How Big A Threat Is Iran?

When Obama describes Cuba and Iran and Venezuela as regimes that "don't pose a serious threat" to the U.S., the usual suspects go nuts. This is "full-throated appeasement" splutters Hewitt. Jen Rubin vents:

So, taken literally, he seems not much concerned about Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, its sponsorship of terrorist organizations, its commitment to eradicate Israel, its current actions in supplying weapons that have killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq, and its role in eroding Lebanon’s sovereignty through its client Hezbollah.

Of course these are different points. It's possible to believe all that Rubin states and yet not believe that Iran actually poses a serious threat to the US as a whole. America's economy is 68 times the size of Iran's, which is an economic basketcase, and rendered more so by religiously oriented mismanagement. America's military capacity is simply stratospherically greater than a ramshackle Islamist state like Iran's. Yes: Iran's pursuit of nuclear weaponry destabilizes the region, and yes, if such weaponry were handed to terrorists, the threat could be enormous. But it's hard to see why such a threat would be any greater than, say, Pakistan's government supplying Islamist terrorists with such weapons. And Israel already has a nuclear deterrent to answer the mullah's threats. It's also very hard to see how Iran could be more empowered than it has been by the Bush administration's bungling of the Iraq occupation.

The deeper question - to which it is hard to evince an easy answer - is whether Iran is uniquely immune to nuclear deterrence because the apocalyptic mindset of some of its leaders makes them suicidal as a nation and as a regime.

We have their statements - which should at times prompt alarm - and we have their record for the past quarter century. That record suggests a despicable regime that nonetheless acts rationally in its own interests and defense. But what are our options if we assume that this regime - unlike Kim Jong-Il or Stalin - cannot be deterred? The only logical response is invasion of pre-emptive bombing, with no clear guarantee of success and an enormous chance of blow-back in the wider war.

It seems to me that keeping some sense of perspective and balance about the threats we face is not the same thing as "appeasement." Appeasement means giving a regime something in return for its aggression, in the vain hope that it will be deterred. And making the right calls in this dangerous and complex world is not made easier by facile, constant analogies to 1938.