Essay: How To Deal with Countries Gone Mad

Nothing is more difficult for the reasonable, settled, status quo state than to contemplate fanaticism. Those whose politics is determined by consensus and compromise become hopelessly unsettled in the face of single-minded zeal. The tendency is then to mistake it for irrationality. Ronald Reagan once famously referred to a group of regimes that defy the rules of international conduct as the “strangest collection of misfits, Looney Tunes and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich.” Less than two years later it was discovered that Reagan not only had dealt with these Looney Tunes but, in the words of his former chief of staff, had been snookered by them.

Reagan’s list of loonies included Iran, Libya, North Korea, Cuba and Nicaragua. In fact, this is a list of small states that have tormented the U.S., delivering pinpricks that America has found impossible either to tolerate or prevent. Admitting this, however, is difficult. Easier to dismiss it all as the work of crazy states. Reagan was certainly right that these countries are “united by their fanatical hatred of the United States.” But that in itself is not proof of derangement. Hatred is a common, often useful, phenomenon in international relations. And fanaticism is a measure of passion, not irrationality.

But assume, for the sake of argument, that there are regimes — Hitler’s, Amin’s, Khomeini’s — whose ends are irrational. It is a mistake to think that because a state has lunatic ends, it must be clumsy, erratic or incompetent in carrying them out.

The fanatic can be both wise and wily. Indeed, the fanatic has a distinct advantage in choosing means. So utterly convinced is he of the rightness of his ends that he lacks ordinary inhibiting scruples in his choice of means. He need consider only their instrumental value, not their moral valence. Not for him messy moral conflicts when matching means and ends. Everything matches.

Zealotry, in fact, produces a kind of hyperrationality of technique. The trains carrying innocents to the Holocaust ran remorselessly on time. That is fanaticism’s special gift, its special horror: its ability to routinize, to rationalize, to bureaucratize murderous irrationality.

The coexistence of irrational ends and rational means is an enduring source of astonishment. It should not be. Once you decide to murder every Jew in Europe, Auschwitz follows logically. Once you have decided that the city is parasitic on the countryside (Khieu Samphan, leader of the Khmer Rouge, decided that at the Sorbonne and made it a tenet of his doctoral thesis), then the forced emptying of Cambodian cities at the cost of millions of lives follows logically. After all, the extirpation of parasites is a public service. Once you have decided, as did Ayatullah Khomeini, to redeem the Islamic world from idolatry, and once you believe, as he does, that martyrdom is the quickest way to the joys of paradise, then sending 14-year-old boys into the teeth of machine guns is by no means irrational.

This is not to say states cannot act crazily. It is to say we should not expect bizarre behavior from states just because we find their ends incomprehensible. In American dealings with Iran, for example, it is the U.S. that has behaved erratically, even laughably. After all, who sent whom the cake?

It is not just wrong but dangerous to underestimate the rationality of regimes that profess the craziest of ends. The very designation “crazy state” inclines those sure of their own sanity to let down their guard. Europe catastrophically underestimated Hitler because he was plainly a madman. That he was. It did not prevent him from conquering Europe.

A corollary to the notion that the crazy state is incompetent is the notion that it must ultimately self-destruct. Americans keep waiting for that to happen to the mullahs, the Sandinistas and the rest of the world’s zealots. It is a wan hope. This century has not been kind to the notion that fanaticism must collapse from within. Generally, the crazy state does not self-destruct. On the contrary, it must be destroyed from without: Hitler by the Allies, the Khmer Rouge by Viet Nam, Idi Amin by Tanzania. (In his last years Stalin was no less irrational than Hitler, if not quite as bloody. Yet far from self- destructing, his regime, having succeeded in war, extended its hegemony over a great empire.)

The authority of the charismatic despot who drives the crazy state rests largely on a myth of invincibility. That myth is best punctured from the outside. So long as the outside world cowers, accommodates and appeases, that authority grows unchallenged. Munich is the model. Once the outside world returns fire, that shock alone can be enough to shake the foundations of the despot’s power. The American air raid on Libya is the model. Its military significance was minimal. Its psychological significance was enormous. Gaddafi has since been in retreat. And not just on the terrorism front. Within a year, his demoralized forces were routed and expelled from Chad, perhaps the weakest state in Central Africa.

Which bodes ill for those hoping to see Iran curbed today. Iran is today’s paradigmatic crazy state: its ideology extreme and archaic, its leadership implacable, its population full of passionate intensity, celebrating martyrdom and incurring it. Sightings of moderates notwithstanding, Iran shows no sign of collapse from within. Moreover, its prospects of being punctured from without are slim. Since crazy states tend to be destroyed from the outside, their fate is often a function of their geography. Hitler had the misfortune of being located in Central Europe; his pursuit of Lebensraum ran up against the greatest powers of the day. The Khmer Rouge’s bad luck was to be living next door to an equally warlike Viet Nam. Otherwise it would be killing to this day, assuming there were any Cambodians left to kill. Gaddafi had the misfortune of being hard by the Mediterranean, an American lake. And Idi Amin’s butchery came to an end after he had trespassed once too often on neighboring Tanzania, which muscled its way into Uganda and threw him out.

The mullahs have wisely taken great care not to provoke their powerful northern and eastern neighbors. Iran’s ambitions lie to the southwest, where, if it can just get past Iraq, it faces states so weak they hardly deserve the name. With hegemony over the gulf, the oil and the holy places awaiting it in what is a veritable geopolitical desert, Khomeinism will push on until it encounters the shock of some irresistible outside force. Until then, Iran can be as crazy as it wants.