"Dual Containment" Policy in the Persian Gulf

The USA, Iran, and Iraq, 1991–2000

A. Edwards

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137436351
• eBook ISBN: 9781137447241
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a concise account of US "dual containment" policy towards Iran and Iraq during the 1990s, an overlooked era between the tumult of the liberation of Kuwait and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In particular, it uses a theoretical framework derived from neoclassical realism to examine the impact of domestic US politics and interest groups on policymaking, as well as perceptions of threat derived from two decades of mutual hostility between the US and Iran.

1

Introduction

[American] Iran policy has been a failure at every level. The message has been: (1) You are evil; (2) We won’t talk to you unless you come out with your hands up; (3) We intend to overthrow your regime; (4) if you don’t comply we might bomb you; (5) if you try to develop a deterrent we will certainly bomb you, maybe with nuclear weapons.

(—Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, interview with author, Washington, DC, February 2011)

The Significance of “Dual Containment”

The central objective of this book is to examine, from the perspective of international relations (IR) theory, the American “dual containment” policy in the Persian Gulf. This policy, which was designed to curtail the influence of both Iran and Iraq across the Middle East, was formally introduced to the world in a speech by a National Security Council (NSC) official in 1993. It essentially persisted until the end of President Bill Clinton’s tenure in office and is notable for several reasons. First, the policy itself tends to be overlooked somewhat, introduced after the events of the 1991 war over Kuwait and before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (henceforth referred to as “9/11”). Second, it is an interesting example of US foreign policymaking in the post–Cold War era. Finally, and arguably most significantly, its implementation and the course it took with regard to Iran is deeply illustrative of the US approach to post-1979 Iran in particular and the Persian Gulf in general. Due to the intensely antagonistic turn US relations with Iran have taken since 1979, the dual containment policy also encapsulates some of the most controversial features of American policy in the Middle East: Washington’s preoccupation with Israel and its increasing entanglement in the security architecture of the Persian Gulf.¹

Theoretical Neglect

Despite its importance, the dual containment policy has not been considered by scholars in a systematic, theoretically informed way. Scholars of IR and Middle East studies have done excellent and comprehensive work on American relations with Iran and Iraq in particular and American foreign policy in the post–Cold War era in general; many studies give at least a brief description of the dual containment policy and American foreign policy in the Persian Gulf in the 1990s. Nonetheless, few have attempted to examine the dual containment policy itself from a perspective rooted in IR theory. Overall, the dual containment policy has often been viewed almost as a historical footnote in the post–Cold War, pre-9/11 era, primarily of interest to scholars researching more expansive issues in US foreign policy or the history of the Persian Gulf. This is a regrettable oversight but it offers the researcher an opportunity to approach American foreign policy in the Persian Gulf from a fresh perspective and attempt to glean insights about the nature of the American relationship with the states of the Gulf, particularly Iran. Much of the theoretical attention to the US policy toward Iran and Iraq during the 1990s has placed it within the framework of the American approach to the so-called rogue states.² There is also a tendency among some scholars to use American domestic politics as an explanatory factor in the shaping of American foreign policy, but without integrating it into a wider theoretical framework or examining it in an in-depth manner. In many studies, causal force is attributed to domestic political variables; however, the mechanisms by which these domestic pressures are translated into policy often go unexamined in such studies. In particular, the influence of the pro-Israel lobby is often held as a major factor in the adoption of a hard-line toward Iran in the 1990s—a claim that requires serious scrutiny.³

Broadly speaking, aside from scholarship focusing on the American relationship with the rogue states, the dual containment policy and the era in which it was formulated have received relatively little attention from scholars of American foreign policy. Chollet and Goldgeier, whose book on US foreign relations in the 1990s (their work mentions Iran and Iraq only in passing) is one of the few to address this period, aptly characterize this era as “misunderstood.”⁴ This is puzzling when one considers that American foreign policy is studied and commented on extensively both in- and outside the discipline of IR, doubly so when one considers that it was a major “flagship” policy in a strategically vital region. Consequently, it deserves more attention than it has received. The dual containment policy is more than just a case study in the arena of post–Cold War American foreign policy. As stated above, it allows us to examine in detail the nature of the American relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has been bitterly antagonistic since its founding in the wake of the 1979 Revolution. From the American side of the relationship, summed up succinctly but somewhat simplistically in the quote that began this chapter, it has been marked by outright hostility punctuated by unsuccessful attempts at reconciliation. Both of these were on display during the Clinton years, which offer a unique opportunity to examine US-Iranian relations and its underlying international and domestic factors.

