India & Iran

Early this week over at Tapped, Matt Yglesias published a brief post on Iran. The gist of his argument was this: " ... Iran has us by the balls. Both militarily (thanks to the awkward position the Iraq War's put us in) and economically (thanks to the energy situation) Iran has more capacity to damage our interests than we do to damage Iran's." [author's emphasis]

Ribaldry aside, Yglesias' point is dead on the money. We simply have no recourse for imposing any kind of hardline or even moderate policy on Iran. Large-scale military strikes are out, as are, for different reasons, small-scale ones. Meanwhile, national economic sanctions aren't working because of the energy crisis, while specific corporate sanctions won't work because the financial companies in Iran are typically Russian firms such as Gazprombank, which operate outside our purview.

Now -- in a sign of just how desperate the Bush administration is getting -- both the New York Times and the Times of India are reporting that the U.S. is leaning heavily on India to join the EU effort to refer Iran's nuclear activity to the United Nations Security Council. It'll be interesting to see which way India goes on this. On the one hand, they should side with us because of the nuclear technology we promised them this summer; on the other, India's alternate estival accord was with Iran, which agreed to a pipeline deal that would pump natural gas directly into India.

But the real trouble here is that the U.S. should have to rely on India at all. Bush administration policies may not be directly responsible for the current political climate within Iran, but they are responsible for having deprived the State Department of the resources needed to confront and contain Ahmadinejad's nuclear program. Beginning with the rampant unilateralism prior to the Iraq war, we have systemically stripped ourselves of the political leverage necessary to engage Tehran effectively.

As a result the regional threat Iran now poses is very much a problem of our own making. And while it would be nice if India opts to help us out of this mess, we should bear in mind that it should never have come to this point in the first place.