Evelyn Gordon
Analysis from Israel

Comment: Israel is on its own vis-?-vis Iran

Published October 10, 2012
For 60 years, America has rejected military action against nuclear programs. Iran won’t be the exception.

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If I could ask every cabinet minister to read one thing now that the

holidays are over and they are getting back to business, it wouldn’t be a

great classic or a scholarly tome. It would be an 800-word
href=”http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/obama-vs-netanyahu-7515?page=1″

target=”_blank”>journal article by a PhD student arguing

that regardless of who wins November’s US presidential election, there’s

no chance America will ever take military action against Iran’s nuclear

program.

Other pundits have advanced this claim


href=”http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/109873/why-romney-wont-strike-iran”

target=”_blank”>before, often persuasively. But what makes

Gabriel Scheinmann’s piece in The National Interest unique is that he doesn’t

ground it in either domestic or foreign-policy considerations, which

could theoretically change. Rather, he points to a consistent,

half-century-old policy tradition in which successive US governments,

both Democratic and Republican, have repeatedly considered preemptive

military action against nuclear programs, and always decided against it –

from the Soviet Union in the 1950s through China in the 1960s all the

way to Syria in 2007.

Scheinmann doesn’t detail why successive governments rejected military

action, but the reasons are fairly obvious: Most of the same arguments –

from reluctance to be seen as the aggressor through belief in the

feasibility of containment to fear of sparking a war – are made today by

opponents of military action against Iran. But there’s another, even

more important reason that often goes unspoken: America is a superpower.

Hence even another nuclear superpower like the USSR doesn’t necessarily

pose an existential threat to it. And a mere regional power like Iran

certainly doesn’t.

This doesn’t mean a

nuclear-armed Iran couldn’t cause America plenty of pain; it could. But

pain isn’t an existential threat. The USSR also caused America plenty of

pain, including hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed or wounded in

several conventional wars against Soviet-backed forces. Yet overall,

America still flourished during that half-century of conflict.

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For a tiny country like Israel, in contrast, a nuclear

Iran is an existential threat. This isn’t merely because a single

nuclear bomb could wipe out much of the country; it’s also because

Israel is so badly outnumbered by hostile neighbors’ conventional

forces.

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Originally Published in: Jerusalem Post
Original Link: http://www.jpost.com/Features/Magazine-Features/Comment-Israel-is-on-its-own-vis-vis-Iran
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