IS ANOTHER ISRAEL-IRAN “PROXY WAR” LOOMING?
Recent actions by regional resistance forces are best understood as efforts to bolster their own deterrent posture by reminding Israel of the potential consequences of another large-scale attack on Lebanon and/or Gaza.
MISREADING IRANIAN POLITICS IN WASHINGTON
The Islamic Republic's anniversary observances have now concluded in Tehran and elsewhere in Iran, and the strength manifested by the Green Movement was hardly noticeable.
LIVE STREAM: What Does the Iranian Public Really Think?
Since the Iranian elections last June, there has been no shortage of commentary surrounding Iranian public opinion, but comparatively little evidence-based analysis.
Tehran’s initial oral response to International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei’s proposal to send most of Iran’s current stockpile of low enriched uranium (LEU) abroad for processing into fuel rods for its reactor in Tehran, indicates three important things about the Islamic Republic’s strategic perspective. First, Iran is interested in establishing a framework for international cooperation to develop its civil nuclear program. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made this clear in an important speech on Oct. 29.
Second, Iran remains profoundly interested in creating a framework for broader strategic cooperation, especially with the United States. This has been a consistent objective in Iran’s interactions with the United States for several years, across ideologically diverse Iranian administrations, including the current Ahmadinejad administration.
Third, Iran might be willing to address international concerns about its nuclear program by sending portions of its LEU stockpile out of the country for futher, value-adding processing, in the process, making the management of the stockpile more transparent to the international community. However, Tehran will only do this if it is confident that other international parties will follow through on their commitments and that cooperation with those parties will not leave the Islamic Republic more vulnerable to international pressure.
Turkey has received quite a bit of notice recently due to its increasingly close ties with the Islamic Republic. This attention intensified earlier this week when The Guardian published an interview with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in which he called Iran “a friend” and cast doubt on Western suspicions that Iran intends to develop a nuclear weapon.
But this is not the first time that Turkey has sought to use the conflict between the United States and Iran to its advantage.
In 1980, following the Iranian revolution, the United States and Turkey signed a Defense and Economic Cooperation Agreement (DECA), which committed Washington to provide Turkey with significant military and economic support – in exchange for access to Turkish military bases – as a way to balance Iranian power in the region. The DECA laid the groundwork for closer U.S.-Turkish ties and was key to Turkey’s participation in the first Gulf War.
As Flynt Leverettnoted in Politico yesterday, times have changed and this time Turkey is exploiting the current U.S.-Iranian standoff to improve its ties with its southeastern neighbor.
Flynt explains that the Islamic Republic’s response to the IAEA yesterday represents neither obfuscation nor mixed signals, but is in fact part of the normal process of negotiations. It is not surprising that the Iranians are wary of sending most of their low-enriched uranium all at once to countries with which it has has difficult relations.
Robert Kagan’s op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post includes two common misconceptions with regard to the United States’ negotiations with Iran.
First, Kagan says that since the Islamic Republic does not appear to have fully and unconditionally accepted the P5+1 proposal to ship Iran’s uranium out of the country for enrichment, we must conclude that “the test results are in,” negotiations have failed, we must try something else.
But as Hillary Mann Leverett explains, the P5+1 proposal is quite different from the Islamic Republic’s original proposal. It is neither surprising nor unreasonable that Iran is seeking further negotiations to improve the deal’s terms.
The second misconception included in Kagan’s piece is the idea that the Obama administration has other good options if engagement doesn’t work. According to Kagan, “if Obama has any hope of getting anywhere with the mullahs, he needs to show them he means business, now, and immediately begin imposing new sanctions.”
The problem with this approach is that sanctions simply won’t work, in part because neither Russia nor China will support them. Kagan suggests that if Russia refuses to go along with sanctions, we should demonstrate that non-cooperation has unspecified “consequences.” He does not mention “China” in his column at all.
The fact is that “engagement” is our only option with Iran. Even if sanctions could work – and they can’t – they would only lead to further conflict down the road.
