ARTICLE: “With Eye On Iran, Rivals Also Want Nuclear Power: Fears of an Arms Race; Peaceful Use Cited, but a Trend in the Region Poses Dangers,” by William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, New York Times, 15 April 2007, p. A1.

You can’t get global gun control until the players in question feel they’ve got all the protection they need. We got it with the USSR when both of us had gorged ourselves on nukes and any further advance was pointless. Until that point was reached, arms control itself was pointless, and once it was reached, it quickly became pointless again--except to keep the club as closed as possible. Well, globalization is integrating countries like crazy, often with great unevenness. Some, like China, get network and economic integration far ahead of political and military integration. Others, like the bulk of the Middle East, achieve it primarily through an energy flow that’s effectively viewed by its recipients more in a security perspective than an economic one, because of the lack of alternatives. The Middle East, because of its unwillingness to embrace globalization broadly, wants further integration largely on its own, seemingly weird terms (all sorts of controls on content). Those terms, for now, are so intense as to effectively preclude deep integration, especially since they trigger all sorts of security problems among themselves. And yet, these many authoritarian regimes, want their sense of security strengthened especially as they contemplate deeper economic and network integration over time. Not surprisingly, given America’s actions in the post-Cold War era, the primary tool for such security is viewed by many regimes as getting nuclear power/capability for weapons. That’s their backdoor route, along with oil, to gaining entry into the Big Boys club. Given our complete failure to deal with the continuing security dilemmas in the region (Israel v. Palestine, Iran v. Israel, Saudi Arabia v. Iran, al Qaeda v. Saudi Arabia, Syria v. Lebanon v. Israel, every authoritarian regime v. their peoples, etc.), the region is using pursuit of nukes as its own forcing function. Left to their own devices, these tribes will self-sabotage their way for decades further, so if you consider our efforts to date to be the best we can do (and they may well be, given the “olive tree” nature of the region), then I say, bring the nukes on. Why? Where we’ve brought the nukes on before, state-on-state war has disappeared. None of the existing regional fights gets me a regional security dialogue worth spit, but nukes will. I guarantee it.