How do you solve a problem like Iran?

Aaron Ellis 9.58am

This question dominates the news once a year and every politician, pundit, and foreign policy expert has an answer to it. Helpfully, they reduce their answers to a single phrase around the likes of “sanctions” or “war”. Then something else happens in the world and Iran and its nuclear programme fade from the headlines until next year.

And every year these solutions contain the same flaw: they are not part of an overarching strategy.

They are tactics. Those who push them never fully explain how they will solve this Iran Problem.

A few Iranian officials threatened to close the Straits of Hormuz last month if further sanctions were imposed on the country. So began the perennial debate. Should the West attack Iran or negotiate harder? Perhaps apply even more sanctions? The recent murder of an Iranian nuclear scientist (for which Iran has pointed a finger at Israel and the UN) led to op-eds advocating targeted killings as the best solution to the Iran Problem.

As with previous debates, few of those pushing these ‘tactical’ policies put them in the context of a wider strategy to dissuade Tehran from acquiring a nuclear capability. Few of them touched on the trade-offs and unintended consequences of their preferred one-phrase-solutions. We cannot come to an informed decision on what to do about Iran if the solutions are so underdeveloped.

The most underdeveloped is the call for war. It is not clear how military action would change the Iranian regime’s view that a nuclear capability is essential to both its own security and that of the country. Those who push for an attack never offer a strategy that connects an airstrike against an Iranian nuclear facility with Tehran giving up a decades-old ambition. The assumption seems to be that if we blow stuff up then good things will happen.

The Iran debate is a spectrum: “negotiation” sits at the opposite end to “war”. But negotiation has its flaws too. If the Iranian regime believes that a nuclear capability is essential to its security and the West believes that this is unacceptable, then towards what are we negotiating?

“Negotiation” as a solution to the Iran Problem also has trade-offs that some are not prepared to make. One can argue that just as an attack on Iran would legitimise the regime, so could negotiations, as was the case with détente during the Cold War. The Israelis are particularly susceptible to this view, writes nuclear policy expert Mark Hibbs:

“At a time when Israel is bracing for a coming wave of democratic anti-Israeli sentiment from its newly-freed Arab neighbors, Israel will want to invest in a future Iran which, as in the past, was willing to live with Israel in peace. [That] would imply that Israel wouldn’t be interested in a negotiated solution to the nuclear crisis that would legitimate Iran’s current rulers.”

In the middle of the spectrum is the vaguer term “containment”, or applying restrained but continuous pressure against the regime until it yields to Western demands or is overthrown by the Iranian people. The great George F. Kennan devised the idea of containment as a way of avoiding the extremes of war with the Russians and appeasing them, and many think that this is the best approach vis-à-vis Iran.

Both sanctions, of which the EU has just unveiled another collection, and targeted killing come under the rubric “containment”, but they both have just as many trade-offs and indirect consequences as the extremes of the debate. These are rarely touched on by those who advocate them.

Though sanctions are seen by many as an alternative to war, they could lead to it if our application of them is not more discriminating. The respected Iran scholar Gary Sick has warned that if the West completely shuts off the regime’s oil revenues, they will lose the incentive to keep open the Straits of Hormuz. One-fifth of the world’s exported oil production traverses this important waterway per day, as does 85% of the UK’s imported LNG (liquefied natural gas). Any attempt by Tehran to close it “would drive up the price of oil to unforeseeable levels and risk a wider regional war.”

The current debate was given further legs by the death of Iranian scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan on 11th January. Mr Roshan, who worked at the Natanz nuclear facility, was killed when a magnetic bomb was attached to his car by a mysterious man on a motorcycle. Is targeted killing really the answer, as some op-eds advocated?

As with the one-phrase-solutions discussed above, “targeted killing” has unpleasant trade-offs and indirect consequences. Murders like that of Roshan are acts of terrorism: if countries like the United States and the United Kingdom were to make them policy then how our governments talk about terrorism would need to change. Instead of it being “barbaric”, terrorism would become a tool of statecraft. I like to think of myself as a realist, but one has to accept that foreign policy just isn’t made like this in a democracy.

So how do we solve a problem like Iran? The short answer is that nobody truly knows. President Obama commented in an interview recently that “this isn’t an easy problem, and anybody who claims otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

But if we are to find the right solution to the Iran Problem, then the standard of the debate needs to rise considerably.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

Iraq was a failure of the neo-conservative world view

Aaron Ellis 9.17am

Iraq is the centre of the world and crucial to the United States’ wider foreign policy. President Obama is a failure and President Bush is as wise and as farsighted a statesman as General Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan.

This is the context in which we must understand the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, says Tim Montgomerie.

Last week, Mr Montgomerie attacked President Obama’s withdrawal from the country. He contrasts it with President Bush’s decision in 2007 to ‘surge’ American troops in order to regain momentum against the insurgency. Typically, Mr Montgomerie presents the reader with black-or-white choices: Bush is good, Obama is bad; and if you support the withdrawal, you “hate freedom”.

Neo-conservatives possess a dated worldview – and it shows. They are stuck in the early 2000s and the language of the War on Terror. They show no appreciation of grand strategy in his article or the coming of the ‘Pacific Century’. This is in stark contrast to President Obama, which is why Iraq should be added to the list of foreign policy failures by neo-conservatives and not the President’s.

The two decisions of Presidents Bush and Obama that we should contrast are the former’s decision to invade Iraq and the latter’s announcement last month of a new American military base in Australia.