America no longer has the economic and political wherewithal to dictate strategic outcomes in the Middle East. Increasingly, if Washington wants to promote and protect U.S. interests in this critical region, it will have to do so through serious diplomacy — by respecting evolving balances of power and accommodating the legitimate interests of others so that U.S. interests will be respected.
For decades, the “Middle East” has customarily been defined as the Arab world plus Israel, with the United States as the principal external power engaged in the region. Over the course of the last decade, that traditional definition of the Middle East has started to erode in important ways. One of the most significant points of transformation has been the rise of regional states from outside the Arab-Israeli arena as consequential players in the Middle East’s political, economic, and strategic affairs. Iran is an outstanding example of this phenomenon; Turkey is another.
This week Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in Iran, where he met with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Erdogan was supposed to come to the United States immediately following his departure from Tehran; the Prime Minister’s Washington visit has now been postponed until early December. As we pointed out in an earlier post, Turkey’s relations with the Islamic Republic have improved dramatically in recent years – economic relations are expanding rapidly and the foundations for closer energy links are being laid. And, as Erdogan himself made clear in an interview with The Guardian earlier this week, political ties between Turkey and Iran are becoming both broader and deeper.
Some in Washington and in Israel criticize Turkey’s burgeoning relationship with Iran, saying that it comes at the expense of Ankara’s longstanding ties to the United States and Israel. Against this, we argue – in an Op Ed published in today’s POLITICO, entitled “Turkey, the United States, and the New Middle East” —that Ankara’s approach to the Islamic Republic actually serves Western interests better than established U.S. policy.
As we wait for Tehran’s response to the proposal from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Director General, Mohamed ElBaradei, to remove low-enriched uranium (LEU) from Iran for further enrichment and fabrication into fuel rods for the Tehran Research Reactor, it is important to understand the considerations that are shaping decision-making on the Iranian side. Hillary Mann Leverett offers her observations about the Iranian approach to Baradei’s proposal in a new piece, “Pragmatists in Iran”, published by Foreign Policy.com.
Iran originally proposed to buy fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor from international providers. There was clearly consensus support for this idea in Tehran leadership circles. The United States and other players responded with a “counter-proposal”, whereby Iran would ship most of its current stockpile of LEU out of the country for fabrication into fuel rods. The merits of this approach are very much a debatable proposition in Tehran. As Hillary points out, this debate has nothing to do with reformists vs. hardliners, or the pro-Ahmadinejad camp vs. the anti-Ahmadinejad camp. Fundamentally, this debate reflects a lack of confidence in Tehran about U.S. and Israeli intentions toward the Islamic Republic.
In an interview with The Guardian, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made clear that he considers Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a friend and that he does not believe Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program.
As Flynt and Hillary outlined last week, Turkey and Iran have increased their commercial ties in recent years and are working together to bring Iranian hydrocarbons to European markets.
Flynt suggests that Iran’s decision to ask for more time before making a decision on the P5+1 offer to take Iranian uranium out of the country for enrichment is likely the result of a sincere effort to reconcile differing opinions within the Iranian political system.
As Flynt explains, Iran originally proposed that it buy enriched uranium for its reactor from the United States or one of the other P5+1 partners. Sending Iran’s own uranium abroad for enrichment is a much different decision – and the Islamic Republic needs to decide whether it is in its interest to do so.
The entire segment is worth watching, but if you want to skip to Flynt’s comments go to: 5:47, 12:00 and 17:47 on the video above.
Judah Grunstein over at World Politics Review is concerned that the uranium enrichment deal – even if it does eventually come to fruition – does little to address the fundamental issues at stake in the United States-Iranian bilateral relationship.
From the post:
As things stand, the Obama administration cannot accede to the principal Iranian demand of broadening the discussions beyond the nuclear dossier without significantly damaging the consensus among its EU partners (principally France). And the Iranians cannot accede to the principal American demand of a freeze and ultimate abandonment of its uranium enrichment without significantly damaging the domestic political consensus around the issue.
The problem for Obama is that he’s hemmed in from actually adopting a true engagement policy without preconditions, due to domestic political constraints and the risk of alienating the EU3. But in the absence of one, he’s forced to resort to engagement lite, which amounts to the same “freeze or sanctions” approach in friendlier packaging.
