Robert J. Lieber and Amatzia Baram in Foreign Policy, on the Iranian threat: "Contrary to the assessments of those who foresee a best case scenario of stable deterrence, a nuclear-armed Iran will usher in a new era of instability in the Middle East -- with consequences that nobody can accurately predict, much less contain." Lieber's excellent book, The American Era, can be found here. And while you're reading, check out Robert Kagan's latest, "The Perils of Wishful Thinking":
One gets the sense that the Obama Administration is fashioning a global strategy for a world that no longer exists, or, more accurately, that never existed. The post-1989 expectation was of a world in which geopolitical competition had given way to geo-economic cooperation. The old laws of great power politics, as Morgenthau understood them, had been rewritten by the universal triumph of liberalism. It was to be an age of convergence. All that was required was an America wise enough to guide the world toward agreement on the important matters on which all the powers must naturally agree. According to the Obama Administration's narrative, George W. Bush then came along and destroyed this great opportunity with his belligerent and unilateralist policies. Now that Bush was gone, the world could resume its convergence under the inspirational direction of the new American President. Missing from this narrative are two major developments of the past decade: the re-emergence of great power competition involving the United States, China, Russia, India, Japan and others; and the surprising resilience of autocratic capitalism as a viable alternative to liberal, democratic capitalism. In Russia the combination has produced a great power nationalism and revanchism that make cooperation difficult and at times impossible. Russia's insistence on a geopolitical sphere of interest in its former imperial domain makes it hard to avoid "zero-sum" situations in Eastern and Central Europe and the Caucasus. Russian and American interests diverge in Iran, where Moscow's understandable desire for money and influence, which would be undermined by any genuine Washington-Tehran rapprochement, may well trump the common interest in non-proliferation. Great power politics intrudes even on that most hallowed of common interests: climate change. The Chinese, who perceive the United States as bent on preventing their rise to dominance in East Asia, cannot help but see Western pressures for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions as part of this effort-no matter how hard the Obama Administration tries to offer reassurance.
Obama has given every indication that he is more interested in domestic than in foreign policy. He sees his mission as building a "New Foundation" for the United States that bolsters the welfare state and begins to cut defense spending. Thus the first year of his presidency focused on domestic issues such as health care, cap and trade, regulatory reform, and the budget. Something tells me that year two will be dominated by foreign affairs, and by the mounting Iranian nuclear crisis in particular.