As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on February 28th, 2010:

In its most recent report, the IAEA acknowledged what many observers have asserted for years — that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon. Whether this is the result of new evidence, or merely the willingness of the agency’s new director-general to heed the existing evidence, is beside the point. The findings will provide new impetus for a sanctions push that has been extensively foreshadowed over the last several months by leaders in the United States and Europe.

For the next tranche of sanctions to be successful, thought must be given not only to which measures are chosen, but how they are chosen. The instinct of policymakers in Europe and Washington is often to act incrementally; stronger sanctions are proposed, only to be diluted in U.N. negotiations aimed at unanimity. The measures that are ultimately adopted are usually just one step beyond the previous set.

This incremental approach is counterproductive. The sanctions’ predictability and long lead time allows Tehran to prepare for them in advance. For example, Iran is currently expanding its oil refining capacity and reducing consumption subsidies in anticipation of the sort of gasoline sanctions moving through Congress, and could be a net gasoline exporter by 2013. Incrementalism inures the Iranian regime to sanctions altogether, stripping of credibility any threats of tougher action in the future. The result is to rob sanctions of their deterrent effect and make extreme outcomes — a nuclear-armed Iran, or war with Iran — more rather than less likely.

The traditional approach also places too high a value on international consensus. While multilateral support is necessary to efforts to deter Iran, unanimity is not. Unanimity does not make weak sanctions more effective. Also, the unanimity achieved is often symbolic — lowest-common denominator measures are supplemented by a “coalition of the willing” who shoulder greater sacrifice while others enthusiastically embrace whatever is not explicitly forbidden. For example, China National Petroleum Corporation (having taken the place of France’s Total SA) will begin the drilling phase of a major gas project in Iran in March, at the same moment the rest of the P5+1 begin their deliberations on sanctions. In this next round of sanctions deliberations, the price required of Beijing for its seat at the head diplomatic table must be that it accept its fair share of the responsibility for and cost of deterring Iran.

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As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on February 16th, 2010:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the surprising assertion yesterday in Doha that an Iranian nuclear weapon would not directly threaten the United States:

“[P]art of the goal — not the only goal, but part of the goal — that we were pursuing was to try to influence the Iranian decision regarding whether or not to pursue a nuclear weapon. And, as I said in my speech, you know, the evidence is accumulating that that’s exactly what they are trying to do, which is deeply concerning, because it doesn’t directly threaten the United States, but it directly threatens a lot of our friends, allies, and partners here in this region and beyond.”

Secretary Clinton is surely correct about the threat faced by U.S. allies in the region, but her assessment of the potential threat to the U.S. does not comport with the evidence on Iran’s ballistic missile programs. Many U.S. facilities and thousands of American personnel are of course already within range of Iran’s short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, which Director of National Intelligence Adm. Dennis Blair recently testified (pdf) are “inherently capable of delivering WMD.”

Furthermore, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency reported (pdf) this month that “Iran continue[s] to develop long-range ballistic missiles that will be threatening to the United States,” and the U.S. intelligence community has judged in the past that Iran may test an ICBM by 2015 (see here [pdf] for a full discussion of this issue). Iran last year demonstrated progress by successfully placing a satellite into orbit. At that time, the State Department spokesman issued a statement of “deep concern,” noting:

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As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on February 3rd, 2010:

As we witnessed recently with the questioning of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair by the Chilcot inquiry, the debate over the war in Iraq is one that raises many issues and can be expected to continue for some time to come. But one issue, raised by my fellow FP blogger, Tom Ricks in a recent post, deserves some critical attention here: his contention that removing Saddam Hussein from power strengthened Iran by removing an Iraqi “bulwark” against Persian expansionism.

Ricks’ assertion is one that is oft-repeated but fundamentally mistaken. It is over-charitable to Saddam, who — having invaded Kuwait, threatened Saudi Arabia, and harshly repressed Iraqis — was no protector of his neighbors. And it is unfair to the current government of Iraq, which is not a client of Tehran’s or passive in the face of Iranian bellicosity.

