Beyond the bluster: Iran at a
crossroads By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
The international nuclear standoff
with Iran, which is likely to culminate in United
Nations sanctions given the present state of
affairs, now has the distinct possibility of
pushing Iran back to where it was in the early and
mid-1980s, that is, international isolation.
This possibility is already foreshadowed
by the draft resolution that was circulated at the
UN Security Council, calling on the world
community to prevent the transfer of goods,
material and technology that "could contribute to
Iran's [uranium] enrichment-related and
reprocessing activities and missile programs".
In light of Russia's recent announcement
of its intention to sell two new nuclear power
plants to Iran, the pertinent question is,
of
course, whether or not
President Vladimir Putin will be able to continue
the Russia-Iran nuclear cooperation when such a
cooperation would put him at odds not only with
the Security Council but with the United States,
Europe and the "international community."
The draft resolution calls on Iran to halt
all uranium-enrichment-related activities as well
as the construction of a heavy-water plant and
threatens to take "additional steps" if necessary.
It gives the International Atomic Energy Agency
chief another chance to seek Iran's compliance
with its, and the IAEA's, demands. And even if
China and Russia as permanent members to the
Security Council block a formal UN resolution, the
chances are that the US will seek to put together
a "coalition of the willing" to impose its own
sanctions.
Assuming that Iran ignores the
UN - "doesn't give a damn", as President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad put it - the road ahead is rather
straightforward, that is, the resort to Chapter
VII of the UN Charter, declaring Iran's behavior a
threat to international peace and security,
barring all member states from any nuclear
cooperation with Iran, as well as "targeted
sanctions".
Implications for Iran's foreign
policy Iran is fairly well equipped to
deal with the rather toothless sanctions posed by
the US that date back to the hostage crisis of
1979. Short of an oil embargo, Iran can
financially withstand any lesser sanctions such as
travel bans, a freeze on assets of leaders and the
like.
On the other hand, the Iranian
economy will suffer grievously should foreign
investors stay away, foreign contracts be canceled
or put in indefinite limbo, and the bills for
foreign imports skyrocket, translating into higher
unemployment and economic stagnation. That would
come on top of a war economy where more and more
of the government's budget is swallowed up by
defense spending. At a minimum, it will slow
Iran's economic growth, about which Ahmadinejad
boasted recently.
Thus, looking ahead, a
year or so from now, with Iran under international
isolation, the picture that emerges is rather
bleak - an Iran turned into a Middle Eastern
version of isolated North Korea. That is hardly
what Iran's foreign-policy establishment aimed to
achieve during the past two decades.
The
pressure on Iran could, of course, worsen if there
are additional punitive measures such as the
exclusion of Iran from international sports,
cultural and scientific events, as advocated by
certain hawkish politicians in the West. The
very stigma of becoming a pariah state is
unwelcome news to Iran's foreign-policy
decision-makers who have, over the years, expended
considerable energy in cultivating Iran's foreign
ties, regionally and internationally. Without
doubt, the negative repercussions of UN actions
against Iran would be far-reaching, adversely
impacting the whole edifice of Iran's foreign
policy.
To avoid or minimize the regime's
vulnerabilities, Iran's behavior has been
characterized by a fluid, mixed response, evincing
the tough line in public - "we don't give a damn"
- with an increasingly finessed diplomatic
approach geared toward stalling the US-EU march to
sanctions.
This might explain why Iran
rebutted the recent statement by a military
leader, regarding Iran's intention to attack
Israel in case of an assault by the US, saying it
was not "valid". The pendulum had swung too far in
the direction of bellicose rhetoric supplanting
diplomacy, and as Dr Hassan Rowhani, the former
chief nuclear negotiator, has candidly stated,
Iran welcomes dialogue and diplomacy.
The subtle diplomatic approach by Rowhani
and his increasingly prominent role in formulating
Iran's response to this dangerous crisis suggests
that Iran is actually in the throes of a serious
soul-search and quite another lurch "back to the
past", that is, back to the prudent nuclear
diplomacy prior to Ahmadinejad, dictated by the
survival prerogatives of the regime and Iran's
national interests. It is not too late to
prevent Iran's descent to another dark era of
international isolation, bringing misery and
deprivation to the Iranian people, who have
already sacrificed so much. To demand from
the present generation that it make another
historic sacrifice, as it did during the
eight-year war with Iraq (which might have ended
sooner without the resistance from hardline
politics), is asking too much, and it is doubtful
that the educated middle-class Iranians would go
for it.
