Charles Krauthammer on "Iran's Emerging Empire"

   Charles Krauthammer is talking empire again, this time with regard to Iran. In a Washington Post column he argues that, in the US,  "...Iran’s march toward conventional domination of the Arab world has been largely overlooked." He goes on to criticizes the president and congresses lack of attention to the Iranian backed coup in Yemen in the context of what he sees as alarming actions by Iran in Syria. Essentially, Iran is building an empire in the Middle East while Washington does nothing to stop it.

   As is often the case,  Krauthammer exhibits a pseudo-Realist view of the world as a place where nations vie for dominance over one another. I call this view pseudo-Realist because Krauthammer's analysis has the state- and power-centric characteristics of Realism without the typical view that security maximization is the primary motivation of the state. Thus, his analysis lacks one of the key virtues of Realist theory which is to provide a model of state decision making that applies to all nations. In so doing, it gives us the means to reduce inscrutable and fearsome foreign boogie men to calculating and constrained rational actors that simply have opposing interests to ours given the zero-sum nature of security.

   Of course, there are Offensive Realists, like Mearsheimer, who assume that states are power maximizers instead of security maximizers. But even Offensive Realism invites a more dispassionate and less nationalist view than Krauthammer. Consider John Meirsheimer's 2012 comments on PBS about the effect of a nuclear armed Iran on the Middle East:

I think there’s no question that a nuclear-armed Iran would bring stability to the region, because nuclear weapons are weapons of peace. They’re weapons of deterrence.

They have hardly any offensive capability at all. And if Iran had a nuclear deterrent, there’s no way that the United States or Israel, for that matter, would be threatening to attack Iran now, in the same way that if Saddam had had nuclear weapons in 2003, the United States wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, and if Libya had nuclear weapons in 2011, the United States wouldn’t have gone to war against Libya.

So I think that if you had a Middle East where other states besides Israel — and this, of course, includes Iran — had a nuclear deterrent, it would be a more peaceful region. But the problem is that there is always some small possibility that there will be nuclear use.

And the most likely scenario is what’s oftentimes referred to as inadvertent escalation. And this is where you have a conventional war that starts off with no intention of turning into a nuclear war, but inadvertently escalates to the nuclear level.

   Note in the above quotation that Mearsheimer implicitly applies the same model of decision making to all states and considers the deterrent effect on the US and Israel to be just as valuable for stability as deterrence on Iran. In short, there are no good guys and bad guys, just states with security interests that are both driven and constrained by the relative power of other states. That's a Realist at work.

   But, of course, Krauthammer is talking about conventional "domination" not nuclear proliferation. I used quotation marks because domination is not, theoretically speaking, a clear cut term. I suppose he may means that Iran is seeking to achieve hegemony in the region and Krauthammer does characterize the situation as "Iran's growing hegemony in the region." However, by definition, hegemony is generally a "there can be only one" situation and, regionally, that one is Israel in the Levant and, arguably, the US in the Gulf. So, semantically, talking of Iran's "growing hegemony" is nonsense.

   Iran may be better characterized as challenging Israeli in the Levant and US hegemony in the gulf.  Indeed, it is hard to argue that they are not. It is generally what the Iranians say they are trying to do, and it is also what Realism predicts they will do.

   The question is what should the US being doing about it. From Realism and Krauthammer's state-centric point of view, the US should be trying to thwart Iran's efforts as a general rule. However, the specific situation is complicated by the rise of ISIS which is threatening to take over Syria in the Levant and Iraq in the Gulf region. To the extent that ISIS is a non-state actor, it hits Realist theory in its non-state blind spot.

  However, since ISIS is proclaiming itself to be a state and is taking over territory, it may be that it should be considered a new emerging state in theoretical terms. Furthermore, one might argue that its insurgent strategy is proving to be a surprisingly effective war fighting technology that is upsetting the balance of power in the region in an unexpected way with unpredictable future consequences.

  If you buy this, admittedly, ad hoc modification of Realism, then Realist theory would predict that the US and other powers would have to adjust their alliance structure to deal with the shift in power within the region. Arguably, that is what the US and Iran have done as they have become tacit allies in the fight against ISIS. If the US and Iran seem like strange bedfellows,  it is important to remember that Realism predicts that nations will make alliances based on considerations of power, not national amity or enmity.

   From this point, many of the things Krauthammer decries as US inaction against Iran are actually US actions against ISIS. That is, the US decision to drop demands for Assad's ouster in Syria is attempt to keep an ally in the fight against ISIS. The acquiescence to the presence of Hezbollah fighters and Iranian officers in Syria is acquiescence to the presence of a tacit ally's troops and proxy troops on the field against the common enemy, even if they may up to some other mischief. The administration's reluctance to impose more sanctions on Iran may reflect a reluctance to impose more costs on an ally that is already hurt by falling oil prices and/or a belief that a more conciliatory approach will be more successful in the presence of a new mutual enemy. (Welcome to the pitfalls of coalition warfare.)

   Overall, it appears that the US has made a decision to tolerate marginal gains in power by Iran in order to thwart potentially larger and more destabilizing gains by ISIS. This decision is akin  (albeit on a much smaller scale and without explicit official acknowledgment on either side) to the decision to ally with the Soviet Union in World War II. While that decision had distinct long term drawbacks, any systematic analysis of it would have to take into account the large short term benefits. Therefore, Krauthammer's arguments fall short because he is not considering the impact of the rise of ISIS on the region's distribution of power and the benefits of a tacit alliance between the US and Iran in mitigating that impact.

   To be sure, you could argue that the US is overestimating the threat posed by ISIS to US interests (primarily in Israel and Iraq). Indeed, it may be that, having first underestimated ISIS, US policymakers are irrationally over compensating. Or, you could argue that increased Iranian influence in Syria (and perhaps in Iraq) would be worse for the US than the emergence of a new state in Syria and parts of Iraq. If one is really worried about Iran, one could argue that having a new state to threaten Iran's western border would be a good thing.

   Ultimately, such arguments would be more palatable to Realists who would see ISIS as just another state seeking to maximize its security or power than to non-Realists who might take ISIS's ideology and brutality into account. But then, such non-Realists would also probably take Iran's ideology and brutality into account as well. This would then raise the thorny issue of which nation's ideology is more malignant and which nation is likely to be more brutal.

   Of course, one would only get into such comparisons if one puts the ISIS into the analysis in the first place. While attributing state status to ISIS is problematic in a Realist analysis, it is probably truer to the theory's emphasis (or, more precisely, Neo-Realism's emphasis) on the importance of considering the international system (i.e., the international distribution of power) as a whole. Such an emphasis encourages one not to make the mistake of selectively considering only part of the system as Krauthammer does.