Not surprisingly, Saturday’s meeting of representatives from the P-5+1 countries reached no agreement about further sanctions against the Islamic Republic over its nuclear activities; as we pointed out in a post on January 14, China’s Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs, He Yafei, who has been representing his country in the P-5+1 political directors’ meetings, declined to attend the January 14 session in New York. (This was the second month in a row that Beijing declined to send a senior Chinese official to attend a P-5+1 meeting to discuss new sanctions against Iran.) Instead, China’s Mission to the United Nations sent a lower-level official in his stead—and this official made clear that Beijing continues to oppose further sanctions.
The failure of the P-5+1 to agree on new sanctions against the Islamic Republic prompted Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki to say, during a press conference in Tehran on Monday, that “we now observe narrow stripes of rationality” in the Western approach to the nuclear issue. While we hope that Foreign Minister Mottaki’s detection of “narrow stripes of rationality” in the Western approach to the nuclear issue is correct, we see no concrete signs that the Obama Administration is prepared to take a more realistic approach to nuclear diplomacy with Iran.
Flynt Leverett appeared yesterday on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story for a segment on the Iranian nuclear issue; to view the segment, which also features Tehran University’s Seyed Mohammad Marandi and Ken Katzman of the Congressional Research Service, click here. Among other things, the Inside Story segment underscores that, notwithstanding media shorthand that Tehran has “rejected” a U.S.-backed offer to refuel the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), the Islamic Republic is still interested in a deal to refuel the TRR, and has proposed modifications to the U.S.-backed plan tabled in October—specifically, that Iran would agree to “swap” the larger part of its current stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) for finished fuel upfront (rather than giving up its LEU in exchange for promises of future deliveries of finished fuel), and would send its LEU out of the country in installments, rather than a single batch. (We, as well as our colleague Ben Katcher, have discussed Iran’s approach to a prospective deal to refuel the TRR in many previous posts; see “Iran Agrees In Principle to Uranium Swap in Turkey”, “Give the Uranium Swap a Chance”, “When Will the Obama Administration Try Actually Engaging Iran?”, “Gareth Porter Explains Iran’s Negotiating Stance”, “Understanding Iranian Perspectives on the TFF Proposal”, “Has Iran Rejected the TRR Proposal? Not According to Its Foreign Minister”, “Interpreting Iran’s Response”, “Flynt Leverett Counsels Patience”, “Baradei’s Proposal and Iranian Calculations”, and “Flynt Discusses the P-5+1-Iran Negotiations on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story”). At his press conference on Monday, Mottaki reaffirmed Tehran’s continuing interest in a TRR deal .
However, as Flynt points out in the Inside Story segment, there is no concrete indication—as opposed to some hopeful speculation by people outside government—that the Obama Administration is backing away from its insistence that Iran send its LEU abroad in a single batch, and without waiting for the delivery of finished fuel for the TRR. This is hardly likely to be a workable basis for diplomatic progress on the issue.
More broadly, a critical mass of elite opinion in Iran remains interested in negotiating arrangements under which the Islamic Republic would continue to enrich uranium on Iranian territory and the international community could have confidence that the proliferation risks associated with uranium enrichment were being controlled. On this point, we want to draw our readers’ attention to a new article, “Iran’s Nuclear File: Recommendations for the Future”, by Abbas Maleki, a former Deputy Foreign Minister who is one of Iran’s most interesting public intellectuals on foreign policy and international energy issues . Maleki’s article offers, inter alia, some of the more thoughtful arguments we have seen as to why pursuing a deterrent capability based on the fabrication of nuclear weapons would not contribute to Iran’s security. More significantly, Maleki positively evaluates various schemes under which enrichment facilities in Iran could be operated under multinational auspices, thereby ameliorating proliferation concerns.
Unfortunately, there is little reason to believe that the Obama Administration is prepared to incorporate these kinds of proposals into its nuclear diplomacy with Iran in concrete ways. Indeed, the trends in the debate over America’s Iran policy seem to us to be going in a negative direction, in at least two respects. First, as Ken Katzman points out in the Inside Story segment, U.S. policy is starting to “shift from a focus on getting a deal to a focus on, perhaps, dealing with some sort of a ‘post-Islamic’ Republic…there is a growing belief inside the U.S. government that the regime is in very, very serious trouble and it is now possible to envision a ‘post-Islamic Republic’ government”. As we have argued elsewhere, it would be a major mistake for the Obama Administration to base its Iran policy on the expectation of the Islamic Republic’s collapse.
Second, there are mounting leaks to the media, from inside the Obama Administration and the U.S. Intelligence Community, feeding a story that the Intelligence Community is revising its famous 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program. This story, as initially reported by Newsweek , suggests, in particular, that U.S. intelligence believes Iran has resumed “research” on nuclear weapons—that is, “theoretical work on how to design and construct a bomb”. However, it seems that U.S. intelligence is not prepared to claim that Iran is engaged in nuclear weapons “development”—that is, actually trying to build a nuclear weapon.
