Still Ours to Lead: America, Rising Powers, and the Tension Between Rivalry and Restraint by Bruce Jones

Author:Bruce Jones [Jones, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, World, American Government, Politics, General
ISBN: 9780815725138
Google: Ev_pAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 20724838
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2013-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Iran: The Acid Test

Of course, looming over the debate about Syria is the fraught question of Iran. There is a good reason that, for the past decade, Iran has loomed large in international politics. Tensions between Iran, its neighbors, and the West touch on virtually every major issue under negotiation in the changing international system. Every rising power, from Russia to China to Turkey to India, even Brazil, has stakes in the issues and the outcome—especially as it impacts the flow of oil from the Gulf and a stable Middle East and Central Asia. And the fact that the tensions hinge on nuclear weapons makes the Iran face-off a crisis of global significance, a test of whether the international system is still capable of restricting the world's most dangerous weapons.

Iran's precise end goal—whether it wants a nuclear bomb or just to be able to develop one extremely quickly when it may need to—is unclear.30 Certainly its quest for a nuclear program, perhaps a weapon, has become deeply linked to the prestige of the regime. Polling consistently shows that the Iranian population is less hostile to the West than its government, but it also consistently shows that the population supports the government's argument that the West should not be allowed to curtail its claimed right to civilian nuclear power.31

Iran's nuclear program is particularly worrisome because of its potentially destabilizing influence on the region. Tensions between Israel and much of the Middle East, as well as many Middle Eastern states’ distrust of Iran, make many concerned about a nuclear arms race. Most informed governments believe that were Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, or even reach the threshold of one, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and perhaps Turkey would immediately feel the need to nuclearize as well. Thus the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon is not just about its own weapon, it is about the nuclearization of the Middle East—and the consequent erosion of the nonproliferation and disarmament regime. There is of course the argument that nuclear-armed states would be less likely to go to war with one another.32 But that scenario would necessitate regime stability, effective administration and decisionmaking, and state rationality trumping populist fervor and religious sentiment.33

In a sense, Iran is the perfect encapsulation of the modern game of great-power rivalry and restraint. Every modern economy depends on Gulf oil, which reaches global markets through the Strait of Hormuz—which Iran borders. This is perhaps the most critical of globalization's networks. The rising powers, especially India and China, are hungry for Iran's oil—but so too are Japan and Korea and Europe. Two major international institutions, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the UN Security Council, play an important part in the relationship between the great powers and Iran. The way the Security Council works in Iran is also a perfect illustration of the relationship between the major powers and international institutions. It is not the case that the UN, through some mysterious agency, itself limits the great powers, nor is it the case that the great powers agree on strategy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.