Iran gets a sanctions reprieve -
for now By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
After intense debates, the Permanent Five
members of the United Nations Security Council
plus Germany have failed to reach a compromise,
because of "tactical differences", according to US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. As a result,
the United States' hardline diplomatic failure has
now been replaced by a new, US-backed European
initiative to use "carrots" to bring Iran into
line.
How did Washington suffer such a
diplomatic setback? In the absence of any credible
evidence of Iran's misuse of its nuclear program
for weapons, the Security Council lacked the legal
foundation for calling Iran's resumption of
enrichment-related activities a "threat to
international peace and security" as set forth
in
Chapter 7 of the UN Charter.
Second, the
United States' repeated threats to use military
force, meant to persuade China and Russia to
support the draft resolution's implicit threat of
sanctions as a "lesser evil", backfired given the
mounting international criticisms, including from
former British foreign secretary Jack Straw, whose
adamant opposition to the military option may have
cost him his job.
Irrespective of Straw's
replacement with a more compliant foreign
secretary toeing Prime Minister Tony Blair's
pro-White House line, the fact is that there are
growing signs of a US-EU divide over Iran that
might have spilled into the open had the Security
Council debates dragged on much longer.
Third, the US might have scored with
Moscow had it played its cards better. Yet the
simultaneous attack on Russia by Vice President
Dick Cheney in Lithuania over its democratic
deficiencies and the like raised too many
roadblocks to hope that Russia might join the
anti-Iran bandwagon with the US at the UN.
Fourth, a great deal of credit must go to
Iran's deft diplomatic moves and counter-moves,
both at the International Atomic Energy Agency and
at the UN, which on the whole outshone those of
the US. Case in point: whereas Ambassador John
Bolton's premature hint at the United States'
unilateral action against Iran elicited an angry
congressional response, his Iranian counterpart at
the UN, Javad Zarif, worked the media and the UN
representatives much more effectively.
Mention must also be made of President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad's defiant stance, promising not
to "give a damn" what the Security Council did
while combining that with the olive branch of
dialogue with the US, both through his
controversial letter to President George W Bush
and, more recently, his declared willingness to
engage in direct talks with the US as a way of
resolving the nuclear crisis.
Equally
important were the Iranian "hard power" maneuvers,
for example the military exercise in the Persian
Gulf, purchase of an air-defense system from
Russia, and the spiritual leader's stern warning
of retaliating "twice as hard" and in "any part of
the world" to any US strike against Iran. The
combined soft- and hard-power diplomacy from Iran
must, then, be interpreted to have worked superbly
in bringing about the desired result - so far.
The next phase: Can carrots
work? According to Secretary Rice, the next
step has now been moved ahead "several weeks", and
it now remains to be seen whether the "carrot
approach" can lead to a more positive outcome,
from the West's perspective, than the package of
incentives offered by the EU-3 (Germany, France
and Britain) early last year.
Recall that
Iran rejected that package as "insulting" and,
therefore, an entirely new package must be put
together that addresses the Iranian criticisms of
the previous one - that it was vague and abstract,
that its security pledge in the absence of US
backing was "toothless", that it was not
sufficiently "firm" in its commitments for
technological and nuclear cooperation,
notwithstanding the United States' sanction regime
precluding the transfer of dual-purpose technology
to Iran.
As the Western diplomats struggle
to put the new package together, it is important
to bear in mind that without an explicit US
endorsement, it will have virtually no chance of
success. In fact, the US should be a direct
participant in the new effort-in-the-making and
shed all pretensions of being on the sidelines.
But of course, even then there is no
guarantee that the new approach will work with
Tehran, which insists on its nuclear rights,
nowadays pointing to Brazil, which has a much more
ambitious nuclear program and yet has faced no
international pressure whatsoever.
Political psychology and linguistics play
a role here, and that means overuse of the
simplistic language of "carrots" and "sticks". The
fact is that the actors involved represent complex
political entities with vested interests and
concerns, and the more formal and official the
approach the better, as this would sidestep the
headaches caused by political rhetoric and, worse,
propaganda.
Simultaneously, the "either
or" approach - take the incentives or face
sanctions - is a poor method of dealing with Iran,
since it does not respond well to threats. To be
persuasive, the coming carrot approach should be
unhinged from the threat approach; the latter
undermines the former and gives the impression of
a "pseudo-diplomacy" as a prelude to punitive
actions against Iran.
Sadly, this last
point has consistently bypassed the attention of
US media pundits, as the recent editorials in,
among other publications, the Washington Post and
the Wall Street Journal clearly indicate an
innocence about what works and what doesn't work
in the nuclear crisis, the argument being that
diplomacy "only backed by threat of force" has a
chance to work with Iran.
Yet, as
indicated above, this is simply not so, and a
"paradigmatic shift" is called for, as part and
parcel of a new approach. An important
consideration, without doubt, is whether or not
Iran is politically ready to enter into meaningful
dialogue with the US, to "hash out the
differences", to quote a US daily.
Iran's
concentric circles of power would have to work in
tandem to make sure that their own power rivalries
do not neutralize the growing potential for a
breakthrough in the US-Iran diplomatic deadlock.
After 27 years, the entrenched institutional
interests operating against a normalization of
relations with the US may prove too powerful to
overcome.
A more realistic goal of
incremental "mini-breakthroughs" is more likely,
depending on the progress or lack of progress on
the nuclear front. The welter of shared or
parallel interests - in Iraq, Afghanistan and
elsewhere - fuels the hope for such
mini-breakthroughs and, based on objective
calculation of both countries' national interests,
there is no reason to forfeit this hope right now.
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", 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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