The Dusty Strategist

Aaron Friedberg writes on Iran’s launching of their first satellite yesterday:

All the more reason to make one more push to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear programs, but also to begin to think seriously about what we should do if — or, as seems increasingly likely, when — we fail.

My thoughts exactly. Indeed, this is a better, more mature way for policymakers to think about the world: coping with rather than solving of problems. As to working through what to do about a nuclear Iran, I took some hackish swipes at the question in the pages of the dearly departed Culture11 a few months back:

Rather than focusing on preventing something that’s largely inevitable, the Obama administration would do well to think strategically through the post-nuclear-Iran landscape. Could we offer Iran’s adversaries the protection of our nuclear shield, whereby an attack on them would precipitate massive retaliation from us? And what are the pressure points we have at our disposal against Saudi Arabia and Egypt to encourage them to not develop weapons of their own? This kind of thinking needs to be built up institutionally and made into a transparent proposal to the region ahead of time. Dealing with the situation reactively can lead to disaster.

There must be some nuclear strategists sitting in the bowels of the Pentagon somewhere collecting dust since the end of the Cold War. Dust these people off! It’s not like we haven’t dealt with this stuff before.