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As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on January 15th, 2010:

By Michael Singh

As engagement with Iran gained political momentum in the United States during the 2008 presidential campaign, some of its advocates were quick to cite the analogy of Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China in portraying outreach to Tehran as a similarly bold policy stroke. The experience of the past year, which has seen Iran’s leaders crack down at home and spurn outreach from the West, has exposed the superficiality of this comparison. As political scientist Michael Mandelbaum has observed, Chairman Mao was motivated, after all, not by American charm but by Soviet belligerence. China in the early 1970s had recently lost a border war to the USSR and faced a Soviet army massing on its border, pushing it into Washington’s arms. The Iranian regime, on the other hand, has been eager to keep America at arm’s length.

With negotiations with Iran making frustratingly little progress and hopes for strong international sanctions restrained by the reality of Chinese and Russian reluctance, a new analogy is gaining traction in U.S. national security circles — containment. Its enthusiasts liken America’s Cold War containment of the Soviet Union to the hypothetical containment of a nuclear Iran in the future. Just like the Nixon-to-China comparison, however, the containment analogy is fatally flawed.

Those who argue in favor of containment generally have in mind nuclear deterrence — that is, preventing Iran from actually using a nuclear weapon. And history suggests that they have a point — no nuclear power besides the United States has ever employed the bomb, and a combination of missile defenses and a declaratory policy promising retaliation could prove powerful deterrents to Iran doing so. While we should not count too heavily on the Iranian regime’s rationality — its officials have, after all, mused about destroying Israel — neither should we exaggerate the likelihood that Iran would initiate a nuclear conflict that would prove its own demise.

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As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on November 3, 2009:

By Michael Singh

One lesson of the financial crisis is that short-termism has plagued U.S. business; too often it plagues U.S. politics and policy as well. The Obama administration has been both victim and perpetrator of this offense. On the one hand, the Obama administration (like most new administrations) has been the target of the short-term thinking prevalent in political and media circles, which judges progress in weeks and months, even against problems which have persisted for decades or longer. On the other hand, the administration itself has exacerbated this problem by raising expectations that many of America’s problems in the world could be solved with a simple shift in tactics, and to make matters worse often exaggerated its own tactical differences from its predecessors.

This latter tendency seems to flow from one of this administration’s most curious characteristics — its fixation on the past. When you are in government, your critics typically want to focus on the past, picking apart your record to find failures or inconsistencies, while you would rather focus on your plans for the future. As citizens, this is precisely what we want of our officials, while as a society we may want — and need — to grapple with our past, we need policymakers to glean what lessons they can from it and look forward. After all, we are powerless to change the past, and duty-bound to shape the future. Nevertheless, the Obama administration seems caught in the past, continuing one year after the 2008 election to define itself by its repudiation of predecessors’ policies rather than a clear articulation of its own vision for the future.

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As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on October 21, 2009:

By Michael Singh

When companies are faced with making a decision between multiple risky options, they will often seek out information in order to reduce their uncertainty. So, a pharmaceutical firm will conduct clinical trials in order to determine if a drug is safe or dangerous, information that could mean the difference between profitable sales and damaging litigation. Such an investment in information is never free — indeed, it often comes at a significant cost that must be weighed against the value of the knowledge obtained.

In this sense, the recently concluded U.S.-Iran talks in Geneva can be considered a diplomatic purchase of information. The United States, by offering to remove Iran’s low-enriched uranium and turn it into the raw material required to make medical isotopes, is testing Iran’s claim of peaceable intent and the Obama administration’s hopes for engagement. If the Iranians comply, they may be open to further compromise, perhaps as a result of the political pressure they have faced at home since the summer’s election turmoil. Their refusal, on the other hand, would serve as a clear signal of intransigence and lead Washington to pursue an alternative path. The most likely result is somewhere in between — Iran gives no clear answer, but seeks to draw out talks and divide the P5+1 — meaning that the United States has to ensure that we and our allies agree on what constitutes an acceptable response from Tehran. Whatever the result, it is a bold and innovative gambit by the United States, and the Iran hands at the National Security Council should be commended for devising it.

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As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on October 9, 2009:

In our polarized political world, U.S. presidents seem to inspire fervent devotion or passionate dislike, with little space in between. The initial reactions to President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize fit into this pattern.

To his backers, the award is a surprise, but a welcome one, confirming his political philosophy. To his detractors, the award is an embarrassment for which no justification can be made. For the president himself, the reward is a problem. Already criticized for overexposure and a dearth of tangible achievements, he may see the Nobel mostly as a headache that puts him in a corner: Decline and risk confirming critics’ charges that you are undeserving, or accept and risk confirming their accusations of arrogance.

