The Depends Theory of Geopolitcs

I was interested to see GregPStone in comments mounting the argument that assuming the Iranians are, in fact, trying to build a nuclear bomb whose purpose is to mount a suicidal unprovoked nuclear first strike constitutes "erring on the side of caution."

There's something to be said for caution, but that's not what this is at all. Rather, it's erring on the side of panic an approach that, stealing from Atrios, we might term the Depends Theory of International Relations. Running around constantly freaking out about everything, panicking, and fostering an atmosphere of paranoid alarmism isn't cautious at all. It doesn't make you safer. Primarily, it prevents you from focusing and setting priorities. It blinds you to real threats by diffusing resources and effort. It leads to mistakes, and imposes enormous costs. It makes it too easy for adversaries to throw you off your game at very little cost to themselves, while making it hard for friends and potential friends to trust you. It destroys your own credibility leaving you, eventually, alone in the corner covered in your own piss.

Real strength requires the United States to act like its strong, to act with some confidence in our basic capabilities, values, institutions, etc. To be able to use that confidence to calm down, set priorities, focus energies and efforts, and make sure we're not running around wrecking what is, objectively speaking, a very favorable situation by global or historical standards.

9/28/06 12:50PM del.icio.us this incoming links

Comments

The folks that who are now being the most alarmist about Iran are the generally the same crowd that overestimated the threat from Saddam, and underestimated the threat from Bin Laden before 9/11. Why should anyone listen to them? Do track records count?

Posted by: RC on September 28, 2006 01:22 PM

Atrios? I really thought that *I* had come up with the Depends analogy (grumble). At least no one's challenged my first claim on "panty piddling paranoia" and "paranoid bedwetting cowards" (both terms generally used WRT law enforcement authorities who panic over dubious terrorist "threats" and others who are convinced that Islam will Conquer the World).

Posted by: Peter on September 28, 2006 01:26 PM

It isn't simply that paranoia is our foreign policy, it's the election year pulse to the paranoia that makes it all so loverly.

Posted by: Jeffrey Davis on September 28, 2006 03:16 PM

This is naive.

They are not afraid of anything. Neoconservative ideologists are not afraid, they're opportunistic. Republican voters are inidifferent to to foreign policy pursued in their name. They care about one thing: lower taxes.

Posted by: brendan on September 28, 2006 03:59 PM

I never thought anything in diapers could be "cute" - you've proven me wrong.

The crucial difference being - this Pug is bold, and noble, and attractive, and brave, and compassionate, and willing to face the world. The People in charge of our discourse are more like highly sensitive poodles with sharp teeth - panicky, pampered, vicious, and fundamentally self-loathing (thus the French hatred). They should be depicted as such a poodle shitting the bed.

Posted by: MDtoMN on September 28, 2006 04:06 PM

It doesn't really seem to work- this stick only approach to governing. And it seems very expensive to maintain the lies necessary to keep it going.

Posted by: patience on September 28, 2006 07:41 PM

Caution of this sort also overlooks all the wrong incentives that a preemptive bombing attack on Iran would create - including by encouraging any country that disagrees with America on any significant geopolitical issue to rush to develop the bomb. Coupling these incentives with America's historically waning economic might, we are in for some interesting times over the next 30 years.

Posted by: DC on September 28, 2006 09:50 PM

"Running around constantly freaking out about everything, panicking, and fostering an atmosphere of paranoid alarmism isn't cautious at all."

Perhaps it's because I'm old enough to have gone through the duck and cover drills in the fifties, but I see nuclear weapon proliferation as the most pressing issue in foreign policy. I know that many others share this point of view; that's why the Bushies went to such pains to gin up the nuke part of the WMD assertions and reacted so strongly to Wilson's op. ed.

Lumping nuclear weapons with "everything" else, strikes me as very sloppy thinking indeed. We have to prioritize emerging threats and IMO millennialists with nuclear weapons hoping for Armageddon ASAP qualifies as a priority threat.

Posted by: GregPStone on September 29, 2006 09:38 AM

Nobody much says it but there is this bullfighter theory as well. Radical Islam is indeed trying to bring down the infidel west but by financial means rather than violent means. The violence is just the cape being waved in our faces to get us to charge the Islamic matador. When we react to it by spending Saganic billions & billions, we are doing just what they want us to do. They hit the war wheel once with $500k or a mil or whatever 9/11 cost them and then we tighten up and empty our treasury of money and our brains of good sense to keep it spinning. This is what Bin Laden said he was up to. And the idea underlying their bet is that the extended visit in Afganistan done brought the USSR down through both financial and morale hits. They think they can bring down the USA the same way. They may be right. In any case, this is the scenario that is being followed - realized and intended or not.

Posted by: Ed D. on September 29, 2006 10:36 AM

> Perhaps it's because I'm old enough to
> have gone through the duck and cover
> drills in the fifties, but I see nuclear
> weapon proliferation as the most pressing
> issue in foreign policy.

True, but you will remember that George W. Bush didn't even try to fight back when John Kerry stated that the Bush Administration had dropped the ball on non-proliferation; he just let it slide by. Which to me means that even Rove and the earpiece couldn't come up with a plausible denial.

Turning Iran, which was willing to talk to the US post-9/11 and which may have provided covert assistance for the invastion of Afghanistan, into a bitter enemy is not exactly a good non-proliferation strategy either.

Cranky

Posted by: Cranky Observer on September 29, 2006 10:50 AM

Cranky,

Yeah, one of the many agonizing ironies of the Bush presidency is that they are adept at using nuclear proliferation as PR to push the Iraq war but completely unserious about the actual polcy issue.

Posted by: GregPStone on September 29, 2006 12:02 PM

Matthew,

If you see this please consider:

1) As I read it the NIE does NOT say that things would be worse in Iraq if we left, only that they would be better if we succeed. (and that no prospect of success is in sight) One does not imply the other.

2) "IF": That the terrorists would be weakened by democratic progress is like saying that they would be weakened by conversion to Buddhism. Without plans and probabilities the point is a worthless sop to Bush.

3) The Bushies have been successful in always answering questions about their Saddam's "mushroom cloud" rhetoric by answering about widespread perceptions of WMD in general. Thus they get off the hook on their most blatant lying by changing the subject to poison gas, etc. where their assertions were more reasonable.

Posted by: GregPStone on September 29, 2006 12:13 PM

Thus they get off the hook on their most blatant lying by changing the subject to poison gas, etc. where their assertions were more reasonable.

Only by the willful forgetfulness of the fact that the most dangerous of their poison gases had aged.

And the biomedical menace was hyped by ignoring the fact that there has never yet been a theater effective biological weapon.

So, all told, they knew there was nothing to the idea of the Iraqi's menacing us.

Posted by: Jeffrey Davis on September 29, 2006 01:48 PM

IMO millennialists with nuclear weapons hoping for Armageddon ASAP qualifies as a priority threat

Threat suppression begins at home.

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