With the "Iran Six" nations agreeing at their meeting in Geneva last week to
hold further talks on the Iran nuclear standoff, the chances of a breakthrough
have increased considerably.
The "Iran Six" - also known as the "Five plus One", includes the five permanent
members of the United Nations Security Council - the United States, Britain,
France, Russia and China - plus Germany.
Equally important is the relatively surprising news that Russia, France and
perhaps even the US had agreed in principle to assist Iran with the procurement
of the medium-enriched uranium that Tehran needs for a small research reactor.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also told the Russian news agency
Interfax after the Geneva meeting that a scheme
had been proposed for Iran to send low-enriched uranium to Russia to create
fuel rods for its medical research.
The Geneva decisions have opened the door for European participation in Iran's
nuclear program, hitherto monopolized by Russia, which is Iran's sole nuclear
partner. Should France, which has been actively trying to get a foot in the
Middle East nuclear market, succeed, it would also be a boon for French
diplomacy, due to the diplomatic and symbolic value attached to such a venture.
It is conceivable to imagine other areas of cooperation, such as nuclear waste
management, where the US in particular could give tremendous assistance to
Iran, assuming that the nuclear crisis is resolved within a framework
acceptable to all.
In the US, the Barack Obama administration has come under fire from blistering
right-wing attacks, with accusations that Obama was duped by the Iranians in
Geneva. This has been reflected in a spate of newspaper and TV commentaries
that raise serious questions about Obama's Iran policy.
Several opinion pieces in prominent newspapers labeled Iran as the "winner" in
the Geneva talks, claiming that without giving up much, Tehran managed to gain
serious concessions. This interpretation has been furthered by various
headlines in the Iranian press boasting of Iran's success in Geneva.
These spins belie the fact that the process is ongoing and the threat of new
sanctions on Iran is still alive. Also, any breakthrough in the talks can only
be sustained if both sides are kept satisfied, that is, a win-win situation
rather than a win-lose situation.
That means that Iran's incremental gain at the initial Geneva talk should be
correctly interpreted from a process approach as simply a part of a puzzle that
would need to be in sync with all the necessary elements of a breakthrough. In
the event of the latter, the nuclear standoff would be eventually put to rest,
Iran's nuclear file normalized, sanctions lifted, and troubled US-Iran
relations would be put on the path of normalization.
The latter requires a more in-depth dialogue that would allow more
confidence-building measures between the US and Iran, without which the initial
gains will disappear. Confidence-building is a tricky business that can be
unraveled by the negative influence of nay-sayers.
For instance, some have attacked Iran, accusing it of duplicity. They have
warned the Obama administration of the perils of making any nuclear deal with
Iran short of disbanding its nuclear fuel cycle. There is almost no mention of
the legal framework of the dialogue that figures prominently in the background.
That is, the fact that Iran is entitled to possess a peaceful nuclear program -
including a fuel cycle - under the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT) to which it is a signatory, as long as it is covered by the
International Atomic Energy Agency's surveillance and safeguard mechanisms.
Criticism that the West's consent to further enrich Iran's uranium for a Tehran
reactor is a "step in the wrong direction" by giving legitimacy to Iran's
enrichment activities is not justified. It overlooks the protean value of
nuclear cooperation with Iran, sanctioned by the articles of the NPT, that
would add important layers of confidence-building.
Compared to Obama, who referred approvingly of the Geneva talks as a
"constructive beginning", Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been more
reserved, confining herself to brief comments that highlight the "door being
opened".
The White House and some of the branches of the government, including the US
Congress, may not see eye-to-eye on Iran, which could lead to contradictory
behavior with a potentially negative impact on the dialogue process with Iran.
The Obama administration needs to be careful to extricate itself from various
"middlemen", such as European diplomats wanting to chart courses of action by
the US on Iran while promoting their own separate sets of interests.
Thus the Geneva talks, as they featured a bilateral Iran-US dialogue, may turn
out to be more significant than the formal multilateral talks that preceded
them.
Direct one-on-one dialogue, unencumbered by the influence of third parties, is
what is needed to promote the cause of US-Iran ties, irrespective of how some
European governments, such as Britain, press to maintain their previous
privileges derived from the US's "outsourcing" of the Iran issue.
In other words, a re-interpretation of global politics, in tune with the
post-hegemonic needs of the current world order, is needed to make sense of the
significance of Iran-US talks, given the Western interventions in Iran's
vicinity. A clean break from the cognitive road map that led to those
interventions has yet to emerge from Obama, and this may prove to be a major
lacuna of today's US talks with Iran.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry,
click here. His
latest book,
Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing
, October 23, 2008) is now available.
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