country should keep working on a nuclear bomb. As Iran patiently
accumulated the tools of regional influence and luxuriated in the power vacuum brought on by U.S. destruction of its neighbors
Afghanistan and Iraq, it developed both the tools and the trenchant mentality of a Shia superpower. It hardly mattered whether
the United States and its allies had been tricked or deluded. The result was settled: in substituting Levi’s for reality,
America and Europe had squandered a decade of opportunity to pry into Iran’s weakness.
Something interesting and important had been going on inside Iran. But, because we were looking at it the wrong way, through
a lens of soft-powered inevitability, we missed it. It would have been far better to have a policy that pushed in hard and
inventive ways on many fronts at once instead of hoping historical forces would work in ways we thought we could predict.
Later on we’ll see how surrounding a problem like Iran, swarming it with different policies, presents a radically new kind
of diplomatic pressure that is both responsive and flexible, that doesn’t count on any certainties. “Iran
will
become more moderate” is not a good basis for policy; it’s hardly a good basis for a wager. We can’t ever know for sure what
is going to happen inside the complex sandpile of Iranian politics and religion, so we’ve got to explore policies in multiple
creative ways all at once. It’s the difference between a linear “first we’ll sanction them, then we’ll wait for history to
work, then we’ll watch the government collapse” narrative and a campaign better suited for a nonlinear world. We’re not baking
cookies here; we’re trying to stress and press a complex system in many ways.
Of course, it’s distressing when we find our enemies ignoring what we thought were those surefire post–Cold War rules, those
just add cell phones
recipes for modernity. When researchers find that the vast majority of suicide bombers come from nonreligious, educated middle-class
families, we often have a hard time squaring the facts with the images of the world that we carry around. When voters in Venezuela
or Gaza choose governments different from our own in elections, we want to believe they’ve been misled or cheated. But really
these choices are signs of the strange interactions that have always existed and that now simply accumulate faster and in
stranger combinations. The end of the Cold War wasn’t proof that our way of life was inevitable. Rather it was the clearest
possible demonstration of the opposite, of the way that the smallest quirks can mark out great differences — and of how hard
we now must work to maintain the ideals and values we believe in.
The good news, as we’re about to see, is that this same energy offers tremendous hope. The world isn’t being paved over by
a smooth, universalized system. And that very ability to evolve systems that fit the needs of different peoples and cultures
and to encourage real diversity in thinking will help us solve many of the problems we face. Of course all of this has to
be constrained in a framework of basic rights, which we’ll discuss as a crucial part of deep security. In a way, the most
gripping part of Gorbachev’s own story was that he saw the hope that sandpile forces could bring, even though he could never
quite figure out how to master them. It’s not going to be easy to change ourselves or our ideas enough to take full advantage
of these forces either, not least because we’ll be trying to do so even as we are faced with a world that feels ever more
chaotic, out of control, and threatening. But this is precisely why we’ve got to abandon the easy idea that history is somehow
“on our side” and that the end of the USSR showed that all we need to do is wait. Those thousand flowering isms now on the
way will challenge our values. And if we don’t accept the need to move now, to
accumulated the tools of regional influence and luxuriated in the power vacuum brought on by U.S. destruction of its neighbors
Afghanistan and Iraq, it developed both the tools and the trenchant mentality of a Shia superpower. It hardly mattered whether
the United States and its allies had been tricked or deluded. The result was settled: in substituting Levi’s for reality,
America and Europe had squandered a decade of opportunity to pry into Iran’s weakness.
Something interesting and important had been going on inside Iran. But, because we were looking at it the wrong way, through
a lens of soft-powered inevitability, we missed it. It would have been far better to have a policy that pushed in hard and
inventive ways on many fronts at once instead of hoping historical forces would work in ways we thought we could predict.
Later on we’ll see how surrounding a problem like Iran, swarming it with different policies, presents a radically new kind
of diplomatic pressure that is both responsive and flexible, that doesn’t count on any certainties. “Iran
will
become more moderate” is not a good basis for policy; it’s hardly a good basis for a wager. We can’t ever know for sure what
is going to happen inside the complex sandpile of Iranian politics and religion, so we’ve got to explore policies in multiple
creative ways all at once. It’s the difference between a linear “first we’ll sanction them, then we’ll wait for history to
work, then we’ll watch the government collapse” narrative and a campaign better suited for a nonlinear world. We’re not baking
cookies here; we’re trying to stress and press a complex system in many ways.
Of course, it’s distressing when we find our enemies ignoring what we thought were those surefire post–Cold War rules, those
just add cell phones
recipes for modernity. When researchers find that the vast majority of suicide bombers come from nonreligious, educated middle-class
families, we often have a hard time squaring the facts with the images of the world that we carry around. When voters in Venezuela
or Gaza choose governments different from our own in elections, we want to believe they’ve been misled or cheated. But really
these choices are signs of the strange interactions that have always existed and that now simply accumulate faster and in
stranger combinations. The end of the Cold War wasn’t proof that our way of life was inevitable. Rather it was the clearest
possible demonstration of the opposite, of the way that the smallest quirks can mark out great differences — and of how hard
we now must work to maintain the ideals and values we believe in.
The good news, as we’re about to see, is that this same energy offers tremendous hope. The world isn’t being paved over by
a smooth, universalized system. And that very ability to evolve systems that fit the needs of different peoples and cultures
and to encourage real diversity in thinking will help us solve many of the problems we face. Of course all of this has to
be constrained in a framework of basic rights, which we’ll discuss as a crucial part of deep security. In a way, the most
gripping part of Gorbachev’s own story was that he saw the hope that sandpile forces could bring, even though he could never
quite figure out how to master them. It’s not going to be easy to change ourselves or our ideas enough to take full advantage
of these forces either, not least because we’ll be trying to do so even as we are faced with a world that feels ever more
chaotic, out of control, and threatening. But this is precisely why we’ve got to abandon the easy idea that history is somehow
“on our side” and that the end of the USSR showed that all we need to do is wait. Those thousand flowering isms now on the
way will challenge our values. And if we don’t accept the need to move now, to
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