The Illogic of Dual Containment

F. Gregory Gause III

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 1994

Article preview: first 500 of 3,816 words total.

Summary:  ?Dual containment? is shot through with dangerous inconsistencies and flaws. It assumes that either the regional status quo in the Middle East will endure or the United States will be able to stage-manage a change of regime in Iraq, while keeping Iran from being a spoiler of stability. Dual containment now pushes Iran and Iraq closer together despite their history of hostility. An end to the futile U.S. economic embargo of Iran and a diplomatic dialogue to assuage Iran?s fears of hostile encircle­ment would make for a better policy.

F. Gregory Gause III is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and Fellow for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

CLEAR POLICY, FAULTY PREMISE

If there is one part of the world where the Clinton administration cannot be accused of lacking a clear foreign policy, it is the Persian Gulf. The administration has identified both Iraq and Iran as significant threats to America’s interests in the region. It has developed a policy, known as "dual containment," to deal with those threats by isolating both countries regionally, cutting them off from the world economic and trading system, and encouraging a regime change in Iraq. It has strongly supported the continuation of U.N. sanctions against Iraq, made efforts to persuade Europe, Russia and Japan to deny Iran access to international capital and arms markets, and continued American military commitments to Saudi Arabia and the smaller monarchies that form the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

In the case of the Persian Gulf, however, such clarity is not a virtue. The dual containment policy is shot through with logical flaws and practical inconsistencies and is based on faulty geopolitical premises. It is hard to see how either Iraq or Iran could be contained, in the administration’s sense, without the cooperation of its hostile counterpart. American allies in the region and elsewhere have shown no enthusiasm for dual containment, making its implementation highly problematic. Dual containment offers no guidelines for dealing with change in the gulf, and it ties American policy to an inherently unstable regional status quo. Worse yet, it assigns to the United States a unilateral role in managing gulf security issues at a time when the American capacity to influence events in Iran and Iraq is at best limited. The policy could end up encouraging the very results, regional conflict and increased Iranian power, that the United States seeks to prevent.

AWAY FROM THE BALANCING GAME

On May 18, 1993, Martin Indyk, the special assistant to the President for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council, outlined the dual containment policy in a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He said that the United States would no longer play the game of balancing Iran against Iraq. The strength of the United States and its friends in the region, Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the GCC, would allow Washington to "counter both the Iraqi and Iranian regimes. We will not need to depend on one to counter the other."

Indyk stated that the administration’s goal in Iraq is "to establish clearly and unequivocally that the current regime in Iraq is a criminal regime, beyond the pale of international society and, in our judgment, irredeemable." While reiterating the U.S. commitment to the territorial integrity of Iraq, he left little doubt that a regime change in Baghdad is the ultimate goal of American policy.

Indyk warned, however, that an exclusive focus on the Iraqi threat to American interests could lead to dangerous consequences if "the balance of power in the gulf [tilts] in favor of Iran." The "containment" of Iran, not buttressed by U.N. resolutions, is ...

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