The Nuclear Deal Keeps America From Confronting Iranian Aggression
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a debate about whether to stay in the Iran deal. Read the other entries here.
In his latest entry in our Atlantic debate on the Iran deal, Philip Gordon appears distinctly uncomfortable with the inescapable part of American preeminence—U.S. willingness to use force fairly often to maintain the liberal world order, which the United States created after World War II. Unlike many on the left and right, Gordon actually recognizes that this order is both real and good, and we would miss it sorely if it were to vanish before the assault of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, and Ali Khamenei’s Iran. Contrary to what Barack Obama often suggested, the West is special, and it’s the anchor for a moral order that keeps much of the world from descending into a Hobbesian state of nature.
The burdens of leading the Western alliance are large. They have sometimes pitted America against the Europeans. The scholar Bob Kagan once asked the French, who came very close to joining the United States in the Second Iraq War, to please American foreign policy, then they should put more skin in the game. Alliances exist for a reason; they are not ends in themselves. This point has sometimes been lost in discussions of the transatlantic relationship. Many Democrats and Republicans tend to see congenial relations between Americans and Europeans as the ultimate good, more important than, say, corralling and defeating the Soviet Union; stopping a savage, aggressive, weapons-of-mass-destruction hungry tyrant in the Middle East; or thwarting the Iranian regime’s quest for the bomb.
