This past week, Russian foreign
policy experienced a thinly disguised humiliation
that is bound to reverberate throughout the inner
sanctum of the Kremlin's policy edifice for some
time to come.
This came in the form of a
Russian turnabout in Washington, when Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov chewed his own
words and denied that he had pitched any new
Russian proposal to solve the Iranian nuclear
crisis.
Lavrov thus recanted what he and
his deputy, Sergei Kisliak, had
told
the
Europeans and the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) in Vienna, on March 4 and 5, before Lavrov's
ship of diplomacy was sunk in mid-Atlantic
before he even set foot in the United States.
Sending fleeting shivers to US
policymakers bent on United Nations Security
Council action against Iran, the aborted Russian
proposal was "swatted down" by US Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice, according to a New York
Times report on Thursday. That means applying
strong-arm tactics and, most probably, even
"coercive tactics" against the Russian visiting
Washington unexpectedly in the midst of the IAEA
meeting on Iran.
At their joint press
conference on Tuesday, Rice stated that "we did
discuss Iran in great detail ... but the Russians
did not tell us of any new proposal that they have
made to the Iranians concerning anything but the
February 4 resolution" by the IAEA. Rice is an
astute, quick learner, aptly filling the shoes of
her predecessor, Colin Powell, given Powell's
stealth tactics with regard to Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction.
"I can reiterate what
Dr Rice said. There is no compromise, new
Russian proposal," Lavrov said bluntly at the
press conference, despite earlier reports that
Russia backed Iran engaging in limited uranium-enrichment
research on its own soil. He then went on to
complain of the US foot-dragging on Russia's bid
to join the World Trade Organization, hoping to
suggest a face-saving quid pro quo, instead of
returning home empty-handed and rather humiliated.
Sadly, Rice has set a bad example with her
dissimulation. US Under Secretary of State
Nicholas Burns recently testified in Congress that
last year he traveled oversees 11 times and spent
hundreds of hours talking to the Europeans,
Russians, Chinese and others about Iran and added
that "there was not one single person who doubted
that Iran was involved in nuclear proliferation".
That is rather strange and one wonders whom
he has been talking to, given the fact that
repeatedly last year Russian President Vladimir
Putin stated publicly that he saw no evidence that
Iran was acquiring nuclear weapons. Chinese
officials have also repeatedly made similar
statements.
If Burns wants us to believe
that somehow these politicians across a number of
countries for some mysterious reason prefer to say
one thing in public and the opposite in private
conversation, that is something we must take with
a pinch a salt.
Nevertheless, what does
all this say of Russia's occasional self-bombast
about its prudent world diplomacy based on, to
quote a Russian daily, "balanced argument,
discretion, tact, norms of international
diplomacy, discussion and dialogue"? In light of
the Lavrov fiasco in Washington, let us add a few
more apt adjectives: weak, vacillating,
contradictory, unprincipled, shameful.
Who
can now count on anything uttered by Lavrov and
company, for example on the inadvisability of
Security Council sanctions on Iran, when he has
established such a poor track record by reversing
himself at a critical juncture in the Iranian
nuclear crisis?
This is certainly a
serious question to ponder by the Russian
intelligentsia now forced to grapple with the
attrition of Russia's standing on the world stage
leading to the diminishing of Russian diplomatic
prowess.
In fact, there are two Lavrovs,
one brave and bold when he is in familiar European
territory, and another scared whenever he sets
foot in the US. Thus, prior to his departure from
Vienna, the former Lavrov was put on full display
at a press conference, boldly promising Iran's
return to the implementation of its "right to
develop a nuclear energy sector full-scale" after
a period of confidence building.
Naively,
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei took the Russians at
their words and while Lavrov's jet was still
crossing the Atlantic, told the press that the
Iranian crisis could be resolved in "a matter of a
week". Such unfounded optimism, based on
miscalculation of Russian, and to a lesser extent
European, resolve to stand up to the US, had clearly
foundered by the time the IAEA meeting was over
and the Iranian referral to the Security Council
was a fait accompli.
Still
desperately clinging to his optimism, ElBaradei's
concluding remarks at the IAEA meeting played down
the body's decision as simply "a new phase in
diplomacy". But not if you were US Vice President
Dick Cheney and the US ambassador to the UN, John
Bolton, smelling an opportunity to draw blood.
They both wasted little time in informing a
cheerful crowd at the annual meeting of a powerful
Jewish lobby group that Iran faced dire
consequences if it refused to comply with the will
of the international community.
And to no
surprise to cynics, given its timing, Britain
claimed on Thursday that Tehran could acquire the
technological capability to build a bomb by the
end of the year. A senior Foreign Office official
said that although it could take Iran several
years to build a nuclear weapon, it might gain the
technical know-how within months. "By the end of
the year is a ... realistic period," the official
was quoted in the media as saying. "It would be
really damaging to regional security if Iran even
acquired the technology to enable it to develop a
nuclear weapon." Previously, European diplomats
have said that Iran would need five to 10 years to
build a bomb.