As Newsweek notes, “this distinction between research and development is unlikely to satisfy hardline critics”. But the distinction is important in the context of nonproliferation policy. Even if Iranian scientists and engineers have engaged in “theoretical work on how to design and construct a bomb”, it is not at all clear that such work, in itself, violates the obligations of non-nuclear weapons states under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) “not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices”.
One of the NPT regime’s dirty little secrets is that a number of Western countries, which signed the treaty as non-weapons states, have conducted research programs on aspects of nuclear weapons design and fabrication that are almost certainly more advanced than anything Iran might have undertaken to date. There has never been any serious suggestion that these programs constitute a breach of the NPT. But the charge that Tehran is actively working to build nuclear weapons will help push the American policy discussion toward more coercive options—a trend that, if left unchecked, leads ultimately to a U.S. or Israeli (with U.S. backing) military confrontation with Iran.
–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett
I just read the Maleki article and I too haven’t a clue as to what the author meant. The entire piece was rather opaque, and cries out for a decent editor. The one thing in the article that did grab my attention was the assertion that members of the Iranian political elite believe American power is waning, and that therefore a deal with the USA is not so important. If true, then have we already missed the bus in our Iran policy? Is it possible that Iran would reject a comprehensive and mutually beneficial deal with the U.S.. on the basis that the U.S. won’t count for much in the future?
To anyone who’s read the Abbas Maleki article in Daedalus to which this blog entry refers, can you explain what the author might have meant by this sentence?
“In addition, the June election was not so much a barometer of support for or against President Ahmadinejad as it was a stage in the overhaul of the political system in its entirety.”
I’d add context, but I doubt seriously it would clarify the sentence’s meaning. The author doesn’t elaborate elsewhere on what he might mean, nor does he take a position on the validity of the election (though any betting man would interpret his guarded comments to mean he believes it was valid).
Thank you for any light, or even speculation, you can shed on this.
@interestedinct–here’s a link spotlighting the double standard: the huge disparity in the treatment of South Korea and Iran.
“There was just one major difference between the South Korean and Iranian cases: Iran never enriched uranium at a level that could only represent an interest in nuclear weapons – but South Korea did.
Yet the IAEA treated Iran as a state to be investigated indefinitely, after failing to give South Korea even a slap on the wrist.
Even more remarkable is the fact that the two cases were the subject of IAEA reports issued within the same week in November 2004.”
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KL22Ak02.html
Also you might remember that the US wanted to sell nuclear power plants to Iran during the regime of the Shah. Now they have the audacity to say, “why on earth would Iran need nuclear power?”
Great post as always, Leveretts. Do you have any independent source of authority for your assertion that many Western NNWSs have conducted weapons design research? That’s a key element of your argument here.
“Non-Stop Lies and Ruthless propaganda” over Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons to turn the international public opinion against Iran, will be counterproductive.
The west must treat Israel, Iran and North Korea equally.
Crime is a crime, whether it is committed by Israel, Iran or North Korea, the punishment and the sanction should apply equally to each one of them.
As Israel is already an illegal possessor of nuclear weapons and has a fanatical government that is capable of using them, crippling sanctions should be applied to Israel to force it to disarm and not to Iran.
The hypocrisy is almost impossible to stomach; the West preaches democracy yet violates its fundamental principles.
The issue with Iran is not really about nuclear weapons – that’s just a pretext just as WMDs in Iraq was not really the reason for US policies with respect to that country. Note how the US does not raise a similar hue and cry about Argentina and Brazil’s nuclear programs, or about Egypt and S Korea, both of which were caught violating their safeguards conducting undeclared nuclear-weapons related experiments. There are still traces of weapons-grade uranium in Egypt that have not been accounted for. So, unless the underlying issues are addressed, the nuclear issue is just a distraction.
The extraordinary attention given to the Iranian none-existent nuclear weapon suggests that many American and Israelis have a stake in the outcome.
Much of the uproar, Lies and propaganda over Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons is done by the Israeli lobby.
It is merely a way to paint Iran as a threat in order to brainwash the international public opinion and justify an attack.
Under pressure from Israel lobby, Obama is now employing the same tactic, creating fear over nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons.
If we don’t heed the lessons of history about the evil propaganda that USA and Israel used against Sadaam’s WMD, and if we ignore how sophisticated and evil the present PR campaigns are against IRI and Iran’s none existent nu-clear weapons , then we will have another tragedy in Iran far greater than Iraq.
This will be the catalyst for a million more tragedies in the years to come – the only difference being that you won’t see the deaths of those Iranian victims being broadcast on the BBC, Fox News or CNN, as the tragic death of Neda was for propaganda purpose.