Grunstein’s argument is well taken, and it seems the only way out of this dilemma is for the Obama administration to articulate both to the EU-3 partners and the American public why broadening the dialogue with Iran beyond nuclear issues is the best way forward.
The Associated Pressreports that Iran has not yet accepted the uranium enrichment deal that would require Tehran to send most of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia and France for enrichment by the end of the year.
The agreement was the subject of two and a half days of talks this week in Vienna among the P5+1 and Iran, and a decision from Iran is expected today.
Iran’s deputy parliament speaker, Mohammad Reza Bahonar seemed to dismiss the plan on Thursday in comments broadcast by Iran’s official news agency (IRNA) – but it is unclear at this point whether Bahonar’s statements represent his personal views or those of the government.
That seems to be the Obama administration’s idea of a policy toward Iran.
According to the Associated Press, the Obama administration is urging China, Japan and other countries to scale down their Iranian petroleum purchases to put pressure on Iran while the U.S. and others consider toughening economic sanctions on the regime.
Flynt and Hillary have detailed the reasons why China in particular will not go for this kind of scheme.
Tony Karon over at Timebreaks down the Vienna negotiations.
Karon provides a smart analysis of the two sides’ positions and explains what the two sides hope to gain from the enrichment deal.
Most importantly, Karon reminds us that “as significant a confidence-building mechanism as the Vienna deal may be, it doesn’t actually begin to address the deadlock between Iran and the West over whether the Islamic Republic will continue to enrich uranium.”
CBS News has a quick 2 minute wrap-up of the negotiations in Vienna. IAEA Chief Mohamed ElBaradei is hopeful that a final uranium enrichment deal can be reached by Friday.
We have spent the last few days in Turkey, attending the inaugural meeting of the Istanbul Forum, a conference on political and security challenges in the Middle East organized by the German Marshall Fund, the Foundation for Political, Economic, and Social Research, and the strategic communications division of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The conference brought together Turkish, Middle Eastern, European, and American participants for discussions on a wide range of regional political and security issues. The conference also afforded us a wonderful opportunity to take a look at Turkey’s expanding role in the Middle East – especially regarding Iran.
Jamsheed K. Chosky has an excellent article over at Foreign Policy – in which he provides a thorough description of Jundallah, the Sunni extremist group responsible for Sunday’s bombing in Baluchistan and makes a persuasive argument against U.S. support for Sunni extremist groups that seek to destabilize Iran.
Indeed, the Barack Obama administration might be tempted to use direct or indirect funding as a means of surrogate warfare to further pressure Iran’s government. Violent anti-Iranian Sunni groups like Jundallah have not been placed on the U.S. State Department’s terrorism list. And the Obama administration might feel that it’s already being punished for the perception that it’s funding the rebels and may as well try to reap some of the rewards.
But this would be shortsighted. The basic problem with any strategy to destabilize Iran via Sunni tribal rebellions is that Baluch nationalism spans three countries — not just Iran, but also Afghanistan and Pakistan. Supporting a pan-Baluchistan movement would only worsen societal instability and national fragmentation in West Asia and South Asia.
Militant groups, especially ones linked to ethnic and religious notions, have brought little but trouble to the world. It is important to recall the obvious: The United States and its partners once supported the Taliban materially because they were battling the Soviets and Russians. The United States shouldn’t repeat the mistake, fooling itself that Sunni Baluch nationalists will be better disposed toward the West just because they are now fighting a common foe in the Iranian government.
Yes, there might be the temptation to exert pressure, via internal strife, on Ahmadinejad’s autocratic regime for eliciting nuclear and international compromises. But Iran’s Sunni insurgency isn’t just bad news for the IRCG — it’s also bad news for the Middle East, Asia, and the United States. Ultimately, therefore, whether or not the Iranian regime’s charges of foreign interference are accurate, no country should welcome or aid an insurgency in eastern Iran. NGOs for terrorism really are harder to subdue than nation-states supporting such activities.
Posted on October 21st, 2009 under general with 1 reply.