One of the two targets of the dual containment policy, Iran, loomed large in the perceptions of American policymakers and continues to do so. The relationship between the two states is a highly unusual one; both states hold a special place in the political discourse of the other as a uniquely sinister and threatening enemy. In the words of Hollis, “A special relationship endures in the sense that both US and Iranian policymakers are somehow fascinated by each other and use their relations, even when antagonistic, as a measure of their respective strengths and status domestically.”⁵ As the international negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program continue in 2014, at the time of writing this book, some of the same patterns—such as attempts by Congress, unprompted by the president, to escalate American pressure on Iran—are repeating themselves with a new urgency. Much of the present book is, therefore, dedicated to examining American relations with Iran in this period as part of the larger dual containment policy. This stems from the fact that the Iranian half of the policy is the most complex, most troubled (in certain respects), and requires the most explanation. Although many of the same forces were at work with regard to American policy toward Iraq, these were much less marked, though at the time they received more attention, and the military clashes between the United States and Iraq in the 1990s were more attention grabbing.

A Gulf Policy for a New Era

As stated, the dual containment policy is akin to a case study in “interwar” American foreign policy, the wars in question being the Cold War and the War on Terror. With the end of the Cold War, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and the subsequent war to expel it, American policymakers were confronted with a new set of strategic issues and problems to wrestle with in regard to existing US national interests in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. With the demise of the Soviet Union, American policymakers were deprived of the overarching framework that had done so much to determine the outlines of American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War, provoking much soul-searching among the foreign policy establishment, journalists, and pundits about how this new “unipolar” world should be approached and what America’s role in it would and should be.⁶ To some degree, this uncertainty persists to the present day, with the period between 1991 and 2001 referred to simply as the “post–Cold War era” in many sources—a perfect example of the lack of clarity on what trends, if any, in international politics this era embodied. Indeed, one of the defining features of American policymaking in the 1990s was the hunt for a winning entry in the “Kennan sweepstakes,” a doctrine that would embody the challenges and solutions faced by the United States in the 1990s in a fashion similar to the American diplomat George Kennan’s influential espousal of “containment” to meet the emerging Soviet threat in the late 1940s. In the words of another scholar of this era, “Absent the Soviet Union, the fundamental rationale for American foreign policy has been lost, the importance of foreign policy was in question, and the level of public support for foreign-policy actions uncertain.”⁷ As Chollet and Goldgeier discuss in their book, a semi-serious competition was held in the pages of the New York Times in 1995 to coin a new name for this time period; many of the entries reflected a sense of uncertainty and even unease.⁸

Despite the end of the Cold War, the United States still faced some major challenges to its interests abroad even as its policymakers and pundits struggled to articulate a new global role for it. The Persian Gulf remained a region where international instability and turmoil could generate significant economic disruption and threaten the outbreak of new wars and the reignition of old ones, both of which would have serious impacts on long-standing American interests. This was exacerbated by the traditional American perception of the Persian Gulf as a key focus of strategic power, and in particular there remained the tricky question of American relations with Iraq and Iran, which were both hostile to the United States and perceived as dangers to American interests. The answer formulated by American policymakers was dual containment. Therefore, in the absence of a global, overarching security threat, dual containment was one of the major foreign policies of its era, which addressed one of the few genuine strategic challenges still facing the United States. It was a concrete problem rather than a conceptual one—like the need to formulate a new vision for America’s role in the world—but one that was nonetheless a product of the new era of uncertainty: virtually unchallenged American power, but with uncertainty as to what to do with it and with an increasing preoccupation with domestic concerns.

