wishful hopes in the West. Anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism (anti-Semitism, in fact) are pillars of their rule. They support terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas, and have their own covert-operations groups capable of undertaking terrorist attacks in the Middle East and beyond.

Thus, for some hard-liners, the discussion is best focused on whether a pre-emptive U.S. military strike could decimate or severely retard Iran’s nuclear program. “There is only one thing worse than military action, [and] that is a nuclear-armed Iran,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared recently. Less stridently, President Bush has called “unacceptable” the Tehran regime’s possession of the bomb.

But those who state the matter as McCain et al do are implicitly assuming that Iran’s mullahs — unlike the Red Chinese and other zealots who have had nukes — are outside the boundaries of deterrence. And yet the system of deterrence — which follows the principle of “mutually assured destruction,” or MAD — is nearly as old as the Atomic Age and has, so far, a perfect track record. Nuclear weapons have been deployed only one time, and that was when one nation, the United States, possessed a monopoly on them, at the close of World War II. And the United States used the bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki “against an essentially defeated enemy,” as Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the A-bomb, put it.

Although McCain’s belligerent quote garnered headlines, a quiet piece of news is this: Most analysts who have studied Iran believe that the mullahs are, in fact, deterrable. “They respect superior power when they confront it,” Kenneth Pollack, a National Security Council staffer in the Clinton White House, said in an interview. Pollack, who backed the Iraq war, added that he views the mullahs as less reckless than Saddam Hussein, who pulled “crazy stunts” like the attempted assassination of the first President Bush.

The trickiest questions, with respect to deterrence of a nuclear Iran, are of a political-architecture sort, having to do with precisely how a deterrence structure could be assembled. What would be the role of Israel, which possesses the bomb but has never admitted that? And, given that deterrence is known to work best when there is open communication among all parties, to avoid a catastrophic miscalculation, would such a strategy oblige Washington and Tehran to repair diplomatic relations, broken three decades ago? Dream on, some will say. But while the potential costs and benefits of pre-emptively attacking Iran are now being openly debated in Washington, so should be the alternative possibility of co-existing, however unhappily, with “mullahs with nukes.” Cannot the ayatollahs, too, be part of a MAD world?
The Kremlin’s Crazies

What if Adolf Hitler had possessed nukes? That question is often lobbed at adherents of the “deterrence works” school. Surely, Hitler would have used, or threatened to use, the weapon had he beaten the Americans in the race to obtain the bomb. But that outcome would have been, as the strategists like to say, an asymmetric situation. Nuclear deterrence is defined by the principle that nobody can win in a first-strike: Every actor must be able to withstand a blow from any rival and still be capable of inflicting serious harm on the rival in a second strike.

The tough question — how Hitler might have behaved if he had possessed the bomb, but had not been the first to acquire it — is perhaps illuminated by the actions of despot Josef Stalin once the Soviets broke the U.S. nuclear monopoly with their successful test of “the article,” as they called it, on August 29, 1949, in Kazakhstan, their Central Asian republic.

By the summer of 1949, Stalin had as much blood on his hands as Hitler, who died in the spring of 1945, ever had. In the “terror famine” of the 1930s, “Stalin killed more Ukrainians than Hitler murdered Jews” in the Holocaust, Anne Applebaum, an exhaustive chronicler of Stalin’s crimes, observed in a 1994 book review. Add to that the millions who perished in Stalin’s gulags. Plus, as both a megalomaniac and a paranoid, Stalin had few peers. “Every Jew,” he once declared, is “an agent of American intelligence.”

The A-bomb project had been personally directed by Stalin’s equally twisted secret-police chief, Lavrenti Beria, whom the dictator once described to Franklin D. Roosevelt as “our Himmler” — Heinrich Himmler being the leader of Hitler’s SS and Gestapo. Beria kept a blackjack in his Kremlin office (along with a collection of sex toys and female underwear) so he could take a personal hand in torturing suspects, Simon Sebag Montefiore noted in his 2003 book, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

The tyrannical two celebrated the Kazakhstan test with a song-filled barbecue of shashliks at Stalin’s dacha in Sochi, on the Black Sea. The bomb certainly meant that the Americans couldn’t easily push the Kremlin around. But both Stalin and Beria were sensible to its confines. “Atomic bombs can hardly be used without spelling the end of the world,” Stalin told a confidant around this time.

