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2 COMMENT The three Rs:
Rivalry, Russia and 'Ran By
Robert D Blackwill
Year after year the
worriers and fretters would come to me with awful
predictions of the outbreak of war. I denied it
each time. I was only wrong twice. –Senior British
intelligence official
, retiring in 1950
after 47 years of service.
Man's most enduring
stupidity is forgetting what he is trying to
do. –Friedrich
Nietzsche
We are
witnessing a systemic decline in Russia's
relations with the West. There is a long list of
complaints from the industrial democracies
regarding Moscow's behavior, many of them
justified. But the US-Russia relationship (and
that of Europe and Russia) does not occur in a
strategic vacuum. Many of Russia's contemporary
offenses pale before what should be the West's
highest policy priority in the period ahead:
preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
According to a US National Intelligence Estimate
(NIE) released on December 3, 2007, it will be
difficult to convince Tehran to forego the
eventual development of nuclear weapons and Iran
could produce sufficient quantities of highly
enriched uranium for a weapon as early as 2010.
Before we can assess Russia's relationship
with the West, including on the question of Iran,
we should first examine the international context
in which those relations will occur. This allows
us to address the fundamental question: How
important is Russia's cooperation in the next
several years on issues clearly most connected to
American and allied vital national interests?
Henry Kissinger recently pointed out in a
Wall Street Journal interview that the
international structure that we have known for 300
years - the Westphalian system that arose after
Europe's wars of religion and is based on the
nation-state - is collapsing. The transforming
effects of globalism and information technology,
the rise of Asia, the relative decline of Europe's
international influence, the surge of radical
Islam and the increasing importance of non-state
actors are together producing a new world
order/disorder.
The increase in China's
power and influence is now a permanent and
critical feature of the global picture, and it is
still far from clear whether Beijing will become a
responsible stakeholder in the international
system. Relations between China and Japan are edgy
at best. We will have to see whether North Korea
will give up its nuclear weapons. I remain
skeptical. The long-term trends in Afghanistan are
not good. Pakistan, with dozens of nuclear
weapons, is vibrating with uncertainty.
The region that is most immediately
pivotal to the security of the West - the Middle
East - is violent and unsteady. A possible war
between the United States and Iran lies ominously
on the horizon, if somewhat postponed, according
to the latest NIE. Iraq remains gripped in a
destructive and bloody domestic political deadlock
that prevents reconciliation and stability.
Prospects for substantial progress in the Middle
East peace process are grim. Lebanon teeters on
the brink of chaos. Syria pursues corrosive
policies throughout the area. Six years after
September 11, 2001, jihadi extremism and the
terrorism it spawns are growing, not receding, in
most of the region.
In short, and as the
Soviets used to say, the correlation of forces in
the Greater Middle East is moving against the
West. Many of our friends are confused and
demoralized, and most of our enemies are
emboldened - nearly everywhere in the region.
Hezbollah's successful resistance to the Israeli
Defense Forces in July 2006 in Lebanon was a
strategic setback for moderate forces, both
Western and Arab.
Most important, it again
demonstrated that force of arms - the machinery of
modern combined air and ground warfare - can be
thwarted or at least neutralized by radical Muslim
paramilitary forces; a lesson not only learned by
Hezbollah but also internalized by Hamas, the
Mahdi Army and other Shi'ite militias, and the
Taliban.
All this obviously represents a
perilous situation for the United States and its
allies. It is certainly the most hazardous period
in the region for the West at least since the 1973
Yom Kippur War and the possibility of US-Soviet
armed conflict. And it is exacerbated by the rapid
rise of Iran, now the second-most powerful and
influential country in the Greater Middle East
after the United States and the most important
foreign power operating in Iraq south of Baghdad.
Not only is Iran the rising nation in the
area, it seems determined to keep open the
possibility of pursuing a nuclear-weapons program.
This is a function of a centuries-long ambition to
acquire the attributes of a great power and to
reclaim Persia's ancient position as the hegemon
of the region. (As one Middle East leader recently
said to me, "Think Darius as well as the
mullahs.") So far, international pressure to
persuade or coerce Iran into suspending its
enrichment program as required by the UN Security
Council has been ineffective.
At this
writing, there appears to be no progress on the
issue in talks between European Union foreign
policy chief Javier Solana and the Iranian
negotiating team, especially after President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad declared on October 23, 2007,
that "Iran will not retreat one iota". And it
appears unlikely that currently discussed UN
Security Council, ad hoc or US unilateral
sanctions, which would take years to make a
decisive difference, will be strong enough to
force Iran to freeze its nuclear enrichment
program, especially given that Tehran is now
cushioned from the effect of such relatively weak
sanctions by an oil price of US$80-plus a barrel.
As Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has
written, "I do not see how the collective actions
that we are taking will produce the results that
we seek ...."
