Israel Matzav

Why Obama may try to stop Iran

The consequences of the Iranian nuclear drive for the President’s Wilsonian project are deadly; the Iranian nuclear program can fairly be called an existential threat to the Wilsonian ideal. In particular a nuclear Iran will kill the two dreams at the heart of President Obama’s foreign policy and indeed of his view of the world: the dream that the genie of nuclear weapons can be forced back into the bottle and the dream that the nations of the world can build a post-Westphalian international order in which the world’s governments are bound by deepening networks of laws.

There are a lot of people in the foreign policy world who consider both of President Obama’s dreams to be hopelessly naive. The idea that the world’s nuclear powers would ever agree to give up these expensive and powerful weapons strikes many realists as laughable. There is a realist case (which I personally buy) for the President of the United States to advocate the abolition of nuclear weapons; the United States, with its overwhelming superiority in conventional weapons, would be safer and more powerful in a world without the big bomb. Conceivably, the UK could go along as that county might welcome a chance to save money while looking idealistic. Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea and France won’t buy. Those countries have good reasons for their nuclear arsenals and they won’t give them up.

The dream that the great powers of the world will ever form a kind of universal European Union also strikes many observers of world politics as naive.

The cynics may be right (and in fact I fear they are) but that isn’t the point just now. Henry Kissinger may not believe in the creation of a post-Westphalian order, but President Obama does — at least he believes that without these noble hopes as guiding lights we will lose our way amidst the countless pitfalls of the world’s long night. And he believes this deeply enough to continue to do his best to set American foreign policy in the service of these two transcendent goals. The President of the United States is a serious and strong-willed man; these values are the rocks on which he stands.

The problem is that Iran’s success means the complete, utter and historic destruction of everything President Obama wants to build.

Make no mistake about it. If Iran gets nuclear weapons on his watch, the dream of non-proliferation comes to an end and Barack Obama will go down in history as the president who lost the fight to stop nukes.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:14 PM