Joshua Pollack over at Arms Control Wonk is optimistic that the uranium enrichment deal among Iran, Russia and France will go through, despite murmurs to the contrary coming out of Vienna this week.
Pollack describes the strategic significance of the deal this way:
It’s easy to get absorbed in the minutiae of site-specific safeguards and takeback arrangements, so let’s keep in mind what the parties really seem to be getting. Iran can duck the worst of the fallout from the Qom affair and gain implicit acceptance of its enrichment activities. (Emphasis on “implicit.”) The P5+1 can put time back on the clock by getting that 1,200 kg LEU out of the country. And in the implementation phase, the sides will be able to test each other’s intentions and create some trust at the working level, assuming there are no major hitches.
In other words, the deal doesn’t mean much in and of itself, but could be a precursor to more significant steps to normalize Iran’s relations with the international community down the line.
The Obama Administration – with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton playing Sancho Panza to President Obama’s Don Quixote – continues its futile quest to induce China to foreswear its increasingly strategic energy relationship with Iran. Two recent articles – one from AFP, the other in The Wall Street Journal – indicate that the Administration is encouraging Gulf Arab oil producers, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to expand their oil exports to China. According to U.S. officials, the goal of this effort is to persuade Beijing to roll back its burgeoning energy ties to the Islamic Republic.
The diplomats in Vienna remain quiet about the outcome of the P5+1 talks. The only news thus far is that there may be a problem with the uranium enrichment pact agreed to earlier this month.
It appears Iran may insist that France be excluded from any participation in plans to turn Iran’s enriched material into fuel for Tehran’s research reactor. Earlier this month, the P5+1 and Iran agreed that Iran would ship some of its uranium to Russia and then on to France for enrichment.
Posted on October 20th, 2009 under general with 1 reply.
Editor’s note: As we noted in our first post, The Race for Iran is meant not only as a platform for our analyses of Iran and its geopolitics, but also for assessment by other commentators, writing from their own intellectual and national or regional perspectives. We are pleased to present here our first “guest” post, by Dr. Jasim Husain Ali, a member of the Bahraini Parliament, director of the University of Bahrain’s Economic Research Unit, and a columnist on GCC political and economic affairs for Gulf News. In this post, Dr. Jasim offers an astute “local” perspective on the regional implications of Sunday’s Jundallah attack in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province. We look forward to presenting the views of Jasim Husain Ali and other guest bloggers as we move forward with The Race for Iran.
Posted on October 20th, 2009 under general with 1 reply.
Sunday’s suicide bomb attack in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province, in which five senior officers of the Revolutionary Guard and at least 30 other people were killed, marks a significant escalation in an ongoing Sunni Islamist terror campaign directed against the Islamic Republic. We do not believe that Sunday’s attack and the ongoing campaign of terrorist violence represents a fundamental threat to the Islamic Republic’s basic political stability. However, we do believe the attack will exacerbate Iranian threat perceptions about its regional neighbors and the United States at a delicate point in the diplomatic process launched at the October 1 Geneva meeting between senior Iranian officials and representatives of the P-5+1.
German Marshall Fund Senior Transatlantic Fellow and former Bush Administration State Department official David Kramerexplains why – unless there is some secret agreement we don’t know about – it is highly unlikely that Russia or China will support American efforts to impose further sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
In light of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Kramer questions how Secretary Clinton could say that if sanctions become necessary “we will have support from Russia,” unless there is some clandestine deal between Clinton and her Russian interlocutors.
From the article:
Russian and Chinese resistance to sanctions is certainly not new. Several U.N. resolutions against Iran passed during the Bush Administration were severely watered down at the insistence of Moscow and Beijing. Now, those capitals don’t even want to talk about the possibility of taking U.N. action against Tehran. It would be “premature,” in the words of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Added Prime Minister Vladimir Putin several thousand miles away in Beijing: “There is no need to frighten the Iranians” with talk of sanctions. “If now, before making any steps we start announcing some sanctions,” Putin said, “then we won’t be creating favorable conditions for talks to end positively. This is why it is premature to talk about this now.”
