Iran and the Costs of Containment

Michael Anton
National Review Online
03 May '10

‘Even as momentum for Iran sanctions grows, containment seems only viable option,” reads a Washington Post headline from April 22. Leaving aside for the moment the dubious character of the first half of that assertion, is it really true that containment is now the “only” option?

It is certainly true that nearly everyone in Washington — from administration officials to the permanent civil service to the foreign-policy establishment — believes that, and has believed it for at least a year, if not longer. The intellectual groundwork was laid long before President Obama came into office, in part as a way of sketching an alternative to an American or Israeli military strike, which seemed a much more likely possibility when the president was named Bush.

In recent days — as one senior administration official after another has either downplayed the significance of an Iranian nuclear weapon or spoken in nigh-apocalyptic terms about the use of military force to prevent one from emerging — it would seem that the triumph of containment as America’s chosen Iran strategy is complete.

The working assumption of containment’s adherents is that it is the low- or lower-cost alternative to tough sanctions or military action. The former are believed to be either impossible to impose (because Russia, China, and other nations won’t go along), undesirable (because sanctions would harm the Iranian people more than the regime and turn popular anger against us), or ineffective (because Tehran is determined to ride out even the most crippling sanctions in pursuit of the bomb). The latter is just dismissed out of hand as the precursor to Armageddon.

But is it really true that containment carries relatively low costs? To answer that, we must first grasp what those costs are likely to be.

It is instructive to begin with a comparison to the lodestar example cited by containment advocates: the decades-long American and allied effort to restrain the expansionist impulses of the Soviet Union. The very term “containment” originated in arguably the most famous foreign-policy essay of all time, George Kennan’s “Sources of Soviet Conduct” [registration required]. Published in Foreign Affairs in 1947, the article outlined a policy that would — short of war — allow America to confront and oppose Soviet aggression.

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