Korean cloud obscures Almaty talks
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
NEW YORK - That the Korean crisis is boiling steadily to new heights is bound to create some minor ruptures for the Iran nuclear negotiations scheduled to resume in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on April 5. This is an inescapable conclusion, drawn from the mere fact that the US and its allies cannot stomach two simultaneous crises in different parts of the world, particularly in today's age of deep Pentagon budget cuts. The Obama administration should think along the lines of "smart power" - that essentially means no unrealistic, and therefore self-defeating, power overstretch.
Already, there are plenty of reasons to think of Iran and North Korea in tandem, [1] in addition to the 2003 George W Bush's
lumping together, along with Iran, under the rubric "axis of evil". Last week, Iran joined North Korea and Syria in scuttling a UN arms treaty, and this week the US media is awash with concerns that a threatened Pyongyang may sell its nukes to Iran, ie, the Western policymakers are worried over a Tehran-Pyongyang concert since both governments are effectively under siege by Western powers, one with nuclear-armed bombers hovering above and the other confronted with an economic warfare aimed at crippling the Iranian economy.
Despite certain similarities, there are of course striking dissimilarities between the two situations, above all the fact that Iran has not exited the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has denounced nuclear weapons as a policy principle, and has no strategic confrontation with a neighbor that warrants offensive nuclear weapons. On the whole, the North Korea analogy does not really apply to Iran, even though the Western misperception to the contrary does have policy ramifications.
Hence, when the world powers known as "P5 + 1" and Iran resume their talks in Almaty for a second round that began in early February in an air of guarded optimism, the stage will be partly set by the on-going Korean crisis that has shifted Washington's focus on what could easily degenerate into a military confrontation with unknown consequences.
From Iran's vantage point, the Korean crisis is a crisis of opportunity to pressure Western governments to show greater flexibility on the removal of sanctions for the sake of reaching an agreement with Tehran. In other words, Tehran definitely senses additional chips in its nuclear diplomacy introduced by the Korean crisis that can potentially worsen if the Iran nuclear crisis is worsened as a result of any breakdown in negotiations, thus bifurcating the US military's attention.
In that case, the military option may be still be on the table, yet with a reduced threat value attached to it because, basically, despite the US military doctrine's call for preparedness to fight two or more wars simultaneously, the facts of budget cuts have clearly diminished this preparedness.
Of course, this is good news for Iran that has been receiving some signs of economic relief recently, in the form of increased oil exports - to China, Japan, South Korea, etc - despite the West's energy sanctions, not to mention India's determination to continue importing Iranian oil irrespective of systematic disinformation in the Western media. Not only India is looking to find a creative way to insure its Iran oil imports, Indian officials have also gone public about their renewed interests in the "peace pipeline" connecting Iran and India through Pakistan, just as this author had predicted when the Iran-Pakistan pipeline got a new lease of life recently (see Afrasiabi,
Pakistan tests US will with Iran pipeline, Asia Times Online, March 13, 2013).
As a result, President Barack Obama can fire away as many veiled threats against Iran as he wishes. As far as Tehran is concerned following up on those threats is highly unlikely and one main reason is that the US administration is reasonably confident that Iran has no intention of crossing the "red line" to acquire nuclear weapons (any time soon). In fact, this lack of proliferation fear may be the real reason why the US and its allies toy with the Iran nuclear standoff and have rebuffed the Iranian overtures, including the following:
In June 2003, the Bush administration chose to completely disregard Tehran's initiative of offering a "global negotiation" that covered by Iran's nuclear program as well as its policies toward Israel.
In 2004, Iran agreed to a "confidence-building" suspension of enrichment activities and adopting the intrusive Additional Protocol, and, yet, the US refused to lift any of the unilateral sanctions on Iran and obstructed the European efforts to live up to their "firm commitments" to provide technical support to Iran as called for by the so-called "Paris Agreement;" in early 2006, US and UK joined hands to disregard an Iranian offer to extend the nuclear suspensions for another two year if the matter was not dispatched to the UN Security Council. [2]
In early 2008, after a successful completion of an Iran-International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Workplan that resolved all the six "outstanding questions" in Iran's favor after extensive inspections, again the Western powers prevented the implementation of that Workplan's call for the "routine" treatment of Iran's nuclear dossier, this time by the last minute manufacturing of hype about Iran's "military dimension" that were questioned by, among others, the former Director-General of IAEA, Dr Mohammad ElBaradei.
In May 2010, the White House rejected a nuclear deal brokered by Turkey and Brazil, which it had encouraged earlier, thus proving once again its preference for a "stalemate".
Unfortunately, there are plenty of indications that once again the US is letting another opportunity with Iran slip by, instead of making firm commitments to remove its sanctions in return for Iranian compromises, for example on 20% uranium enrichment and greater nuclear transparency. The big question is if Washington, grappling with the North Korea's "clear and present danger" can really afford this pattern of obstructing a reasonable endgame in the Iran nuclear crisis?
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For further biographical details, click here. Afrasiabi is author of Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) and Looking for Rights at Harvard. His latest book is UN Management Reform: Selected Articles and Interviews on United Nations CreateSpace (November 12, 2011).
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