Blog P.I.

Charles Krauthammer is one of the country’s most influential conservative thinkers, indeed one of the country’s most influential newspaper columnists. Right?

When I was on Bloggingheads a few weeks ago, I briefly mentioned a then-recent Krauthammer column that caught my attention and made me think hard about current U.S. (and European) policy toward Iran vis-à-vis its nuclear (weapons) program. I thiink it’s important enough to quote at length. Here’s how it began:

The era of nonproliferation is over. During the first half-century of the nuclear age, safety lay in restricting the weaponry to major powers and keeping it out of the hands of rogue states. This strategy was inevitably going to break down. The inevitable has arrived. …

The EU-3 negotiations (Britain, France and Germany) [with Iran] went nowhere. Each U.N. Security Council resolution enacting what passed for sanctions was more useless than the last. Uranium enrichment continues.

When Iran’s latest announcement that it was tripling its number of centrifuges to 9,000 elicited no discernible response from the Bush administration, the game was over. Everyone says Iran must be prevented from going nuclear. No one will bell the cat.

Krauthammer acknowledges, remarkably but rationally, that Iran will get its nuclear weapons whether we try to bribe them to do otherwise or not. And thanks in part to the pyrrhic invasion of Iraq and as well to North Korea’s development of WMD, preemption “is spent.” This is a huge concession from one of the standard-bearers of the political philosophy popularly, if somewhat erroneously, termed neoconservatism. So what to do?

Begin by making the retaliatory threat in response to Iranian nuclear aggression so unmistakable and so overwhelming that the non-millenarians in leadership would stay the hand or even remove those taking their country to the point of extinction. …

For the sake of argument, imagine a two-layered anti-missile system in which each layer is imperfect, with, say, a 90 percent shoot-down accuracy. That means one in 100 missiles gets through both layers. That infinitely strengthens deterrence by radically degrading the possibility of a successful first strike. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might refrain from launching an arsenal of, say, 20 nukes if his scientific advisers showed him that there was only an 18.2 percent chance of any getting through — and a 100 percent chance that a retaliatory counterattack of hundreds of Israeli (and/or American) nukes would reduce the world’s first Islamic republic to a cinder.

Of course, one can get around missile defense by using terrorists. But anything short of a hermetically secret, perfectly executed, multiple-site attack would cause terrible, but not existential, destruction. The retaliatory destruction, on the other hand, would be existential.

This is hardly dovish, promising Iran that nuclear devastation of Israel (or any other ally) would mean the destruction of Iran — in effect, we would tell Iran that Israel’s safety is now very much in its interest.

But it’s also not quite what you’d expect from one of the strongest supporters of the Iraq war. My left-leaning roommate called it “uncharacteristically sharp and honest for him.” Maybe, just maybe, that’s part of the problem.

Because the column sank like a stone.

Krauthammer’s column regularly appears on more than one website, and when I searched then and again tonight, I found very little pickup. At WashingtonPost.com, the highest-profile of all, it received just 21 linkbacks from the blogosphere. At the high-traffic NRO.com, there were only 4 linkbacks. And at the lesser-read Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (at least some subset of Blog P.I. readers will probably find this association ironic) it was a whopping zero. (Of course, this post will bump each up by one.) Compare to his most recent column, taking a familiar position against cap-and-trade, which picked up 59 linkbacks just from its appearance on WashingtonPost.com.

No major blog, liberal or conservative, gave his Iran column any serious thought. The only sustained discussion of the column was at the mid-level left-leaning blog Foreign Policy Watch, which simply disagreed with his premise:

Of course, one of the larger concerns surrounding the prospect of North Korea’s failure to disarm and the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran is that they could inspire balancing, follow-on nuclear programs elsewhere in their immediate regions. But it’s not inevitable that this will happen. Nor is it inevitable, for that matter, that North Korea won’t see its disarmament obligations through to the very end, or that Iran is racing toward nuclear weapons acquisition and there is nothing capable of preventing this outcome. Such fatalism is misguided, to say the least, and would lead to very poor policy if taken seriously. …

That is not to say there aren’t potent concerns for the future of antiproliferation efforts; there are. But to translate this into such sweeping pessimism, going so far as to say “the era of nonproliferation is over,” is intellectually lazy and politically dangerous, particularly if it means adopting purely defensive responses as opposed to vigorous preventive diplomacy designed to blunt such outcomes in the first place.

Maybe they’re right and Krauthammer is wrong. But considering the perceived admission against interest, one would think this column would spark more debate.

Conceding that Iran will succeed in developing nuclear weapons is clearly an unpopular position to take, no matter which political party you belong to. The national consensus, international consensus even, is that Iran must be dissuaded from developing a nuclear arsenal. There are disagreements about how to do it, but the argument that “the era of nonproliferation is over” is clearly something that no one wants to hear.