On balance, the right thing would have been to decline the Nobel. Supporters would applaud the humility, and critics would largely be disarmed. Further, the president in pointing to more deserving, less well-known candidates, could do significant good.

In the charged, bubble atmosphere that prevails in modern White House staffs, however, such modest actions are uncommon. Presidential aides and communicators these days are given to grandiloquence and self-congratulation, a crass trend whose momentum seems unfortunately unstoppable.

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As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on September 25, 2009:

Earlier today, President Obama, British Prime Minister Brown, and French President Sarkozy dramatically confirmed that Iran has been covertly building near the city of Qom a second uranium enrichment facility. Obama said the “size and configuration” is “inconsistent with a peaceful program,” suggesting that it is intended for military purposes. The revelation will prompt very different reactions from different people.

Some will find the news shocking. And that the Iranian regime would so brazenly flout the international community and the IAEA, despite Iran’s own assurances of cooperation and the very real possibility of war or harsh sanctions, is something indeed. Others will find it utterly predictable, based both on the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate’s December 2007 conclusion that “Iran would probably use covert facilities … for the production of highly enriched uranium for a weapon” — and on Iran’s history of evasion. Iran concealed its first uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, opening it to IAEA inspections only following its public disclosure by Iranian dissidents in 2002, and continues to refuse to answer the IAEA’s questions about its work on nuclear weaponization.

The Iranian regime and its backers will have a different reaction altogether — they will insist that Tehran had no obligation to disclose the existence of the facility, having unilaterally terminated its implementation of the part of its NPT Safeguards Agreement requiring advance notice of the construction of nuclear sites. Thus far, Iranian nuclear officials have confirmed reports about the enrichment plant while insisting that it is for civilian purposes, and Iranian President Ahmadinejad has warned that it would be a “mistake” to press the regime on the issue.

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As published for shadow.foreignpolicy.com on August 7, 2009:

Economist Stephen Landsburg famously observed that “economics can be summed up in four words: people respond to incentives.” “The rest,” he said, “is commentary.” Examples of such incentives — in their proper sense as both prospective rewards and punishments — in the economic sphere include the incentive to work less created by high marginal tax rates, or the encouragement of riskier behavior arising from the provision of insurance. It would not be too great a stretch to apply this same lesson to diplomacy. In international relations, incentives are a powerful force in determining the behavior of states and their rulers; a decision-maker who ignores the incentives his policies create does so at his peril.

Unfortunately, the United States has too often reverted to solipsism in its foreign policy. Ideally, policy should be informed by a careful assessment of the range of incentives influencing allies, enemies, and those in between, and decisions made in order to alter those incentives to produce the outcomes we desire. (This is similar to what Joseph Nye refers to as “contextual intelligence,” a term borrowed from psychology.) Instead, policymakers often act with little thought for how others see the world, with the blithe expectation that other states’ actions will be a direct function of U.S. power or popularity. It is solipsism, rather than any particular type of policy or action — unilateral or multilateral, aggressive or accommodating — which most often causes foreign policy to go awry.

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As published for shadow.foreignpolicy.com on July 22, 2009:

When it comes to the Middle East, American presidents like to think big, and President Obama is no exception. His agenda for the region, at the outset, included ending thirty years of enmity between the U.S. and Iran, reviving American popularity amongst Arabs and Muslims, and resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. Such big thinking is laudable (if not necessarily pragmatic), given the Middle East’s increasingly prominent role in U.S. national security. When it comes to that last agenda item, however — Arab-Israeli peace — the President would be better served to think small. An opportunity exists to achieve progress between the Israelis and Palestinians, but it is a modest one, and the surest way to quash it is to overreach.

Despite Obama’s talk at the White House press conference following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s May 18 visit of a “historic opportunity” for peace, he surely understands that the odds are currently stacked against such progress. Hamas remains firmly in control of Gaza, and there are few prospects for dislodging, defeating, or taming the militant Islamist organization. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas appears likely to postpone presidential elections, and enjoys mixed support at best from his constituents. Netanyahu heads a right-wing coalition that may not support far-reaching peace talks. Further afield, Hizballah continues to rearm, a jumpy Iranian regime continues its march toward nuclear weapons, and Arab states are not, for the most part, forthcoming with outreach to Israel or financial assistance to the Palestinians.

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