Unthinkable by Kenneth M. Pollack Page B

at which Iran can defeat the United States The smartest thing they could do would be to back down, de-escalate, and try to go back to fighting at the unconventional level where they may have an advantage over us—although even that is no longer certain after Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terror, and the Arab Spring. At any other level of warfare, we will do infinitely greater damage to them than they can do to us. There is always the potential for catastrophic miscalculation, but in every nuclear crisis in the past, regardless of the participants—including India and Pakistan—the moment that their nuclear arsenals were engaged, all sides suddenly began to demonstrate enormous care and caution, and a willingness to tolerate humiliating defeat rather than face annihilation. That includes risk-tolerant and casualty-tolerant leaders like Khrushchev, Stalin, and Pakistan’s generals. Iran’s leaders would thus have to be categorically different kinds of people to act differently—again, they would have to be as different as Saddam Husayn, who was willing to gamble on the ruin of his regime and his own death on numerous occasions from 1980 until his final miscalculation in 2003. There is nothing about the behavior of Iran’s leaders that looks to me like they belong in that narrow category.
    The Saudis also worry me. My experience of the Saudis is that they don’t bluff lightly, unlike some of our other Middle Eastern allies. I take them at their word when they say that they plan to get a bomb of their own if the Iranians do. Nevertheless, I suspect that when it comes down to it, doing so will prove harder for the Saudis than it might seem now. First, I am skeptical that the Iranians will weaponize, at least for some time, because they fear Russia, China, and India joining the sanctions;they fear the United States mounting an all-out regime change campaign against them; and they may even fear an American or Israeli military response. In the ambiguous circumstances in which Iran abstains from weaponizing, would the Saudis go for a bomb? To the rest of the world, it will look like international pressure is working with Iran—and then the Saudis come along and wreck it by getting a bomb of their own? Maybe. There is also the question of whether the Pakistanis will actually give it to them if they ask for it, no matter how much Riyadh may have contributed to Islamabad’s bomb-making program. The Pakistanis have actually been remarkably careful with their nuclear arsenal, and they may fear that if they are caught giving a bomb to someone, they will come under severe international sanctions that they simply cannot tolerate—and from which neither the Americans nor the Chinese will save them. The Saudis, too, may still calculate that it is more useful for them to have a strong defense relationship with the United States than to go out on their own, acquire a small nuclear arsenal, and perhaps sour the long strategic relationship with the United States that has been the cornerstone of their security since the Second World War.
    Then there is the issue of Khamene’i’s successor. First, I suspect that for their own reasons the Iranians are not going to pick a crackpot to succeed him. Next, in a post-Khamene’i era, my guess is that the Supreme Leader will be more constrained even than he is now. This is the nature of bureaucratic autocracies: they dislike strong leaders who want to push for particular visions. Left to choose their own leaders, they tend toward safe choices—nonentities, consensus builders, and committees. Just looking at the current Iranian political scene, it strikes me as difficult for one of the real firebrands to get himself named Supreme Leader. Even if one of them could, I think it highly unlikely that they would be even as bad as Khomeini, who still abided by deterrence logic and respected the overwhelming strength of the United States even if he fought it