Why
Iran does not want the bomb By
Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Western sanctions on Iran
and heated policy debate on Tehran's nuclear
program go hand and hand, but the latest foray
into the latter by Kenneth Waltz, a prominent
international relations theorist, is emerging as
one of the most controversial.
Turning
conventional wisdom on its head, in a brief but
weighty article in the influential Foreign Affairs
magazine, Waltz defends Iranian nuclear
proliferation as a stabilizing factor in the
turbulent Middle East, citing the regional
imbalances and insecurities wrought by Israel's
nuclear monopoly and the rationality of Iranian
regime.
Not only that, Waltz questions the
wisdom of Western and Israeli pressure tactics
against Iran, pointing out that tactics such as
military threats and coercive sanctions only
heighten Iran's
national security
concerns, thus strengthening the country's
proliferation resolve.
Featured
prominently on the magazine's cover with the
eye-catching title "Why Iran should get the bomb",
the article is a timely jab at official Western
justifications for targeting Iran with an arsenal
of sanctions, threats, sabotage, assassinations
and, of course, incessant propaganda and
psychological warfare.
Waltz, who has
written extensively on the nuclear arms race and
is credited for the international relations school
of thought known as structural (neo) realism,
expresses his pessimism that these efforts can
stop a country "bent on acquiring nuclear
weapons". He predicts that Iran will beat the odds
and eventually get its bombs, but that this will
contribute to - rather than threaten - regional
peace and security.
It isn't clear if
Waltz's theoretical contribution, which offers a
different diagnosis of the Iran problem and
recommends new directions, will have an impact on
real policy. Irrespective of whether one
subscribes to his assumptions and conclusions, the
article offers a penetrating discussion with more
insights into the complexities posed by the Iran
nuclear standoff than whole books on the subject
In essence, Waltz's theory of Iranian
proliferation undermines the legitimacy of the
current US-led strategy of preventing Iran's
acquisition of nuclear weapons and even the
capability to build such weapons.
This is
in sharp contrast to the recent past, when the US
government publicly toyed with the notion of
consenting to Iran's low-grade enrichment program.
That diplomatic charade has apparently outlived
its usefulness, and the truth about the US's real
intentions from recent multilateral talks on
Iran's nuclear ambitions is gradually becoming
clear.
By expressing academic sympathy for
Iran's nuclear program, Waltz appears to have
single-handedly reinvigorated debate on Iran while
supplying policy-makers with a theoretical
framework they can use to make better sense of
their options.
Three
scenarios Waltz picks and chooses between
"three scenarios" on Iran. One is halting Iran's
nuclear weapons program through sanctions and
other means; a second involves Iran reaching the
"breakout" threshold but falling short of
assembling actual bombs (nuclear latency). Waltz
dismisses the latter scenario as unlikely since
"power begets to be balanced" and Iran is highly
motivated to counterbalance Israel's nuclear
monopoly.
The third scenario is Iran
joining the world's nuclear weapons elite, at
which point Waltz predicts Tehran would become
more cautious and risk-averse.
This
article highlights paradoxes in the Western and
Israeli counter proliferation tool box. Firstly,
that these tactics create a self-fulfilling
prophecy, and secondly they will persuade Iran to
continue with its proliferation activities rather
than dissuading it from doing so.
Theoretically, Waltz forces the Western
course of action towards Iran into the awkward
position of having to justify itself. Still, this
does not mean that Waltz's approach is
problem-free.
Israel-centric
approach At the heart of Waltz's argument
lies the assumption that Iran is marching towards
a nuclear balance with Israel in the region. This
is why Waltz expresses surprise that it has taken
so long before another Middle East state acted to
address this problem, notwithstanding Israel's
past attacks on Iraq and Syria to stymie any
rising nuclear competition.
This
hypothesis that Iran is overly concerned about
Israel's proliferation and aims to counterbalance
it does not match the reality.
Iran's
nuclear program under the Islamic Republic was
revived after a temporary halt at the outset of
the 1979 Islamic revolution in response to the
perceived threat of Iraq's nuclear program during
the 1980s and 1990s. However, it acquired a
non-military dimension with the demise of Saddam
Hussein following the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, as
per the conclusion of the US's intelligence
finding of December 2007. (This national estimate
remains valid and essentially unchanged today
despite official Washington rhetoric).
The
fact is that most Iran policy experts regarded
Israel an "out of area" nuisance with respect to
Tehran's national security calculus, but it has
been elevated to a primary threat solely due to
Israel's constant sabre-rattling against Iran.
Waltz is wrong to assume that Iran has
been motivated to go fully nuclear as a result of
the perceived threat of Israel's arsenal. Contrary
to what Waltz says, Iran's leaders have repeatedly
pointed to the "uselessness" and "futility" of
Israel's arsenal, reflected in the absence of its
utility in the various Israeli wars with its Arab
neighbors.
The idea of "nuclear blackmail"
by Israel may be highly important to Arab leaders,
but there is no evidence that it figures
prominently among the Iranian leadership.
Waltz makes the error of lumping
post-revolutionary Iran with the other
(unit-level) states in the contemporary anarchic
world and making undue generalizations about
states' behavior that fails to distinguish
revolutionary from status quo powers.
A
better guide for understanding Iran's uniqueness
is provided by the late French philosopher Michel
Foucault, who observed the revolution first-hand
and wrote about its emancipatory mission, to lift
the chain that weighs on the "entire world order".
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad said in a
recent speech at the Rio+20 United Nations
conference that there is a need for a new world
order. This points at a historical understanding
of the Islamic Republic as a distinct
"quasi-state" that bears a trans-national sense of
responsibility as a global revisionist state
combating global inequities of power and
injustice.
This is why Iran has
spearheaded the disarmament movement by holding
disarmament conferences, supporting the UN's goal
of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, and
deliberately taking aim at the nuclear weapons
states' failure toward their disarmament
obligations under the articles of the
Non-Proliferation Treaty.
By August, when
Iran hosts a major summit of the Non-Aligned
Movement (NAM) and officially takes over the
movement's presidency for the next three years,
Tehran's determination to play an even more
prominent role with respect to the disarmament and
non-proliferation objectives of the NAM will grow
considerably and, in turn, further weaken any
opposite proliferation tendency.
For the
moment, however, Iran is fairly content with its
nuclear progress, which has brought it to the
latent breakout capability, per the admission of
Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian nuclear
negotiator, and yet without any sign that Iran has
any intention of turning that latent power into a
nuclear-weapons regime.
One of the reasons
Iran is uninterested in going fully nuclear,
ignored by Waltz, is that this would trigger a
reciprocal nuclearization on the part of Saudi
Arabia, Iran's main rival in the region, and thus
introduce a costly and structural competition in
the Persian Gulf, both draining the precious
economic resources and institutionalizing the
Iran-Saudi rivalry.
Indeed, that is the
nub of the problem in Waltz's article, the fact
that it is Israel-centric and overlooks the
regional dynamic that at present exists in the
Persian Gulf region, by simply making abstract
generalizations about the broader Middle East.
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