Stalin proved no more a gambler with nukes than he was without them. Not long after the test, it’s true, the dictator gave Kim Il Sung, the North Korean Communist leader, a thumbs-up for his invasion of South Korea, which was launched in June 1950. But historians who have studied Kremlin archives generally agree that Stalin was emboldened less by his newfound possession of the bomb than by his new strategic alliance with Mao, who in 1949 had finally triumphed over the Chinese nationalists. It was Mao’s vow of military backing for the North Korean invaders that made that attack seem like a good bet, in Stalin’s mind. (And it was Mao’s support, in fact, that nearly made for a Communist victory.) But when another Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, visited Stalin in Moscow, in February 1950, he got a cold and rude reception. It was Mao who at that time agreed to train and arm the Vietminh by the tens of thousands.

Stalin died in March 1953. Nikita Khrushchev eventually won the scramble to be the new Soviet ruler. Khrushchev was no stranger to Bolshevik gangster methods; Beria, his rival, was arrested and executed. And yet, after the first Soviet hydrogen bomb — a thermonuclear weapon — was tested in August 1953, Khrushchev “saw a documentary about the test, and could not sleep for days afterward,” the historians Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov report in their 1996 book, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War.

Khrushchev’s conviction that Kennedy was a weak, easily cowed leader helped to produce the Cuban missile crisis, the most dangerous episode of the Cold War. Even so, as Zubok and Pleshakov conclude from their review of Soviet records, for all his “bravado,” Khrushchev “developed a sense of the ultimate limits imposed by nuclear weapons on statesmanship.”

The history of the Cold War after the 1962 missile crisis is largely the tale of American and Soviet leaders recognizing deterrence as the central political fact of the relationship and taking steps to open lines of communication to ensure that nuclear weapons would never be used. The vision of diplomat George Kennan at the start of the Cold War — the idea that the West could best achieve its objectives through deterrence and containment — was vindicated with the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Deterrence regimes are often portrayed in static terms, as a kind of freeze in the political status quo. But in the U.S.-Soviet case, deterrence proved supple enough to accommodate seismic political changes in Moscow. It is much the same lesson offered by China’s possession of nukes and its subsequent embrace of capitalism after Mao’s death; deterrence kept the peace with China and yet did not stymie tremendous internal change.
Deterrable Mullahs

On February 1, Michael Eisenstadt, the director of security studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a well-respected think tank generally viewed as sympathetic to Israel, took his seat to testify at a House Armed Services Committee hearing. The title of his testimony was distinctly Kennanesque: “Deter and Contain: Dealing with a Nuclear Iran.” A former analyst for the Army’s Intelligence and Threat Analysis Center, Eisenstadt has been mulling this very matter for some 15 years, well before it became a hot potato. He began:

“Because Shiite religious doctrine exalts the suffering and martyrdom of the faithful, and because religion plays a central role in the official ideology of the Islamic Republic, Iran is sometimes portrayed as an irrational, ‘undeterrable’ state with a high pain threshold, driven by the absolute imperatives of religion, rather than by the pragmatic concerns of statecraft. There may have been some truth to this characterization during the heady, early days of the revolution. However, years of revolutionary violence and a bloody eight-year-long war with Iraq have made Iranians, by and large, war weary and risk averse.”

Eisenstadt went on to caution that the emergence of “a new generation of Iranian politicians,” a group of “assertive nationalists” embodied by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, needs to be “better understood.” Ahmadinejad has intensified the regime’s anti-Israel, anti-American rhetoric — in one speech, he said of Israel, “The Islamic people cannot allow this historical enemy to exist in the heart of the Islamic world.” And in a recent letter to President Bush, he tried to position himself as a grandiose oracle on behalf of Islamic civilization, asserting that “liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity.” Still, as Eisenstadt testified, “all signs point to the fact that real power in Iran remains largely in the hands of the same old familiar cast of ‘unelected’ leaders,” the mullahs.

The Iranian revolution was a transforming event, on a par with the Russian and Chinese cataclysms. “I would say it is now in the Stalinist phase,” a rather “cynical one,” Bernard Lewis, the renowned historian of Islam, said at a recent luncheon in Washington sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. But Lewis, who thinks that the West has been appeasing Tehran, Munich-like, on the matter of the bomb, believes that Iran’s rulers, unlike Stalin in his time, are not subject to deterrence. “The use of a nuclear weapon would not bother them in the least,” he said in reply to my question at the forum on how possession of the bomb would affect “the mind-set” of Iran’s leaders.