For no good reason at all, President Bush burdened the United States with a disastrous war in a country of only marginal importance; he handed “a massive gift” to Tehran as a result, and distracted Washington from a real challenge to its power: China.

With his own announcement, however, President Obama sent a signal to Beijing that the U.S. was no longer distracted. The new base, the President said, was “a deliberate and strategic decision – as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping the region and its future, by upholding core principles and in close partnership with allies and friends.”

The great scholar Walter Russell Mead has described President Obama’s announcement, and other diplomatic coups the U.S. achieved in Asia last month, as the “coming of age of the Obama administration and it was conceived and executed about as flawlessly as these things ever can be.”

If we understand the Iraq withdrawal in this context then it is obvious which of the two presidents can claim to be a wise and farsighted statesman. “Regardless of whether the twenty-first century will be another ‘American century’, it is certain that it will be an Asian and Pacific century”, Richard Haass, President of the Council of Foreign Relations, has written. “It is both natural and sensible that the US be central to whatever evolves from that fact.”

This undermines many of the neo-conservatives’ other beliefs. Tim Montgomerie is disappointed that the U.S. will not have a “foothold” in Iraq but he does not explain why such a foothold is important to the U.S. He has tweeted praise for a Mitt Romney line about whether a government scheme is so crucial that it is worth borrowing money from China to pay for it, but he hasn’t yet answered whether the same test can be applied to Iraq.

The fact that the interests of the United States are in Asia-Pacific also undermines the examples of post-war Germany and Japan as templates for American policy vis-à-vis Iraq. Those two countries mattered to U.S. security after 1945, justifying the time and money spent on developing them. You cannot make the same argument with regard to Iraq.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

Shameful and disgraceful: the St Andrews Tories

Craig Barrett 6.00am

Obama should win again, but he should listen to some tax ideas coming from the Republicans

Nik Darlington 9.38am

Allister Heath’s City A.M. editor’s letter is required morning reading, whether you agree with it or not. It is relevant, informed and clear. It often teaches me something about finance or economics that I didn’t know before.

Mr Heath’s letter yesterday didn’t teach me any economics, but it did tell me something interesting about the US presidential contest.

The radical tax proposals of two Republican candidates: that GOP’s surprise frontrunner Herman Cain and the Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, have, says Heath, “kick-started a major debate on tax reform and economic growth”.

It all started with Cain’s fascinating 9-9-9 plan: he wants to slash the federal income and corporate taxes to 9 per cent (while eliminating all loopholes) and introduce a 9 per cent federal sales tax. The poorest people (on or below the poverty line) would pay no income tax, a very sensible move… Cain also backs “opportunity zones” that would liberalise the poorest parts of America in a bid to boost growth and jobs. He also supports zero capital gains tax, the immediate expensing of business equipment and no payroll taxes.

Perry’s plan would give taxpayers the choice of either a 20 per cent flat tax on income above $12,500 (the new personal allowance) or of retaining their current tax rates and rules. Lower-income taxpayers in the 10 and 15 per cent brackets would keep the current system - while those on higher incomes would switch to the flat tax… Hong Kong already operates a similar system. Perry’s…other policies include cutting company tax from 35 per cent to 20 per cent.

Neither plan is perfect… But even Mitt Romney, a lacklustre candidate, wants to cut corporate tax from 35 per cent to 25 per cent.

In my Total Politics column recently, I wrote that a radically lower tax base could be the making of Scotland, if ony the SNP has the bravery to deliver it. While the economics are clear about the benefits of lower taxes to all members of society, the politics are a harder sell. A mixture of envy, stubbornness and ineffectual pretence of ‘fairness’ (for some people, high taxes will never be ‘fair’ enough) stand in the way of efficient tax policy.

Politicians need to make a better case for lower taxes. One that combines social justice with an incentive to work hard. One that, you might say, combines compassion with efficiency.

I still believe that President Obama will be (and should be) re-elected next year. As former diplomat Sir Christopher Meyer told the TRG recently in Manchester, the split in the Republicans caused by the hard right populism of the Tea Party “may win tactical victories on Capitol Hill but may lose them the country”. He also said that the Republicans have “no credible candidate” other than the “incredibly boring” Mitt Romney.

The incumbent is still the most credible and likely next President from 2012. He has the funds, he has the platform and he still - choose to believe it or not - inspires some hope in people.

But there are encouraging signs that some thoughtful Republicans have the better ideas for economic recovery. For the time being, they are just wrong on too many other policies to win.

A Gulliver for our generation

Alexander Pannett 10.00 am

With Obama announcing the first withdrawals of troops from Afghanistan and the anniversary of September 11 fast approaching, it is a good opportunity to reflect on the dubious benefits that the ten year “War on Terror” has brought.  With such a review in mind, I was recently struck by the poignancy of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, where Gulliver is explaining the causes of war to the Master Horse of the Houyhnhnms.

 “I answered, they were innumerable; but I should only mention a few of the chief.  Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern.  Sometimes the Corruption of Ministers, who engage their master in a war in order to stifle or divert the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration.  Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives:  For instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh:  Whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine:  Whether whistling be a vice or a virtue:  Whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire:  What is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red or grey and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; with many more.  Neither are any wars so furious or bloody, or of so long continuance, as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.”

 As these words were written in 1726, it does not seem that we have learnt much since then.  Whilst not all armed conflict is necessarily unjust or pointless, it would be a much safer world if the honest reasons for war were recognised and debated.  We may then be saved from the consequences of some of our more ludicrous prejudices.

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