Fear Factor in Nuclear Iran

Fear Factor in Nuclear Iran

from The Diplomat by James R. Holmes

Different types of regime—republics, democracies, autocracies—“do” strategy differently. Right? Not if you ask Thucydides. The chronicler of the Peloponnesian War opines that “fear, honor, and interest” comprise “three of the strongest motives” that propel states’ actions. The Greek historian disregards the nature of the regime as a variable in his fear-honor-interest calculus. Freewheeling democratic Athens obeyed his logic of statecraft. So did oligarchic Sparta.
The Islamic Republic of Iran may as well. In Strategy in the Second Nuclear Age, my pal Scott Jones and I argue that the nature of the regime influences nuclear strategy and force structure less than common sense says it should. Tehran pursued a policy of nuclear ambiguity under the Shah, only to press ahead with nuclear-weapons R&D under the Islamic regime following the 1979 revolution. The Iranian nuclear program, then, has endured for some four decades across diametrically opposed regimes.
In other words, the link between how a country is governed, its leadership’s decision to go nuclear, and the kind of strategy it drafts to govern the use of nuclear weapons appears tenuous. Consider these motives in turn. Thucydides’ third driver, interest, is reasonably quantifiable. By applying raw intellect, representatives of different societies and cultures will probably come up with the same list of interests and options for a given state in given geopolitical surroundings.

How to uphold these interests, though?http://thediplomat.com/the-naval-diplomat/2012/10/18/regime-types-and-nuclear-weapons/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+the-diplomat+%28The+Diplomat+RSS%29