Despite this crystal clear rejection from Russia, Clinton voiced optimism in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that if sanctions become necessary, “we will have support from Russia.” Her optimism apparently is based on what U.S. officials claim she was told by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday. These same officials got carried away when Medvedev, in New York for the U.N. General Assembly session last month, criticized sanctions but said they might be inevitable anyway. Alas, for those of us no longer working in the government, we can rely only on Lavrov’s and Putin’s public comments to divine Russia’s position. And based on those comments – and the fact that it is Putin, much more so than Medvedev, who is calling the shots in Russia on issues of this importance – Clinton’s optimism seems sadly misplaced.
The P5+1 countries and Iran met in Vienna today to continue negotiations with Iranian officials. The key item on the agenda for today’s talks is solidifying the agreement that was reached in principle earlier this month to send Iranian uranium to Russia and France for enrichment. The agreement would provide Iran with enriched uranium for medical purposes while providing assurances to the P5+1 that the uranium is not enriched enough to make a weapon.
Massimo Calabresi over at Time has the scoop on the background to that agreement.
Iranian officials indicated prior to today’s meeting that they may demand that France not be part of the uranium enrichment agreement, but it is unclear whether this came up at today’s meeting.
International Atomic Energy Agency Chief Mohamed ElBaradei said this afternoon that the talks were constructive and got off to a good start.
As anticipated in our post on The Washington Note on October 13 (and a monograph published by Johns Hopkins’ Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies earlier this week), China authoritatively signaled today that it will not support the imposition of anything approaching “crippling” international sanctions against Iran over its nuclear activities.
Nor will Chinese leaders support measures that would negatively impact what Beijing sees as its most important economic and strategic interests at stake in China’s developing relationship with the Islamic Republic.
The New York Times reports that Hillary Clinton failed to secure a promise from Russian President Dimtry Medvedev to support additional sanctions against Iran if quick progress is not made on the nuclear negotiations.
The reason for this is simple: supporting additional sanctions would hurt Russia in two ways. First, Russia enjoys a lucrative trading relationship with Iran that it is not eager to give up. Second, Russia is not interested in a U.S.-Iranian “Grand Bargain” that would threaten Iran’s dependence on Russia and increase American throughout the world.
Despite President Medvedev’s statement last week that “Sanctions rarely lead to productive results, but in some cases are inevitable,” Russian interests have not changed and its policies will not either.
Earlier this week, we participated in a panel on Chinese-Iranian relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). The event, sponsored by SAIS’s Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies and the New America Foundation’s Iran Project and moderated by Kent Calder, launched a new monograph that we have written with our colleague, John Garver, an outstanding China expert at Georgia Tech’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. The monograph, published by the Reischauer Center in its Asia-Pacific Policy Papers series, is entitled Moving (Slightly) Closer to Iran: China’s Shifting Calculus For Managing Its Persian Gulf Dilemma. At the risk of appearing immodest, we believe that Moving (Slightly) Closer to Iran offers the best analysis currently available on the economic, political, and strategic dynamics shaping the evolving and critically important relationship between China and Iran.
Last week, Flynt and Hillary penned a New York Times op-ed advocating for a robust effort to achieve a “grand bargain” with the Iranians, rather than continuing down the Bush-Obama path of “containment.”
The folks over at Blogging Heads must have picked up on this exchange, because they arranged for a “debate” between Leverett and Drezner, which I have posted above.
I put “debate” in quotation marks because this particular blogging heads session is not really a traditional back and forth argument. Instead, it consists of Drezner asking a series of critical questions (and rolling his eyes), and Flynt offering responses.
Still, the session is an excellent primer on why working toward a “grand bargain” with Iran could be a real game changer for the United States – and how the obstacles to getting there can be overcome.
The part of the exchange I found most interesting (at about 28:30) was when Flynt laid out exactly why a grand bargain is necessary. He argues that none of our most urgent objectives in the Middle East (solving the Israel/Palestine issue, putting Lebanon on a more stable path, improving conditions in Iraq) can be solved without a more productive U.S.-Iranian relationship. Therefore we either strike a deal with the Iranians or we continue to muddle along without success on these pressing issues.
