WASHINGTON - The assumption that the United States should exploit its military
dominance to exert pressure on adversaries has long dominated the thinking of
the US national security and political elite. But this central tenet of
conventional security doctrine was sharply rejected last week by a senior
practitioner of crisis diplomacy at the debut of a major new centrist foreign
policy think-tank.
At the first conference of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS),
ambassador James Dobbins, who was former president Bill Clinton special envoy
for Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo and the George W Bush administration's
first special envoy to Afghanistan, sharply rejected the well-established
concept of
coercive diplomacy.
Dobbins declared in a panel on Iran policy, "I reject the theory that the
implicit threat of force is a necessary prerequisite to successful diplomacy."
Looking back on 40 years of US diplomacy, Dobbins, now director of the Rand
International Security and Defense Policy Center, concluded that the
conventional wisdom about the need to back up diplomacy with adversaries with
force is wrong. "I can say that most of it was not conducted against a
background of threat of force," said Dobbins, and when the threat of force was
introduced, "diplomacy failed".
In diplomatic dealings with the Soviet Union, however, Dobbins said, "We never
threatened to use force."
Dobbins complained that the debate over diplomacy with regard to Iran has been
between those who are ready to use military force now and those "say we should
talk with them first". Advocates of diplomacy, he said, have to "meet a high
threshold - they have to offer the reversal of all Iranian positions". In
effect, they have to deliver Iranian "capitulation", said Dobbins.
Although very different from the Soviet Union as a threat, Dobbins observed,
Iran is similar in that "we can't afford to ignore it and we can't overrun it".
Real diplomacy in regard to Iran, he argued, would result in "better
information and better options".
In a line that got applause from the more than 750 people attending the
conference, Dobbins said his solution was to "deal with Iran".
The Dobbins argument represents the first high-profile challenge by a veteran
of the US national security community to a central tenet of national security
officials and the US political elite ever since the end of the Cold War.
The recently established CNAS has strong connections with former Clinton
administration national security officials and the Clinton wing of the
Democratic Party. CNAS president Michele A Flournoy and chief executive officer
Kurt M Campbell both held positions in the Clinton Defense Department. William
J Perry and Madeleine K Albright, Clinton's secretaries of defense and state,
respectively, gave opening remarks at the conference.
The Clinton wing of the Democratic Party and of the national security elite has
long associated itself with the idea that the threat of military force - and
even force itself - should be at the center of US policy in the Middle East.
Key figures from the Clinton administration, including Perry, Albright, former
United Nations ambassador Richard Holbrooke, former assistant secretary of
state James P Rubin and former deputy national security adviser James
Steinberg, lined up in support of the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq in
2003.
Flournoy and Campbell have already made it clear that CNAS' orientation will be
to hew the common ground uniting the national security professionals who have
served administrations of both parties. Flournoy co-authored an op-ed with
former Bush administration deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage two days
before the NCAS conference, and Armitage also introduced the conference.
A paper by Flournoy and two junior co-authors ostensibly calling for a new US
"grand strategy" is notable for its reluctance to go too far in criticizing the
Bush administration's policies. It argues that the current US positions in Iraq
pose the "real threat of strategic exhaustion" and calls for "rebalancing
risk", but offers no real alternative to indefinite continuation of the Bush
administration's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Instead, it urged the "rearticulation" of goals in both Iraq and Afghanistan by
replacing the "maximalist language used in past years" with "pragmatism".
But the choice of Dobbins to anchor a panel on Iran indicates that the Clinton
wing of the Democratic Party and of the national security community now has
serious doubts about the coercive diplomacy approach to Iran that has dominated
policy thinking since the beginning of the Clinton administration.
A paper on Iran policy co-authored by Campbell and released at the conference
reflects a new skepticism toward the threat of an attack on Iran as a way of
obtaining Iranian cooperation. It argues that US military threats against Iran
"have had the opposite effect" from what was desired, hardening the resolve of
Iranian leaders to enrich uranium and giving the Islamic regime greater
credibility with the Iran people.
The paper also reflected an unwillingness to dispense entirely with the
military option, however, proposing that the United States "de-emphasize, but
not forswear, the possibility of military action against Iran".
The paper advised against even taking the military threat off the table in
return for Iran's stopping its nuclear program, on the ground that Washington
must be able to use that threat to bargain with Iran over "stopping its support
for terrorism".
The principal author of the paper, James N Miller, who is senior vice president
and director of studies at CNAS, explained in an interview after the conference
that he believes Dobbins' assessment of the problem is "about right". Miller
said the threat to use force against Iran to coerce it on its nuclear program
"is not useful or credible now".
But Miller said he would not give up that threat, because the next president
might enter into serious negotiations with Iran, and Iran might refuse to "play
ball" and go ahead with plans to acquire nuclear weapons. If the president had
a strong coalition behind him, he said, "The use of force is an option that one
should consider."
The idea that diplomatic negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program must
be backed by the threat of war is so deeply entrenched in Washington that
endorsement of it seems to have become a criteria for any candidate being taken
seriously by the national security community.
Thus all three top Democratic hopefuls supported it during their primary fight
for the Democratic nomination.
Addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention in early
2007, Hillary Clinton said that, in dealing with the possibility of an Iranian
nuclear capability, "no option can be taken off the table". Barack Obama and
John Edwards also explicitly refused to rule out the use of force against Iran
if it refused to accept US demands to end its uranium enrichment program.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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