Yet contrary to such
hype, Iran's request to keep 168 centrifuges
operational for research and development purposes does
not represent a huge risk warranting all the
current saber-rattling. Even respected US nuclear
scientists have gone on record stating that Iran
would need a minimum of 500 centrifuges put
together in order to assemble enough fissile
material for a single bomb. For one thing, such a
small cascade as 168 centrifuges has a reduced
separative work unit (SWU) capacity of 30% or
more, hardly alarming in terms of military
diversion. [1]
The US media's role in
scuttling a compromise The mainstream media
in the United States dutifully and masterfully played
their compliant role as props for US foreign
policy. Without exception, all the big players
lambasted the Lavrov initiative as "capitulation",
"route of appeasement", and "backstabbing the US".
Without them, the White House's
"preemptive" nipping in the bud of the
Russian-IAEA proposal would not have been
possible. At least the Washington Post
subsequently exposed Rice's little white lie of no
new Russian proposal by conceding that "after
making his pitch Lavrov appeared to retreat from
the new proposal".
Clearly, crisis
prevention is not good news for the
corporate-controlled US media, basking in an
approaching Iraq-type major international crisis
bound to galvanize the public's attention. Any
hope that something might have been learnt from
the Iraq experience has now been effectively
dashed by the example set in the Lavrov debacle in
Washington.
The road ahead: Bolton
versus Zarif The US, having finally got
its wish to have Iran brought before the UN, has
now directly inherited a crisis that was until now
outsourced to the Europeans, and we shall see how
deftly the White House can handle it, given the
paucity of the Bush administration's expertise on
Iran.
Rice is a Russian expert first and foremost,
still on the learning curve on the Middle
East in general and Iran specifically, and the
National Security Council (NSC) is not an improvement
either. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley continues
to play second fiddle to Rice, obviously no
Henry Kissinger in the Vietnam crisis. Eliot Abrams
at the NSC is reportedly in charge of Iran's
proliferation threat, a better hand relatively
speaking, but perhaps too ideologically
oriented for his own good.
How then can we expect prudent US
diplomacy in the coming storm when the
policymakers in Washington are so ill-equipped to
deal with it, in terms of the depth of their
understanding of the tremendous complexities of
today's Iran and the various security and
non-security considerations that are integral
elements of this crisis?
That aside, the
US has had it relatively easy so far, basking in
the huge dividends from the Iranians shooting
themselves in the foot (and belly) with their
rather amateurish diplomacy over the past few
months. But with the nuclear ball now moving to
the UN, we can expect a reasonable and qualitative
improvement in light of the leadership role by
Iran's competent permanent representative to the
UN, Mohammad Javad Zarif. He is well liked in the
UN halls and has already given the US a taste of
his shrewd diplomacy by delivering a blistering
defeat to the US at last year's nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, almost
singlehandedly.
For the moment, the Security
Council is expected to issue a statement by
its president noting Iran's non-compliance with IAEA
requests, hurling it back to the IAEA for further
review, and picking it up again after another
status report by the IAEA, either in a month
or less, in light of the United States' "shotgun
diplomacy" aimed at compressing the timeline. A
more prudent approach would allow a reasonable
cooling period both for adequate deliberation and
dialogue as well as for an Iranian increase of
their margin of maneuverability at home for the
sake of a compromise solution.
The first
issue the council will have to decide is
procedural - whether the issue should be addressed
under the general item of Non-Proliferation of
Weapons of Mass Destruction (an item already on
the council's agenda since 2004) or a new
Iran-specific item. The second issue, given the
general view that the matter should be approached
in an incremental way, is how to establish a
meaningful series of steps that will send
progressively stronger messages to Iran, but leave
enough room for the resumption of negotiations.
Bolton, waiting impatiently for months for
this golden opportunity, has said that he wants
the Iran case to remain in the Security Council
and, by the looks of it, he is determined to do
all he can to achieve that. In so doing, Bolton
may characteristically overlook the opportunity
side of this crisis - a meaningful dialogue with
Iran touching on all the relevant issues on the
Iran-US table.
For sure, the US will
ignore the IAEA chief's increasingly soft stance
on Iran, blaming Iran mostly for lack of adequate
transparency and tardiness rather than outright
breach and non-compliance, and focus instead on
the latest IAEA resolution's harsher language
against Iran.
Worse, the Security Council
may not even bother to engage Iran in their
dialogue.
On the other hand, Bolton's
mission may not turn out smooth sailing after all,
partly as a result of the worthy opponent he faces
in Zarif. This might explain why Bolton may be
maneuvering to deny Zarif a platform at the
Security Council, circumventing the process and
even strangling it with his punchy warnings
against Iran, aimed at muddying the picture.
No matter, a litmus test of US "soft
power" diplomacy is in the offing now. What one
can safely predict is a mixed result, whereby the
US will lose some by winning some, definitely far
below ideal expectations. That is the best-case
scenario. In the less sanguine worst-case
scenario, this crisis may well turn out a sad
lose-lose predicament for all involved, including
the IAEA.
Yet the US and Iran, as this
author has repeatedly noted in the past, have a
considerable pool of shared and parallel interests
in the region which can be the ammunition for
constructive dialogue on the sidelines of the
Security Council.
Note 1. Separative work
unit (SWU) is a function of the amount of uranium
processed and the degree to which it is enriched,
ie, the extent of increase in the concentration of
the U-235 isotope relative to the remainder. The
fissile uranium in nuclear weapons usually
contains 85% or more of U-235, which makes it
"weapon-grade".
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating
Iran's Nuclear Populism", the Brown Journal of
World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005,
with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He is also author of
Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating
Facts Versus Fiction.
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