Several commentators have remarked on the Obama administration’s weekend PR offensive touting the accelerated deployment of ballistic-missile defense systems to the Persian Gulf. George Friedman of STRATFOR is one, and in an excellent article in Spero News from Monday, he posits that President Obama is “preparing to accept a nuclear Iran.”
Friedman makes the case that February 2010 is a decision point for President Obama, in part because of Israeli statements to that effect. Friedman’s sense is that Obama cannot politically get away with letting another month go by. He suggests that with events developing that will require a decision, Obama wants to convince Israel that a nuclear Iran can be tolerable – if the right defenses are in place. Obama’s hope with this policy would be to avert unilateral Israeli action. The pieces of this assessment certainly fit, if we stipulate that Obama’s conscious priority is maneuvering to block Israel. I’m not sure, however, that his thinking process is that pristinely linear.
There may be another prospect in view. I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that Obama is preparing the ground for sanctions; indeed, sanctions at a level that could enrage Iran. (A “graduated pressure track” sounds like a formula his advisers would endorse.) The political benefits of proceeding with sanctions would include, among others, the perception of keeping the “negotiation” going. The longer the outcome remains uncertain, the more latitude Obama retains, and the longer the key decision points can be forestalled. Sanctions would also, of course, give the appearance of doing something “tough” on foreign policy.
Obama hasn’t shied away from the difficult – at times even impolite – task of twisting China’s arm to join sanctions against Iran. If he has no intention of acting on sanctions, he has burned a lot of bridges to no purpose. Although he will assuredly have to act without China’s agreement, and probably without Russia’s, he would approach sanctions with bipartisan support already lined up in Congress. His policy stance has been quite consistent on sanctions, and he would have support for meaningful measures, at least initially, from much of the Western media. The argument that tough sanctions are the inevitable “next step” and must be at least tried would appeal to many.
The political calculation for a president seeking to bolster his image with unhappy constituencies at home could well argue for sanctions. It’s another question whether Obama understands what he would be getting into, with sanctions that might be meaningful in the sense of inflicting loss or inconvenience but are unlikely to be effective for the intended purpose. If a tougher sanctions regime produced restive European allies, overt realignment by Russia and China, and an Iranian terror backlash in the Middle East, we might well find ourselves wishing that George Friedman had been right. The possibility certainly remains that he is; but Obama has a lot of political capital invested in the prospect of a “pressure track,” and more incentive to proceed with it than to choose now as the time for accepting a nuclear Iran.