But Lewis is in a minority among analysts of the mullahs. Unlike an Islamic extremist such as Osama bin Laden, whose precise whereabouts are not known and who controls no state, the mullahs do have an address and are thus deterrable because “they don’t want to get their teeth kicked in,” Michael Scheuer, a former CIA counter-terrorism analyst, said in an interview. And “if a terrorist group used one of Iran’s nuclear weapons,” the political scientist Barry R. Posen wrote in a recent essay for the MIT Center for International Studies, “Iran would have to worry that the victim would discover the weapon’s origins and visit a terrible revenge on Iran. No country,” Posen drily noted, “is likely to turn the means to its own annihilation over to an uncontrollable entity.”

One episode cited frequently by the “yes, they are deterrable,” school of analysts is the June 1996, bombing of an apartment building used by the U.S. Air Force in Khobar, Saudi Arabia. Nineteen Americans died, and the Clinton administration identified as the culprit a covert unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But in response to what was reportedly a “chilling threat” to the Iranian regime by Washington, “Iranian terrorism against the United States ceased,” the counter-terrorism analyst Richard Clarke, at that time a White House official, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed.

Within Israel, which understandably regards itself as a target of a nuclear Iran, the question of “Can the ayatollahs be deterred?” has been debated since the early 1990s, the Israeli security analyst Shai Feldman, a former head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, noted in an interview. The discussion, Feldman said, has had a philosophical cast — whether for “effective deterrence you have to have an adversary that looks at life the way you look at life.” His answer is no: What matters is not a regime’s rhetoric but its behavior. If the conduct of the Tehran government is carefully examined, Feldman said, “you cannot but reach the conclusion that it is a very cost-sensitive regime.” Feldman, an old friend of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University.

As for the Iranian-backed terrorism groups that directly threaten Israel, namely Hezbollah and Hamas, Giora Eiland, the national security adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, recently told journalists that although such groups might feel emboldened by a nuclear-armed Iran, “I don’t think they [the mullahs] would be ready to share” nukes or the knowledge to make them with proxy groups. “They are extreme and anti-Israel,” he said of Iran’s leaders, “but I didn’t say they are not responsible.” Other analysts, inside and outside Israel, suggest that the ayatollahs, despite being revolutionaries, also see themselves as guardians of a civilization that is several thousand years old, like China’s.

In an interview, Eisenstadt said he was not, in fact, altogether confident that deterrence would work. Even so, in the interests of prudence, “right now we have to start laying the groundwork for a containment and deterrence regime,” he said.
How Deterrence Could Work

In thinking about a new deterrence structure, some analysts advocate a global approach in which nuclear states — including the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — would in effect cover the greater Middle East region with a protective nuclear umbrella. The proposition would be simple: If the mullahs use or even threaten to use nukes, they would face the prospect of retaliation from these powers. “I think that would make a powerful deterrent,” said a leading backer of this tack, Harlan Ullman, a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and a former commander of a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Persian Gulf. Perhaps even a treaty could codify the arrangement, he added.

A Middle East deterrence umbrella, enforced by a concert of outside powers, could also be adjusted to cover any others in the Middle East who might come to possess the bomb — Sunni Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for example, which might feel compelled to head in this direction, for reasons of prestige and security, should Iran’s mullahs gain a “Persian Shiite” bomb. (And maybe Turkey, too.) The perpetually volatile Middle East would thus become a multilateral security responsibility.

The main hurdle, and it is a tall one, is political will. The “Perm Five,” as they’re known, parted ways on the Iraq intervention and so far have not been able to agree on applying economic sanctions against Tehran for its defiance of international nuclear program inspectors. Moscow and Beijing have stakes in the Middle East that in some ways collide with Washington’s perception of its interests there. Is this crowd really capable of jointly operating a deterrence mechanism? Maybe not.

A variant of the Ullman plan is to put the biggest of the big powers, America, in charge of the job. The U.S., on its own, could explicitly spell out to the mullahs the consequences of any attempt to use nuclear weapons — or to slip a “suitcase bomb” or the like to a terrorist surrogate. Such a threat, given the enormous size of America’s military arsenal, nuclear and conventional, as well as America’s “eyes and ears” to detect any untoward moves by Iran, could carry a high degree of credibility. Indeed, part of what restrained the mullahs after the Khobar assault, according to a Clinton administration national security source, was that Washington made it very clear that, through its intelligence, “we knew a lot of what they were doing around the world” in terms of terrorism sponsorship.