The very name “dual containment” is itself somewhat obscure, largely unknown to anyone outside the community of policymakers and students of the US role in the Persian Gulf. In fact, the lifespan of the term itself was a limited one. After the name “dual containment” was coined, it was rarely used in official discourse, was criticized by some policymakers as misleading, and was much maligned by analysts and observers. Its broadest definition runs as follows: the simultaneous containment of the regional influence of both Iran and Iraq by the United States in an attempt to prevent them reconstructing their previous military power or acquiring Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), implemented concurrently but via different means and with different objectives. For instance, the sanctions on Iraq were multilateral (though the United States had great influence as one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council), while sanctions on Iran were unilateral. Regime change was the implicit (and later explicit) goal in the case of Iraq, while this was never seen as realistic in Iran by the Clinton administration. While in some ways it resembles two policies running in parallel, there is an unbreakable connection between the two, thanks to the “brute fact” of geography—the two states are neighbors—and the fact that both found themselves to be the target of American hostility. In seeking to contain these two states, the United States assumed a direct, predominant, peacetime role in Persian Gulf security for the first time in the history of the region, leading scholars to describe dual containment as an attempt to ensure American hegemony or “the preservation of American dominance.”⁹

However, while the United States became the most powerful actor in the Gulf in the 1990s and was militarily predominant, the role played by the United States in this era was quasi-hegemonic compared to the dominance exhibited by the British Empire in the Gulf in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Also, while American power was the lynchpin that allowed the system to function, the basic architecture of the system itself was inherently limiting and suboptimal from the US perspective. While the United States was relatively successful in accomplishing its goals of excluding Iran and Iraq from the regional security system that it oversaw, it was unable or unwilling to effect the changes it desired in these states, leaving it to manage a system it disliked, maintaining the least worst (from the US perspective) balance of forces. Specifically, while it was a key part of the security system, at the same time, the United States was unable to fully enforce its will upon its allies and adversaries, and exercised little influence over the domestic affairs of regional states. As Gause observes, the United States merely sought to contain Iraq and Iran, lacked even diplomatic representation in those states, potentially the most powerful and influential in the region, and sought only “to sustain the regional territorial and political status quo.”¹⁰ In this sense it was in keeping with Stephen Walt’s summing up of Clinton’s overall approach to foreign policy during his eight years in office: “Hegemony on the cheap.”¹¹ By the end of Clinton’s term in office, the dual containment policy was still in effect, according to the broad definition offered above: both Iran and Iraq were still hostile, both were the target of American sanctions, and the United States still played a predominant role in Persian Gulf security.

In terms of the bilateral relations between the United States and Iraq and the United States and Iran, the picture is, of course, more complex. US foreign policy toward both was subjected to the tumult of domestic American politics, stemming both from the nature of the American political system and the unique constellation of political forces acting in this system to produce and shape the dual containment policy. With the assumption of a quasi-hegemonic role in Gulf security, American policymakers were left with important details to work out—details that would define the policy, namely the relationship of the United States to Iran and Iraq. The relationship with these two states, particularly Iran, was often defined as much by domestic American politics as much as by global and regional political forces.

Argument and Theoretical Framework

From the perspective of IR theory, the central claim of this book is that dual containment is best understood through a framework of neoclassical realism (NCR). This strand of realist theory is a relatively recent outgrowth of a renewed interest among theorists of IR—particularly members of the “realist” school—in the role of domestic factors in defining the limits of traditional power politics.¹² It is therefore distinct from structural realism, such as that advanced by Kenneth Waltz.¹³ While structural realists hold that a state’s foreign policy is strongly conditioned by its place in the anar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Introduction
• 2   US Foreign Policy in the Persian Gulf, 1945–91
• 3   The Balance of Power in the Persian Gulf, 1945–91
• 4   Dual Containment: Conception, Evolution, and Implementation
• 5   A Triumphant America and a Villainous Iran: Perception as an Intervening Variable
• 6   Two Voices: Domestic Structure as an Intervening Variable
• 7   “Mischiefs of Faction”: Interest Groups as an Intervening Variable
• 8   Conclusions and Intervening Variables Assessed
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index