Chapter nine: a caucus race and a long tale.(Great Powers in Wonderland)(Critical essay)

"Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look a bout her and to wonder what was going to happen next."

IN THE preceding pages, my colleagues discussed the foreign-policy debates going on in other major and aspiring powers. Do these debates matter for U.S. policy makers?

To take one hot-button topic: If moderate opposition groups in Iran took power away from the country's current fundamentalist rulers, would they pursue significantly different policies? Specifically, would they terminate Iran's nuclear-weapons program?

In the United States, the response to this question is filtered through four schools of thought. All four seek the same foreign-policy objectives--safety, which is largely a function of the nation's relative power, and comfort in the world, which is largely a function of a country's identity, its values in relation to other countries' values. But each emphasizes these objectives differently. Nationalists and realists give priority to safety and defense; neoconservatives and liberal internationalists give priority to identity and democracy.

The nationalist view is little concerned about Iran's domestic debate. This school focuses on America's defense, primarily in the Western Hemisphere, and assumes that other nations will defend themselves without needing significant U.S. help. If Iran threatens the United States with nuclear weapons, the proper response is national missile defense, not alliances to contain Iran or intervention to change Iran's domestic regime. And if Iran interferes with U.S. oil supplies from the Persian Gulf, the United States can buy that oil elsewhere in the world because Iran has to sell oil somewhere to finance its own national Security. This nationalist impulse is evident in all the presidential candidates when they appeal for energy independence, reducing America's need to be involved in the Middle East. But it is most evident in the views of Republican candidate Mike Huckabee who says, "I want to treat Saudi Arabia the way we treat Sweden," a neutral country.

The realist school of thought takes the position that Iran's interests are determined primarily by geostrategic circumstances, not by domestic debates. A different government in Iran would not pursue different policies. Moderate groups face the same geopolitical realities as fundamentalist mullahs--a nuclear-armed Israel to the West, a "Sunni bomb" to the East in Pakistan and relatively unstable countries on its borders--Iraq and Afghanistan. In these circumstances, Iran seeks a margin of superiority or hegemony to be safe.

Realists therefore advocate counterbalancing Iran by allying with Saudi Arabia and other friendly countries to create stability, not anticipating or encouraging regime change. Former-Republican-presidential-candidate Rudy Giuliani reflected this view best when he called for "an ever widening arc of security and stability across the globe" and argued that "democracy can work only if people have a reasonable degree of safety and security."