Tyler's Question on Iran
on the objectives of their leaders
what is the correct way to model what they would have done had Trump and Netanyahu not attacked? And what is the correct way to model our optimal response to that? The terrible things that are happening now, do they not reflect an underlying equilibrium that would have emerged anyway within a few years’ time, or do we hold some hypothesis here of extreme path-dependence, suggesting the Iranian government would have been less bellicose on more or less a permanent basis?
The question is how well the Iranian regime would have behaved had there been no war.
One can imagine a scenario in which it would have behaved tolerably from our point of view. But the probability of such a scenario is something we can argue about.
As an aside, one can have different viewpoints of what “behaved tolerably” means. For some people, nuking Israel but leaving us alone would count. Or maybe even putting all of Europe under sharia law would be acceptable. Or occasionally throwing its weight around and obtaining concessions by threatening the U.S. with nuclear-armed ICBMs might be ok with some of you.
But there has to be some definition of “behaved tolerably” that is not all-inclusive. There has to be some conceivable behavior of the Iranian regime that one thinks is intolerable.
Tyler’s question then becomes: how do you think that the war in Iran affected the probability of intolerable behavior by the Iranian regime?
I think that it lowered that probability for at least a few years. This is based on a guess that it took out much of Iran’s military and nuclear capability.
Where I am coming from is a dark view of Iran’s intentions. This comes from:
a reading of Islamic history. It is filled with conquest by the sword and demands for submission. Muslims kill in the name of God. Say what you will about the West, we don’t do that any more. Islamic history is filled with using ceasefires as temporary respites from defeat, followed by resumption of war. The October 7 massacre broke a ceasefire, and people blame Netanyahu for counting on Hamas to keep the ceasefire.
The history of Iran’s regime. Starting in 1979, it committed an act of war, holding American diplomats hostage. Since then it has sponsored terrorism and murdered its own people at will.
The regime’s stated objectives. They repeatedly have called for the defeat of America and the destruction of America as a political power.
My model of Iran’s regime is that its long-term mission is to achieve world hegemony under its brand of Islam. My model of the United States is that it does not want to take this threat seriously. Solve for the equilibrium, as Tyler might say.
The most likely counterfactual at the geostrategic level is surely that nuclear-armed Israel would eventually launch preemptive strikes. Else what choice does it have, sit and take it? The large in land and population, oil-exporting nation of Iran that does not even border Israel surely has no need for nuclear anything except as an offensive weapon.
Whether any of it is the US's business is a different question, although it seems oil will dominate geopolitics in the 21st century as it did in the 20th century (see The Prize).
I take the view that leaders are rational in some way and unpredictable lunatics do not rise to power, because predictability is a prerequisite to being followed by henchmen. In the case of nuclear weapons, I believe that using them is beyond the pale for both rational leaders and henchmen because there's too much chance of national suicide, and it is the henchmen who would have to carry out the orders.
Even if Iran doesn't have launch codes and require multiple keys for launch, they must have some means of control, because while they can rely on the random half-illiterate fanatics to enforce morality codes, they cannot trust them with launching nuclear missiles on their own; if the leader has the power to start a nuclear war, he's going to make sure no one else can usurp that power, especially street thugs who are good for nothing more than beating up women who let their hair show.
Thus I do not believe ANY Iranian leaders want to start a nuclear war whose response would obliterate them before they barely got started in their holy mission to wipe out infidels, and I do not believe that the fanatics who don't mind committing national cultural suicide have the power to do so, as shown by the fact they haven't done so yet.
The only real evidence I have is that North Korea has been tamer since acquiring nuclear weapons than they were beforehand. It's not like North Korea has become stable and respectable, but they have become less rowdy. Their first nuclear weapons test was 9 October 2006. They sank a South Korean warship four years later. The last known Japanese kidnapping victim was 1983. An American may have been kidnapped in 2004.
A lot of people think the risk of a nuclear Iran is too high for such flimsy evidence. I have no counter-argument.