Later this week, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors will meet in Vienna, with Iran’s nuclear program at the top of the agenda. Of course, the Board will discuss the IAEA’s recent inspections of Iran’s newly declared enrichment facility near Qom, as well as the Iranian response to outgoing director general Mohammed ElBaradei’s proposal for refueling the Tehran Research Reactor. But, as has been the case since 2006, discussions of Iranian matters in Vienna will take place under the cloud of three United Nations Security Council resolutions calling on the Islamic Republic to stop all activities related to uranium enrichment. In retrospect, the Board’s decision to refer the Iranian file to the Security Council has hardly facilitated a negotiated solution to the issue; rather, referral to the Security Council—and the Council’s subsequent insistence on suspension—has made it more difficult to reach a solution through thoughtful diplomacy.
As we have made clear in previous writings and Harvard’s Matthew Bunn has argued in a recent policy brief published by the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, there is virtually no chance that the Islamic Republic will agree to “zero enrichment” as a negotiated outcome, for at least two reasons. First, “zero enrichment” is a country-specific formulation that is being applied to Iran but not to anybody else. Second, “zero enrichment” requires Iran to forswear its sovereign right to access the full range of civil nuclear technology, including the nuclear fuel cycle.
If the United States and its Western partners were to drop their insistence on “zero enrichment”, it would probably not be that difficult to find a negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear issue. If, however, the United States and its partners continue to insist on “zero enrichment”, nuclear diplomacy with Iran is bound to fail, and the risks of an eventual military confrontation between the United States (or Israel, with U.S. support) and the Islamic Republic will rise inexorably.
A more constructive approach would be for the United States and other major regional and international players to emphasize country-neutral formulations for curbing nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. And, in this regard, the most country-neutral formulation one could advance would be the establishment of a nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East.
To be sure, the idea of a NWFZ in the Middle East is not a new one. The first proposals for a NWFZ in the Middle East were advanced in the United Nations General Assembly in the 1970s, and the concept was later expanded into a weapons of mass destruction-free zone (WMDFZ) for the region. The objective of establishing both a NWFZ and a WMDFZ in the Middle East was formally enshrined by the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 687, which ended the first Persian Gulf war. The pursuit of a NWFZ was a hot (and controversial) topic of discussion in the multilateral Arab-Israeli negotiating track that flowed from the 1991 Madrid peace conference.
More recently, Saudi Arabia and its GCC neighbors have worked hard to revive the idea. In 2006, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal even suggested that the establishment of a NWFZ could start in the Gulf and expand later to encompass the Middle East as a whole. (At the time, Flynt Leverett wrote an Op Ed in The New York Times arguing that the Bush Administration should take up the Saudi proposal, but, of course, the Bush Administration was not at all interested.) For their part, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other senior Iranian officials have said that the Islamic Republic supports a Middle East free of nuclear weapons.
But, serious consideration of a NWFZ or WMDFZ in the Middle East stops in American foreign policy circles as soon as the matter of Israel’s nuclear status comes up. For many years, the Israeli position has been that, once the peace process has given Israel a secure place in the Middle East, it might become possible for Israel to take part in creating a NWFZ or even WMDFZ in the region. American foreign policy elites typically take this position at face value. But it deserves a higher degree of critical scrutiny than it usually receives in the West.
We will take up the Israeli position regarding the establishment of a NWFZ in the Middle East in another post later this week. For now, suffice it to say that we do not find the Israeli position analytically credible. We will explain why before wishing our readers a Happy Thanksgiving.
–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett
It is important that the American people, particularly the one who are in decision making positions, know this kind of arguments when considering the situation in the Middle East. Many States defend the right of every country to develop nuclear energy with peaceful purposes with the supervision of the IAEA, and Iran can not be taken as an exception. This country has the right to enrich uranium if it has the capabilities. Of course, the internationa comunity must be sure that Iran will not deviate its nuclear programme to militar purposes.
Regarding the NWFZ I, as a Mexican, consider that it could be a slution to everybody’s security concerns in the Middle East, including Israel and Iran.
Finally, a rational approach that comes from two eminent experts on Iran and the Middle East. It was the Iranian government that first introduced the nuclear free zone in the Middle East in 1974. Since then Iran has not renounced the idea.A reward regime for countries that join and a sanctions regime for those that don’t will have to be part of the scheme; as well as a nuclear security umbrella for the zone by the the five permanent members of the Security Council. Level the playing field and then ask everybody to play.