War With Iran Leaves Them Cold

At Contentions, Gordon Chang and David Hazony exchange views on Tom Friedman's prediction that:

The next American president will inherit many foreign policy challenges, but surely one of the biggest will be the cold war. Yes, the next president is going to be a cold-war president-but this cold war is with Iran.

Chang notes that

Friedman has violated Oscar Wilde’s first rule of international relations: “A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.”

Once a nation chooses its enemy, it inevitably selects its friends. If Iran were the Soviet Union, then we would naturally side with Tehran’s adversaries, the generally autocratic and corrupt Sunni Arab states. Indeed, Friedman lists them as our allies in his “cold war.” This makes perfect sense if the United States were, like England once was, just another offshore balancer.

Yet America is more than one of those. If there is any justification for us to exercise power beyond our borders, it is because we stand for a set of important principles. Because Iranian leaders oppose all that Americans believe-representative governance and free markets, for instance-they are by definition our foes.

Hazony argues that though Iran is not an enemy on the level of the former Soviet Union, it is an enemy and is using the same strategy:

The bottom line is that Iran is operating on the very same logic that the Soviets did: Expand your country’s power through (a) a totalizing ideology that rejects freedom; (b) massively upgrading your military; (c) fighting proxy wars against America and its allies; (d) technological advancement; (e) justifying the suffering of your people by pointing to the enemy as the real cause–you get the point.

Now all that is left is for the US to finally settle on a strategy of her own.

Technorati Tag: Iran.