Close to Home: Threaten Iran? Here we go again

National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has the idea that Iran's recent missile test warrants a strong notice to Iran to be very careful about provoking the ire of the Trump administration. The critics of Flynn's warning to Iran aren't against the idea that the United States has a right to defend itself against an enemy provocation. On the contrary, they are concerned that Flynn's hard-line rhetoric against Iran can inadvertently invite a counterproductive escalation of the already frayed tensions between the two countries.

It took years of a hard-won struggle with European allies to negotiate the 2015 Iran deal, which secured an arrangement by which Iran agreed to cease all efforts to advance any nuclear weapons work for 10 years in exchange for much- needed sanctions relief. As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran was compelled - largely against the wishes of its own hard-line factions - to comply with the terms of the agreement, even when it meant unrelenting, intensely intrusive inspections of its military arsenals over an entire decade. Countries that have not signed the non-proliferation treaty - Israel, North Korea and Pakistan - are not under the same obligation or scrutiny to reassure the world that they will not build or use nuclear weapons in a hypothetical war with a rival state.

If there is any doubt that Flynn's warning to Iran is not ideologically based, consider his comments in his recent book “Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and its Allies,” co-authored by his colleague Michael Ledeen. The U.S. is confronted with “an international alliance of evil countries and movements that is working to destroy us,” they wrote.

In her New York Review of Books appraisal of “Field of Flight,” national security expert Jessica Matthews notes that Flynn and Ladeen have singled out Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua as emblematic of the “evil countries” the U.S. should take to task, lest they eventually succeed in “defeating, dominating and destroying” the U.S. Both Flynn and Ledeen have been advocating for some time that - the nuclear issue aside - the goal of U.S. policy toward Iran should be regime change, an idea that has had Iranian hardliners on defensive alert ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. In a now infamous quote, Ledeen caught the attention of Iran's defense ministry a few years back for its rarely articulated arrogance: “Every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

These are the kinds of sentiments evoked by the new administration's “Make American great again” trope, even as it reveals a remarkably ahistorical perspective on world affairs. One wonders where the learning curve is regarding the utility of throwing a weaker country - Vietnam? Iraq? -“against the wall,” or where the rationality lies in listing China or Russia among the “evil countries” that Flynn believes require every dimension of American national power - “in a cohesive synchronized manner - similar to the effort during World War II” to fight an impending war that would be international in scale.

If, in his new role as national security adviser, Flynn continues to hold - or worse, to act upon - the near apocalyptic worldview expressed in his book, the world is in for some dark times.

As Mathews concludes in her review, “Clearly this is a time for rethinking many long-established claims and convictions, and for new foreign policies … As threatening as the external environment is, it could easily become much worse.”

If there is a silver lining in this daunting narrative, it surely rests with the world's citizenries. There may be no better time than the present to forge the international alliances necessary to check the political power of the world's hard-line military ideologues.

Donna Brasset-Shearer of Petaluma is a cultural-anthropologist with a background in international relations.