America’s Persian Gulf allies, such as Kuwait, who are not major military powers and who are themselves alarmed about the prospect of a nuclear Iran, might participate as junior partners in this kind of deterrence scheme for their own reasons. Addressing the prospect of a nuclear Iran in a recent memo to leaders at West Point, retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey counseled against pre-emptive warfare, arguing, “We can bankrupt and isolate the Iranians as we did the Soviet Union and create a stronger Gulf alliance that will effectively deter this menace to our security.” McCaffrey toured Iraq and Kuwait during an April trip.

But for this to work, according to the Henry Kissinger maxim on deterrence, there would still have to be fail-safe communication links between Washington and Tehran — at a minimum, something like the “hotline” between Washington and Moscow, which was installed in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis. “The greatest danger of war,” Kissinger once said, “seems to me not to be in the deliberate actions of wicked men, but in the inability of harassed men to manage events that have run away with them.”

The problem, of course, is that the U.S. and Iran broke off diplomatic relations at the outbreak of the Iranian revolution. Both sides nurse grievances — for America, the seizure of hostages at its Tehran Embassy in 1979; for Iran, America’s treatment of the country as a pariah, a member of President Bush’s proclaimed “axis of evil.”

And yet, Iran’s acquisition of a bomb would probably improve the chances of the U.S. and Iran renewing a dialogue after all these years. Because the mullahs feel so strongly that, in any fresh diplomatic start with Washington, they must be treated as “equals,” Eisenstadt told me, “they see acquisition of a nuclear weapon as a precondition of having talks with the U.S.” As the China example suggests, the history of nuclear deterrence is replete with these kinds of paradoxes.
Israel’s Deterrence Role

The most ticklish issue in the Iran deterrence equation is the role of Israel. The Jewish state is generally averse to entrusting its security to outsiders, even a close friend like America. After all, a principle of Israel, a corollary of the “never-again” ethos, is a commitment to a robust self-defense capability. Israel’s last resort, defensewise, is its unacknowledged nuclear arsenal — the fruit of a research effort launched with the country’s founding in 1948. (In 1986, an Israeli nuclear technician said that the country had more than 100 atomic warheads.)

Israel’s first leader, David Ben-Gurion, was worried not so much about other Middle East states gaining nuclear weapons as about the need for tiny Israel to have a potent weapon that could effectively counter the huge armies of its hostile Arab neighbors. Once the weapon was gained, Israel, for political reasons, including quiet urging from an anxious Washington, adhered to a policy of “nuclear ambiguity” under which it would neither confirm nor deny its arsenal.

But Israel could jettison nuclear ambiguity if the mullahs get the bomb — and thus break Israel’s regional monopoly. In our talk, Shai Feldman, who wrote his dissertation, in the 1980s, on the Israeli nuclear deterrent, said, “If Iran becomes nuclear, Israel would not be able to tolerate the level of uncertainties and ambiguities and room for misperceptions that exist today.” Even now, some Israeli leaders are sending loaded messages to Tehran. “They want to wipe out Israel,” Vice Premier Shimon Peres said of Iran’s leaders in a recent interview with Reuters. “Now, when it comes to destruction, Iran, too, can be destroyed,” Peres asserted.

The most straightforward option would be for Israel officially to declare itself a nuclear power and, as the U.S. and France have done, to make public essential aspects of its nuclear-deterrence capabilities. Israel could also seek a direct dialogue with Iran, so each country’s leaders could gain a clear understanding of the others’ capabilities and intentions.

This would amount to a kind of regional deterrence system — the approximate parallel would be India-Pakistan, both of which gained the bomb in 1998. Having fought three major wars before then, the first in 1947-48, those two nations have not waged a big one since, and they have regular, if sometimes heated communications. Lacking a land border, which in the India-Pakistan case has helped keep the pot simmering, Israel and Iran arguably would find it easier to maintain a cold stalemate, argues Leon Hadar, a native Israeli and a former U.N. bureau chief for The Jerusalem Post who is the author of Sandstorm, a 2005 book on the security climate in the Middle East. Hadar is currently a research fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington.

But Israeli leaders could face a request from Washington to, in effect, sit still, maintain nuclear ambiguity, and accept a U.S. pledge of protection from a nuclear Iran under a broad American deterrence umbrella. Why would Washington make such a request? The game-theory-like reasoning among strategists goes like this: If Iran goes nuclear, the chances that Arab powers like Egypt and Saudi Arabia will feel bound to follow suit will be lower if Israel keeps quiet. A public Israeli nuclear declaration would be like a face slap, forcing the hand of Arab leaders who have cynically made anti-Zionism a part of their rule and would thus have to call their own bluff.

