The Globalist's Thomas P.M. Barnett suggests that a nuclear armed Iran may be a stabilizing force in the region. His "Blueprint for Action" presents a number of interesting possibilities in a development that has so brought about few new perspectives.In the recent increase in tensions between Iran and the West it is important to distinguish between the Iranian government and the Iranian people. With this in mind, one can better analyze Iranian political maneuvering from a domestic and international perspective.
Current efforts by U.S. and E.U. officials to seek a referral of Iran to the U.N. Security Council provides little hope for an acceptable outcome. China's tremendous thirst for energy makes an oil and gas embargo improbable. It also remains to be seen if such an embargo would damage Iran or the world economy more. It seems officials are seeking a Security Council referral without plans for a successful end-game. With this in mind, one must be willing to consider alternative perspectives.
"In many ways, the Shiite revolutionary spirit died a long time ago in Iran, leaving behind a cynical political order where the mullahs pretend to rule, the citizens pretend to obey and the government pretends to reform.
Iran is a frightfully young society, full of ambition for a better life and chafing under what the majority of the population consider to be the rather idiotic rule of the religious fundamentalists, one that offers them no future worth pursuing in an increasingly globalized world that demands far more rational rule sets."
2 comments:
My professor of International Relations of South Asia argues that the Pakistan/India conflict is stablized by each country now possessing nuclear weapons. I think an appropriate analogy is the statistic that domestic violence occurs at a much higher rate in England than in the U.S. because when a husband becomes upset at his wife in England he beats her, however when a husband becomes upset with his wife in the United States he goes and gets his gun, but shooting his wife takes more guts (and has more severe consequences) than that of beating her, so the wife is rarely shot. So similarly to nuclear weapons, the possession of guns is a stabalizing tool. But is this a plausible argument against gun control?
but what if iran is the husband willing to use his gun?
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