First step: Acknowledging a
crisis Several months ago, Ahmadinejad
questioned the applicability of the term "crisis"
for the nuclear issue. Yet today there is no
doubt that there is a crisis with the
potential for war, something that Iran's former
envoy to the UN, Deputy Oil Minister Hadi
Nejadhosseinian, openly admitted in his recent
trip to India.
His expressed concern about
a possible war with the US is clearly shared by
nearly all the top-ranking Iranian officials, many
of whom are unhappy about the adverse impact it
would have on their respective programs, be it
oil, gas, trade, communication or construction.
By acknowledging that Iran faces a
formidable international crisis, the government
can brace for the consequences better by preparing
the population, as well as search more
energetically, and diplomatically, for a formula
out of it, since the present endeavors have not
had the desired results - at least not yet.
By definition, a crisis is a moment of
opportunity as well as danger, and to a large
extent its evolution depends on the acumen,
imagination and will of the political leaders to
chart a course leading away from danger. That
means seizing on the nuclear crisis's opportunity
to reach a modus vivendi with the US, to
make more transparent their singular commitment to
protect Iran's national interests and define the
limits of their commitments to purely religious
and/or ideological values in conjunction with
national-security interests.
For the
moment, the chances of achieving a positive
outcome are held back by the crisis's powerful
momentum toward a complete breakdown - of Iran's
relations with the West, with the UN and, indeed,
with much of the international community. This is
connected to a related breakdown in Iran's
foreign-policy priorities and interests.
Post-populist politics On a
broad level, what Iran may need to pull itself out
of the present crisis is a political housecleaning
following the parameters of a yet-to-be-defined
post-populist politics commensurate with Iran's
needs and priorities unblemished by the
ideological "noise" marring the picture of what
Iran's national and security interests dictate
both in the short and long terms.
The
problem with this scenario unfolding is that,
perversely, the present crisis fuels the very
basis of populist politics in Iran, by forcing the
government to increase its reliance on its mass
base of "citizen soldiers". Yet a clue to the
riddle of Iranian politics, as long as this
pattern of politics continues, is how long Iran
will keep on playing to the standards of what we
may aptly refer to as the "heroic society".
To leapfrog to a "post-heroic" society is,
however, what is precisely needed for Iran to come
back down to earth and stop acting as it if
speaking on behalf of the entire Muslim world, and
limit its rhetoric to Iran's national concerns and
priorities. The movement aspect of the Islamic
Republic must be preceded by the strictly state
aspect.
The dual revolutionist-statist
orientation of the state has caused certain
inconsistencies that must now be addressed, along
with the serious side-effects of the new trend
toward a greater emphasis on ideology.
This is exceedingly difficult given the
multiple sources of populist politics in Iran
epitomized by Ahmadinejad. It involves a politics
of identity and "symbol-wielding" reliance on the
linguistic reservoir of the revolution that makes
any shrinking from the ideological and public
commitments of the state problematic today.
Iran is caught on the horns of a dilemma:
the very process of distancing itself from the
core fundamentalist values, without having
anything to replace them, has today caused a
"restorationist" politics that, in the realm of
foreign policy at least, amounts to a vicious
circle.
Still outstanding after all these
years is the answer to the question of which
approach Iran should have to today's age of
globalization, to the international system and to
international relations. Iran's leaders have
called for a long-term, 20-year economic policy,
yet the foreign-policy dimension of this is
hitherto absent and requires serious attention.
This aside, to call for a post-populist
politics is not to be mistaken for jettisoning all
those populist reservoirs of power in Iran, rather
to reconstruct the state-making process along new
lines whereby the harmful effects of "politics
from below" are kept in check and rational
decision-making is not put in jeopardy by
political rhetoric.
Ahmadinejad and
his circle of policymakers have repeatedly
criticized the one-dimensional "politics of
appeasement" under former president Mohammad
Khatami, and their corrective militancy has not
been entirely without positive aspects, such as in
reasserting Iran's regional role, among
others. But, as called for by various policy
analysts and pundits in Iran today, a "balancing
act" is required, and that inevitably means
re-embracing some of the foreign-policy
prescriptions of the Khatami era.
Iran's foreign policy is today at a
critical crossroads, where there are alternative
roads to the past, one being the isolationism of
the 1980s and the other the integrationist
approach of the 1990s. The worse remedy is a mixed
approach that would seek in vain to retain
elements from both eras. The way forward is
to continue, in main essentials, the path of the
Khatami era.
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.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing
.)
