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Middle East: Know the Limits of U.S. Power

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Third, offshore balancing would reduce fears in Iran and Syria that the United States aims to attack them and remove their regimes—a key reason these states are currently seeking weapons of mass destruction. Persuading Tehran to abandon its nuclear program will require Washington to address Iran's legitimate security concerns and to refrain from overt threats.

A final, compelling reason to adopt this approach is that nothing else has worked. After the Gulf war, the Clinton administration pursued a "dual containment" strategy: instead of using Iraq and Iran to check each other, the United States began trying to contain both. As a result, both came to view the United States as a bitter enemy. The policy also required the United States to deploy large numbers of troops in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which helped persuade Osama bin Laden to declare war on America.

Offshore balancing wouldn't eliminate all the problems we face in the Middle East. But it would be considerably less expensive in both human and financial terms. It's not a foolproof strategy, but it's probably as close as we can get.

Mearsheimer is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and coauthor of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.”

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Posted By: JT_Nichols @ 01/01/2009 12:41:46 PM

Mearsheimer is unable to acknowledge the recent successes in Iraq due his prior opposition to the war, because of this his analysis is almost anachronistic, as if written in 2006 rather than late 2008. Clearly establishing a democracy was not beyond the reach of US power. Of course we don't know at this time if the new democracy will be stable, but to say it is a debacle is as naive as saying it is a certain success. His cold-war proposal not only ignores the real benefit the defeat ofAl-Qaeda in Iraq gave to both the US and mainstream Muslims, it proposes repeating the same mistakes that led to the extremist attacks on the US in the first place.
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Posted By: chitown @ 12/09/2008 8:41:23 PM

Will not work, first, The countries that you mentioned would never go along with such a policy, as long as Israel holds over 250 nuclear warheads over their head. Second, The U S has lost much credibility as an honest broker withe the Bush Administrations unilateral policies. The only hope would be to eliminate all nuclear weapons from the middle east.
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Posted By: karaswart @ 12/05/2008 5:36:50 PM

Comment: December 3rd to December 14th , 1971 is the time that the Pakistani Army Genocide of the Bangladeshi Muslims came to an end. 3 million Muslims were slaughtered by the Pakistani Army in 1971, historically the biggest genocide of Muslims.