Slow-motion progress in Iran
nuclear talks By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
When Iranian nuclear negotiator
Ali Larijani and the European Union’s top diplomat
Javier Solana meet today, July 6, it is a foregone
conclusion that the two will fall short of the
“clear and substantive response” from Iran
demanded last week by a meeting of G8 foreign
ministers.
The EU's decision to press Iran
on their delayed response to the recent
international package offered to encourage Tehran
off its collusion course with the US misses a
crucial point: Larijani doesn’t yet have an
answer. Tehran’s Kayhan daily newspaper in a July
5 editorial criticized Iran's "incompetence" for
allowing the West to "throw the ball in Iran's
court". Iran's counter-strategy, it now appears,
is to switch the momentum by pointing out the
package's "ambiguities" and
Tehran’s need for further "clarification" on
certain points.
On the whole, the
diplomatic climate is warming for Iran. The
escalating North Korean missile crisis has to some
extent shifted global attention away from Iran’s
nuclear program. Moreover, if China is pressured
by the US to go along with a draft Security
Council statement condemning Pyongyong's
"provocations", it is possible that Beijing could
lower its guard on defending Iran to balance
strategic interests closer to home. Meanwhile,
Tehran has, somewhat provocatively, hailed North
Korea's defiant missile test as standing up to US
power in Asia.
At the same time, Iran's
leader has recently hinted at a new drive toward
economic privatization, widely interpreted as a
move to facilitate Tehran’s quest to eventually
join the World Trade Organization. This alone puts
Iran in sharp contrast with North Korea's
state-controlled economy and reinforces the
possibility that the economic linkages offered as
part of the nuclear package may prove decisive,
along with the security guarantees, in softening
Iran's initial objections to the package.
Iran's refusal to abide by the July 12
deadline could actually turn out to be a blessing
in disguise for the upcoming G8 summit in St
Petersburg, Russia, which recently decided to put
the Iran nuclear issue on its agenda. That’s one
reason why International Atomic Energy Agency
chief Mohammad ElBaradei is now planning to attend
the summit.
An outright negative or even
partially negative Iranian response would have
greatly tested the G8's unity, adding to already
fractious US-Russian relations. That’s presumably
one reason why the White House's spokesman
recently backtracked from the US’s earlier strict
July 12 deadline for an Iranian response.
Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair has already
backed away from a strict timetable, saying at his
latest press conference that there was "no
deadline for Iran".
Blair's softening
position and Germany's recent refusal to recant a
statement by its defense minister in support of
Iran’s uranium enrichment program are two
important signals that the US's now favored
multilateral diplomacy towards Iran has imposed
limits on its previous hard-nosed diplomatic
tactics.
A recent authoritative article by
David Albright in the Bulletin of Atomic
Scientists states that, "Iran could have its first
nuclear weapons in 2009." This assessment
represents a sharp contrast to consensus estimates
that Iran is at least five, if not 10 years away
from acquiring nuclear weapon capabilities.
According to Albright, Iran is now, "on the verge
of mastering a critical step in building and
operating a gas centrifuge plant". Still,
Albright's hypothetical timeline is based on a yet
to be substantiated accusation that Tehran is
running a clandestine nuclear weapons program.
In the absence of any hard evidence that
Iran's civilian nuclear program is being applied
for military purposes, the upper hand still
belongs to Russia, China and the Non-Aligned
Movement, which has steadfastly opposed the US’s
push to impose UN sanctions against Tehran.
Moscow’s and Beijing’s occasional prodding of Iran
to accept the nuclear package should be viewed
more as obligatory diplomacy rather than a
softening of their pro-Iran stance inside the UN.
Revising up the timeline for when Iran might
possess nuclear weapons, baldly based on purely
hypothetical assumptions rather than firm
empirical evidence, is unlikely to sway
international opinion in Washington’s favor.
It is hardly surprising, then, that there
is an emerging US ambivalence about bogging the
Security Council down in the near future with more
unsubstantiated claims about Iran’s nuclear
capabilities. In fact, Washington has recently
been trying to ingratiate itself with the UN
community in the wake of US ambassador to the UN
John Bolton’s recent flip-flop on an earlier
announced UN budget cap, which arguably would have
put the UN into serious financial straits. One
hopes that the same pragmatism Bolton recently
displayed on the UN budget can be duplicated by
Washington in its dealings with Iran.
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 also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear
potential latent", Harvard International Review.
He is author of Iran's Nuclear Program:
Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
(Copyright
2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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