Essay on Jamaran News Agency January 21, 2024 -
The original text is in Persian and the following translation was done by Ai.
With the issue of the field and diplomacy on the one hand and the attempt to theoretically justify what each side's position is in domestic politics, various issues such as power, deterrence, etc. have been raised in rumors rather than being explained from an academic standpoint, and this has increasingly reduced the accuracy of the discussions. In recent days, and given the tensions that have arisen between Iran and Pakistan and Iran and Iraq, the issue of national power and also deterrence have resurfaced significantly.
The fact is that the issue of power is a fundamental issue of political science and national power is primarily the first issue of the science of international relations. Although how national power is created and what its indicators are, the main difference between different schools of international relations, this difference is different from what has been spread among the general public. In particular, non-specialist supporters of the realist school describe power as limited to the military component, and the result of this conception of national power, even in its realist version, is that they reduce deterrence to the monopoly of military power.
However, even in classic versions of realism such as Hans Morgenthau, national power is not limited to the military component. He specifically considers national power to be a function of geography, natural resources, military readiness, population, national character, national spirit, quality of diplomacy, and quality of government, at least four of which have an immaterial nature. However, what separates different schools from each other in general is the coefficient of influence of each of these material or semantic power components. The further we move from the realist perspective to idealism, the greater the weight of the influence of semantic components. At the same time, most of what is considered the source of power is agreed upon by different perspectives.
The issue of deterrence, meaning what prevents the greed of competitors or adversaries from entering a country's national interests, is directly related to national power. Naturally, the greater the national power, the less passive and therefore less costly the potential attack of others on national interests:
Entering into the interests of a strong entity is a costly and inefficient matter, and therefore far from the rationality and cost-benefit calculation of competitors. Therefore, the verse “Be strong if you are comfortable with worldly ambition/who is weak in the system of nature” is an important association of this meaning.
However, the important point in the context of the association of this verse is that this “getting strong” is a function of all components of national power and not limited to the military or even economic element. This verse in its broad sense means that go and strengthen good governance, the quality of diplomacy, media power, national cohesion, public interest, technology, science, economy, foreign relations, and of course, your military aspect, because if anything else happens, in today’s international environment, it is impossible to raise your head and truly protect national interests and dignity.
Another point to consider in the present discussion is the element of time. That is, apart from the perspective and school of thought that an analyst, politician, decision-maker or citizen holds, the period in which he/she is situated and the way he/she views the international environment and the country's foreign policy affects the equations. The reality is that since the end of the Second World War and during the Cold War, the coefficient gradually increased in semantic elements.
Also, the issue of economy became important when the competition between the two poles of the Cold War, especially in the military and social axes, became subordinate to the economic component. Also, after the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the beginning of what was generally called the transitional period in international relations, the issue of economy gained more share than before and the issue of arms races lost its coefficient. Of course, this does not mean that this coefficient has become zero and that the military element is ineffective in the competition between countries, but what is true is that military superiority has lost its decisiveness in a wide area of international relations.
Therefore, it seems that the name "post-polar" can be applied more than anything to the order of the international environment. National power and, consequently, deterrence is a function of the sum of the weights of all the classical components mentioned, plus new elements of power such as media power, cyber power, etc. It seems that these weights and coefficients of sentences are more worthy of processing in the new era than ever before: today and in the post-polar era, both the impact coefficient of power components have distanced themselves more than ever from hard and material components, the geography of power has changed compared to the past, and non-state, supranational, etc. actors have been added to the equations more than ever. It should be noted that deterrence, as one of the reflections of competition between nations and other areas of competition, has acquired a different relevance than in the past.
Consequently, what was said about the impact coefficient of power components can be considered that real deterrence today has more than ever been excluded from the monopoly on material and especially military issues:
In a world where Israel, as a nuclear-armed entity, faces the October 7th attack by Hamas, which is devoid of many conventional military technologies, Iran, due to the intangible and non-military dimensions of its power, can permanently dissuade even the world's leading military power from adopting a military approach, and the Houthis of Yemen were able to offer meaningful resistance to the highly equipped Saudi war machine not because of military equality and similar economic capabilities to Saudi Arabia, but because of the same semantic dimensions of power. From these examples close to the intellectual system of supporters of the monopoly of military power, we can conclude that if victory or failure is seen in these examples, which is also the case, it is not because of the similarity of the hard military and economic capabilities of the parties, but because of the superiority in the domain of semantic power.
Deterrence as a reflection of power also follows these equations of power. What produces security deterrence more than anything else in today's world is national cohesion, good governance, an organized society, organized institutions, the quality of diplomacy, and, ironically, an economy that supports technology. Of course, military power is not as much as it was in the last century, but it is still necessary and has a role, but it should be noted that focusing on any of the aforementioned dimensions of deterrence does not lead policymakers and decision-makers to make a cognitive error and a reductionist view of power and deterrence. In today's world, no dimension of power completely replaces the other, and good governance is forced to monitor and promote all of the aforementioned dimensions simultaneously. An unbalanced approach in this regard actually makes a country more vulnerable than it strengthens it. Single-component deterrence is impossible today more than ever.
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