ROBERT KAPLAN WANTS TO CONTAIN EXPANSIONIST IRAN
It is not an accident that Iran was the ancient world’s first superpower. There was a certain geographic logic to it. Iran is the greater Middle East’s universal joint, tightly fused to all of the outer cores. Its border roughly traces and conforms to the natural contours of the landscape—plateaus to the west, mountains and seas to the north and south, and desert expanse in the east toward Afghanistan. For this reason, Iran has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and urbane civilization than most places in the Arab world and all the places in the Fertile Crescent. Unlike the geographically illogical countries of that adjacent region, there is nothing artificial about Iran. Not surprisingly, Iran is now being wooed by both India and China, whose navies will come to dominate the Eurasian sea lanes in the 21st century.
Of all the shatter zones in the greater Middle East, the Iranian core is unique: The instability Iran will cause will not come from its implosion, but from a strong, internally coherent Iranian nation that explodes outward from a natural geographic platform to shatter the region around it. The security provided to Iran by its own natural boundaries has historically been a potent force for power projection. The present is no different. Through its uncompromising ideology and nimble intelligence services, Iran runs an unconventional, postmodern empire of substate entities in the greater Middle East: Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Sadrist movement in southern Iraq. If the geographic logic of Iranian expansion sounds eerily similar to that of Russian expansion in Mackinder’s original telling, it is.
Therefore, he recommends containment which he considers as causing the collapse of the USSR.
The geography of Iran today, like that of Russia before, determines the most realistic strategy to securing this shatter zone: containment. As with Russia, the goal of containing Iran must be to impose pressure on the contradictions of the unpopular, theocratic regime in Tehran, such that it eventually changes from within. The battle for Eurasia has many, increasingly interlocking fronts. But the primary one is for Iranian hearts and minds, just as it was for those of Eastern Europeans during the Cold War. Iran is home to one of the Muslim world’s most sophisticated populations, and traveling there, one encounters less anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism than in Egypt. This is where the battle of ideas meets the dictates of geography.
Personally, I believe geography makes a comparison to Germany more apt. But Kaplan prefer the comparison to Russia because he wishes to apply a strategy called containment to the problem called Iran. But it should be recalled that it was not containment per se that led to the implosion of the Soviet Union and certainly not it was not"respect" that convinced Gorbachev to throw in the towel.
It was the disenchantment of the Communist elite with an ideologically driven economic system which could not provide it with access to the life style available to Western elites. The same cannot be said of the Iranian (or Chinese for that matter) elite. That elite and its children enjoy an unfettered access to the best Democratic states can offer. They can have their theocratic cake and eat it too.
A serious containment policy must close Western borders to the members of Iran's elite and their children in the manner the US has done during the Cold War to members of the Communist party in Eastern Europe and Russia. Failure to do so would doom any containment policy to failure.
In the meantime, Barry Rubin is right to recommend Obama read his own report on Iran, the number one terror exporter:
