I see some key points which remain unresolved. India and Pakistan got away with going nuclear, oil behemoth Saudi Arabia is hardly a prime target for economic sanctions, and Washington doesn’t have a great track record of standing up to Riyadh. What’s more, the authors probably overestimate the rationality and coherence of Saudi foreign policy, which might leap forward out of status concerns or irrational terror of Tehran despite the compellingly logical reasons they shouldn’t. For that reason, I just hope that “Atomic Kingdom” is read closely in Riyadh and its logic fully internalized there among the relevant decision-makers.
If you bother to keep track of these things, the “experts” have been predicting that Iran will develop a nuclear capacity “soon” for the past twenty years.* So Mark Lynch may have just made himself a very smart career move. Spending the next twenty-thirty years rewriting the same column? Smooth!
*Iran began a peaceful nuclear program under the Shah in the Seventies, but the Ayatollah, not a fan of science, let it fall apart. He died in 1989, and the predictions started, even if the work didn’t.