If Iran stays on its current
pace of development, it could be approaching a
point of technical mastery of large-scale
enrichment by the end of 2009. This could provide
Iran an irrevocable capability to produce nuclear
weapons, even if it had not completed
weaponization.
Let me be very clear.
President George W Bush and State Secretary
Condoleezza Rice are deeply committed to trying to
solve this problem with Iran through multilateral
diplomacy. They understand that multilateralism,
which in the past was regarded by some as only a
diplomatic alternative for the United States, has
now become a compelling foreign-policy
requirement. They genuinely seek to avoid a binary
choice by an American president either to attack
Iran or to acquiesce to Iran's possession of
nuclear weapons.
However, at present there
is no evidence that this matter can be
successfully resolved, including through
unconditional bilateral negotiations with Iran,
which I support. (Among other things, I do not see
how the United States could attack another country
with whom we have refused to have face-to-face
talks to try to avoid the conflict.)
Chinese leader Mao Zedong once advised his
cadres during the Chinese civil war to "Talk, talk
- fight, fight". The Iranian version of this for
the period ahead is clearly, "Talk, talk - enrich,
enrich". Only rigorously severe sanctions would
have any chance of changing Tehran's policy in
this regard.
As the NIE states, "Our
assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003
primarily in response to international pressure
indicates Tehran's decisions are guided by a
cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a
weapon irrespective of the political, economic and
military costs" and that "Iran may be more
vulnerable to influence on the issue than we
judged previously". However, thus far the
potential costs to Iran of retaining its
nuclear-weapons option have been far too feeble to
lead Tehran to change course.
If, despite
the West's best efforts, diplomacy fails and the
United States attacks Iran's nuclear facilities,
Tehran would respond with a variety of
countermeasures against the United States and any
nation that was seen to be assisting it - both in
the region and in the world at large, including
probably in the American homeland. This would be a
long war, likely lasting for years, since Iran
would not surrender. It would inflame the entire
Islamic world, strengthen terrorist forces
everywhere and, given the projected meteoric rise
in oil prices, could well trigger a global
recession. As columnist Anne Applebaum observed in
The Washington Post, "International support would
be minimal, fury maximal, diplomatic consequences
appalling."
Iranian possession of nuclear
weapons would have devastating strategic
consequences for the West for decades. This is why
a prominent Asian leader and strategist told me
recently, "If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it
will change the world." And a Middle East monarch
noted, "If the United States attacks Iran, there
will be serious trouble in the region for 18
months. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, there will
be serious trouble in the region for thirty years
and beyond."
Should Iran go nuclear, how
many Sunni Arab regimes would follow suit and who
believes that in a Middle East with multiple
nuclear-weapons states, we would not eventually
have a nuclear catastrophe in that region, in a
Western city or both? As Henry Kissinger stressed
on the Charlie Rose show, "In this situation some
use of nuclear weapons is almost inevitable."
If we are to avoid either of these
horrific outcomes, Russia will have to play a
central and positive role. We are unlikely to
succeed without Moscow. It has a closer
relationship with Iran than any nation in the
West; trust is too strong a word, but Russia-Iran
relations are generally good. It has more
influence in Tehran on this issue than any other
country.
It has a long-time civil-nuclear
relationship with Iran, which gives it unique
access to the Iranian nuclear elite. Thus, its
potential to importantly affect Tehran's
calculations is probably greater than the combined
efforts of Europe and the United States. And, most
important, Russia must agree if the Security
Council is to adopt severe economic sanctions that
would have the unambiguous force of international
law and might alter Iran's future nuclear choices.
George Shultz used to stress wisely that
setting priorities and making choices among
various policies is a crucial and often
underutilized element of foreign-affairs
formulation and implementation. Having worked
three times in the White House, I can confirm that
establishing priorities and sticking to them is no
easy task for any American administration, perhaps
not for any democracy. Over many administrations,
Washington is often the undisputed champion of
rigid and competing stovepipe policies.
In
this context, it is crucial and urgent that the
West's overriding objective vis-a-vis Russia
should be to secure its assistance in curtailing
Iran's nuclear options. But to do that, and in the
spirit of Metternich's comment that "the obvious
is always least understood", we need to
substantially change our current approach to
Moscow. In the first instance, this means that it
is time for the West, including the United States,
to stop trying to reform Russian domestic politics
- end what Kissinger calls "the American tendency
to insist on global tutelage". In overly
emphasizing that subject with Moscow, we are
reducing the West's chances of success in by far
the most critical issue before us - preventing an
Iranian bomb.
President Vladimir Putin has
obviously moved Russia away from the path toward a
Western-style liberal democracy attempted during
the Boris Yeltsin era - albeit in a highly flawed
and tenuous manner - to the Kremlin's vision of a
strong and highly centralized "sovereign
democracy". Serge Schmemann has explained it like
this in the International Herald Tribune:
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