Such reasoning may lie behind President Bush’s recent vow “to defend Israel” from an attack by Iran. Many have seen Bush’s comment as a blunt warning to Iran’s hothead president, Ahmadinejad. But his warning may also represent something more subtle — a signal for Israel to stay its hand, to keep the Middle East from being further roiled. Whether Israel would agree to do so if Iran gains nukes is one of the great unknowns of the Iran deterrence debate. “I don’t think anyone knows how that will turn out,” Feldman told me.
Accepting Deterrence

In “Third World” countries, the possession of nuclear weapons at first tends to be seen as a kind of psychological equalizer with rich and powerful “First World” nations. If the mullahs succeed in gaining nukes despite unrelenting efforts by Washington and others to stop them, they might well become “impossibly arrogant,” as Lewis, the historian, suggests. And ordinary Iranians, out of a sense of national pride, might applaud the regime’s underdog-like feat. Still, the bomb tends not to be a panacea for regimes that covet it.

The world’s biggest nuclear arsenal did not keep the Soviet Union from imploding — and is of little benefit to today’s Russia, which under Vladimir Putin is attempting to regain its global clout by becoming an energy superpower. Gaining the nuclear force de frappe, under Charles de Gaulle in 1960, did not arrest France’s (continuing) decline in global influence; nor has the bomb resurrected Imperial Britain. Although nukes helped China win respect from foreigners, its remarkable ascent on the world stage, as is also the case for India, is principally a function of its powerhouse economy. The magic of A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, isn’t making that troubled country any more stable.

Thus, there is no reason to think that a nuclear (and, as ever, oil-rich) Iran would not find itself pestered, as it is now, by troubles on its borders, not least the frayed ties with ethnic Kurdish minorities whose clans extend into Iraq and Turkey. Nor would a nuclear Iran be immune, any more than it is now, from pressures for political modernization coming from the nation’s Western-centric middle class. All of the festering issues of economic development — high oil prices are buoying an otherwise stagnant, state-protected economy — would remain on the table. At a May 1 rally in Tehran organized by the government, workers were supposed to chant, “Nuclear technology is our undeniable right!” Some shouted instead, “Permanent employment is our undeniable right!” and complained about wage arrears and “backbreaking” inflation, according to an Agence France-Presse dispatch.

What the bomb would do for sure is make Iran less likely to be attacked by a foreign power, America or anyone else. Deterrence, by definition, is a two-way street.

Many a statesman has decried the grim character of deterrence. “Is there either logic or morality,” Ronald Reagan asked in his second Inaugural Address, “in believing that if one side threatens to kill tens of millions of our people, our only recourse is to threaten killing tens of millions of theirs?”

The answer, actually, is yes. Deterrence arises from a logical and a moral necessity — as the political scientist Kenneth Waltz pointed out in his 1954 classic, Man, the State, and War. Because men are not angels, because states can be malevolent, and because the international system of states is itself a jungle, without an all-powerful world government to enforce order, something like deterrence is required. “The beast in man may glory in the carnage [of war]; the reason in man rebels,” Waltz wrote. Deterrence can be thought of as reason’s attempt to check the perpetual temptation of evil. Deterrence also offers an insurance guarantee against the possible failure of idealists to reduce the likelihood of war by other means. So if President Bush’s big effort to diminish international conflict by improving the character of states, by making them democracies, does not work out, deterrence will still be available to keep America secure. Call it Plan B.

There’s a hole that no deterrence system can fill, no game theorist can wish away. Suppose a bin Laden type got his bomb not via a rogue state regime but through black-market purchases in a place like Russia, thus evading Moscow’s own counter-terrorism efforts. Would it be credible to threaten retaliation against the Kremlin in that kind of scenario? No.

But deterrence as a concept is not invalidated because nonstate actors, in some cases, may be outside its boundaries. In the case of Iran’s mullahs, the question of whether deterrence could work might come down to whether America’s leaders resolve to make it so. Deterrence is for long haulers — to “deter and contain” the mullahs could be a 10-year, 20-year, or even longer proposition. Military strikes, with their tantalizing promise of tidily resolving a nettlesome problem, tend to beguile the impatient. Deterrence isn’t tidy, but history has shown its effectiveness. MAD, anyone?