US's zero-sum diplomacy toward
Iran By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
On the eve of the Group of Eight (G8)
summit in Russia, President George W Bush and his
top policymakers openly boast about the US's
multilateralist diplomacy toward Iran and, yet,
their all-or-nothing approach with respect to
Iran's nuclear enrichment program represents a
zero-sum pseudo-diplomacy bound to fail.
While pressing Iran to provide a response
to the international package prior to the much
anticipated summit in St Petersburg, the US
government has preemptively rejected the
middle-of-the-road option of putting Iran's
enrichment program on standby while the talks
continue.
In talks in Brussels on Tuesday,
the two sides made no headway with Iran, which is
still refusing either to accept or reject the
offer
of
incentives made five weeks ago by six of the
world's powers in return for giving up its uranium
enrichment program.
In a recent interview
with the Arms Control Association, the US envoy to
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),
George L Schulte, clarified that the US opposes
the idea of Iranian centrifuges running on
"empty". Suspension, Schulte, explained, "means
all enrichment activities to include research and
development. We are not looking to parse that in
some fashion. We're looking for a full
suspension".
Lending a scientific hand to
this maximalist US demand, the nuclear scientist
David Albright has stated: "Among the proposals
and counterproposals seeking a resolution to this
issue, one that is especially gaining momentum in
some quarters of Europe and Iran is to allow
Iran's centrifuges to spin but with no uranium
hexafluoride. This would give Iran important
knowledge of centrifuge cascade operations with
proliferation risks of its own, and must not be
part of the negotiated settlement".
Yet,
what Albright misses is the reason this option is
gaining momentum in Iran and Europe, that is, its
feasibility as a viable third option that, as
stated by this author in a previous article, can potentially
break the present impasse on nuclear talks, since
anything beyond that, that is, full suspension, is
simply not in the realm of political possibilities
in Iran today.
In addition to readily
dismissing a viable option increasingly favored by
the Europeans, the US diplomacy is suffering from
a chronic lack of creativity thinly cloaked by
pseudo-solutions aimed at capturing the headlines
more than providing substantive grounds for
multilateral diplomacy.
In the latest
development from Washington the US is about to
start negotiations with Moscow for disposing some
of its nuclear waste in Russia. Per the reports in
both the Washington Post and the New York Times,
this deal would be closely linked to Russia's
cooperation on Iran. According to the National
Security Council spokesman, Frederich L Jones, "we
have made clear to Russia that for an agreement on
peaceful nuclear cooperation to go forward, we
will need Russia's active cooperation in blocking
Iran's attempt to obtain nuclear weapons".
But, this is clearly a US misstep for
three main reasons. First, as the host for the G8
summit, Russia hopes to utilize the opportunity to
sell its new image as an energy superpower, not
the dumping ground for nuclear wastes by the US
and other third countries using US-made power
plants, and this can hardly be said to favor
Russia's global image.
Second, Russia's
growing environmentalist movement is adamantly
opposed to President Vladimir Putin's initiative
in this regard and, consequently, any such
US-Russia deal, is bound to add to Putin's
unpopularity at home.
Russia today is
already threatened by "widespread contamination of
the environment", per a recent report of the
environmentalist group, Ekozashachita, which has
predicted "minimum profit and maximum radioactive
waste", If the deal goes through "each Russian
citizen will get an average of 140 grams of
nuclear waste and $3.50".
Presently,
Russia has 26 nuclear waste sites, many of them
causing serious environmental problems. They
include the city of Moscow, the Northwest region
of Russia, the Kara Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Ural
mountains, the Techa River. Even the G8 host city
of St Petersburg is put at risk by the train
shipments of nuclear waste tunneling through town,
per the complaints of Greenpeace activists who
cite the numerous problems with Russia's aging and
malfunctioning train system, bedeviled by a long
list of incidents.
Third, the strong
linkage between the nuclear waste deal and
Moscow's Iran policy is also bound to backfire
with the Russian nationalists surrounding Putin
who would be risking his reputation if he consents
to this linkage. One thing is certain, precisely
because of the US linkage diplomacy, the nuclear
waste agreement will likely take longer to ink,
perhaps not even during the remainder of Bush's
presidency. Much ado about nothing then?
Not necessarily, in light of the rather
robust US-Russia cooperation on strategic threat
reduction, both sides have agreed to renew until
2013 their historic agreement to cooperate in
reducing threats involving their nuclear arsenals.
That agreement outweighs other, less important
considerations and tensions, between Russia and
the US, which is why the Bush administration's
explicit linkage of normal nuclear cooperation to
Russia's Iran policy is both illogical, untimely
and unworkable.
This brings us to the
agenda overload of the upcoming G8 summit. With
North Korea's missile tests dropping in at center
stage, the world leaders, including China's
president, attending the summit might end up
devoting more attention to North Korea than to
Iran.
This, in turn, puts China at center
stage, takes some of the heat from Russia, and
simultaneously alleviates some of the pressure
from Iran that has been somewhat cornered by the
mounting pressure to respond to the package.
Already, one of Putin's top aides, Sergi
Prikhodko, has clarified that Iran will "not be a
central international topic" at the summit. Both
Prikhodko and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have
kept up hopes that Iran will in the end adopt
Russia's proposal for nuclear fuel production for
Iran inside Russia, and that is probably one of
the strongest common denominators of the White
House and Kremlin at the moment.
Everything else has the bittersweet taste
of zero-sum diplomacy unlikely to find too many
converts either in Tehran, Moscow or elsewhere in
Europe.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD,
is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview
Press) and co-authored "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear
Populism", The Brown Journal of World Affairs,
Volume X11, 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.
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