Hard choices for Iran in 2010 By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
What will 2010 bring to the stalemated United States-Iran relations? Continuing
stalemate, a worsening relationship marked with greater sanctions and punitive
measures slated for the Islamic Republic of Iran or, on the other hand, a
gradual improvement and perhaps even some breakthrough on the nuclear front
occupying the center stage in the current diplomacy between the two nations?
Undoubtedly, these are important questions not only for the US and Iran, but
also for Iran's troubled neighbors, above all Iraq and Afghanistan, the entire
Middle East region and, indeed, the international community, all of which have
a vested interest in issues of war and peace raised by Iran's nuclear standoff.
As we approach 2010, in light of the United Nations Security
Council's decision to address the Iran nuclear issue in mid-January because of
Tehran's rejection of various council resolutions demanding a suspension of its
uranium-enrichment program, the prospect of tougher UN sanctions as well as
other unilateral and multilateral (ie, European Union) sanctions now weighs
heavy on the horizon.
In this scenario, Russia and China would go along with more UN sanctions, just
as they have in the past; more recently, they have also backed an International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolution that censured Iran over its second
enrichment facility near Qom. What will the new UN sanctions consist of?
No one at the UN secretariat in New York seems sure about the answer, and one
source tells this author that it will definitely fall short of what hawkish US
politicians and media pundits are pushing for, namely, sanctioning Iran's
petroleum product imports.
According to the UN source, who wishes to remain anonymous, the concern is that
if there are "too many teeth" in UN sanctions that would "hurt average
Iranians", it "may backfire".
This is a realistic concern, particularly since Iran has the solid backing of
many UN member states that are involved in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). A
NAM official in New York, also wishing to remain anonymous, tells this author
that the 118-member NAM has "supported Iran in blind faith" by accepting Iran's
declarations about its peaceful program and since Tehran is taking over the
leadership of NAM in 2012, it is vitally important for it to keep its promises
to the NAM community.
"If Tehran goes nuclear despite its pledges to NAM, then the whole movement
will lose face in the international community," said the source.
Therefore, Tehran's politicians should be careful to avoid any future headache
in terms of their standing in the NAM movement. With India having for all
purposes shed its NAM identity, member countries now look to Iran and a few
other countries for global leadership. After all, didn't the late French
philosopher, Michel Faucault, once describe the Iranian revolution as a "great
refusal" that aimed to remove the shackle "that bears heavy on all of us"?
The connection between Iran and NAM on the one hand and the nuclear standoff on
the other raises important questions about Iran's foreign policy orientation
that is geared less toward a regional role and more and more toward a global
role, so much so that according to a veteran Iranian diplomat, speaking on the
condition of anonymity, "Iran actually has no regional strategy, only a global
strategy." Astonishing as this may sound, there is a grain of truth about it,
reflected in the small but profound fact that nowadays President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad is seen spending more time touring Latin American capitals than
those in Iran's vicinity.
The Iranian diplomat relayed the story of how the late ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini rejected the request by his commanders to allow Iran's use of chemical
weapons in retaliation against the Iraqis who were using them on the Iran-Iraq
war fronts, insisting that Iran operated by higher standards, even if the price
was high.
So why is Iran concentrating its efforts globally when it should be - logically
speaking, based on its net contribution to the global economy - thinking
regionally? The Iranian diplomat said it's due to the dynamism of Iran's
historical revolution and the fact that Tehran has a long history of
empire-building. However, the Iranian diplomat was quick to elaborate that
Iran's intention was not join the "world empires" but rather to "transform the
world toward a more just order". In other words, it is an inherent logic of the
post-revolutionary state to resist the unjust global hierarchy and join other
nations seeking to restructure it along "equitable lines". Those lines cover
economic, political, military and geostrategic considerations, including
nuclear arms races and disarmament.
Concerning the latter, and contrary to all the Western and Israeli hype about
Iran's "nuclear ambitions", which often cite proliferation pressures in Iran's
neighborhood, a problem with such analyses is that they assume that Iran by
definition has a regional strategy or that it feels pressured by Pakistan and
Israel's nuclear-weapons moves.
For sure, the fact that two new nation-states, Pakistan and Israel, have bombs,
while the ancient Iran does not, does not sit well with some Iranians, who
argue that Iran requires a nuclear shield to defend against American and other
Western threats posed by their military presence in Iran's vicinity.
However, these arguments are not very compelling since (a) Iran feels very
little pressure by Pakistani proliferation that is entirely consumed by fear of
India and (b) Israel is "out of area" and focused on its Arab enemies, not
Iran, as a result of which an Iranian attempt to acquire nuclear weapons would
only engulf Iran deeper in the Arab-Israeli conflict, to the detriment of
Iran's national interests.
But, for a political system that has a generic globalist prism, the real
importance of Iran's "nuclear ambition" rests on the multiple effects it has on
the global nuclear arms race and the hitherto-absent disarmament, and this is
precisely where a "quasi-nuclear" Iranian power can make genuine contributions
to both the non-aligned movement in specific and global politics in general, by
frustrating all the hype and expectations about a "nuclear-armed Iran", simply
by using the leverage of this threat to highlight the importance of a concerted
global effort toward disarmament.
This would be tantamount to a delicate balancing act whereby Iran would no
longer act as a nation-state but a global leader at the front row of the
Non-Aligned Movement, pressuring the nuclear-weapons states to take serious and
drastic steps toward disarmament or face the prospect of more nuclear weapons
states.
In fulfilling this enormously difficult role, Iran would have to consistently
fall short of giving the West what it desperately needs, a full, 100% guarantee
about Iran's peaceful intentions. Yet, to provide this firm guarantee is
tantamount to depriving Iran, as well as NAM, of key leverage in the area of
total global disarmament. Rather, the trick is to thread the "politics of
borderlines" that would enable Iran to have a strong voice in the disarmament
debates, both individually and as a NAM spokesman, in international forums,
since Iran's status has now been elevated to "nuclear capable”.
"Think of the beauty of it - if Iran disappoints all these talks about going
nuclear and stops itself at the door and then knocks on the door of big powers
and says 'shall we make a deal on disarmament or shall I join your club'?" said
the NAM official cited above.
Assuming for a moment that Iran would follow this scenario, it may gain greater
prestige and respect worldwide then by actually going full nuclear, in contrast
to countries such as India that have acquired the bomb in large measure in the
name of "regional status and prestige". In turn, this would require a
disciplined approach to Iran's foreign policy orientation and the Foucauldian
logic of state-making mentioned above, instead of falling prey to the traps of
regional "power projection”.
Simultaneously, Iran's national security concerns would have to be fully
addressed in this noble pursuit that runs the risk of appearing "esoteric" and
even "idealistic", to paraphrase the Iranian diplomat mentioned above. In other
words, only a balanced approach that is organically connected to a "more
powerful regional approach based on conventional power and diplomacy" in order
to lessen Iran's national security concerns could work here, otherwise the
global dimension would "sooner or later be sacrificed by the vacuum of regional
consideration".
But, can it be that this is all an academic exercise and Iran is just another
ordinary nation-state out to maximize its power through whatever means? This
author has posed this question to a number of Iranian diplomats and foreign
policy analysts and has received a mixed response, some going as far as
dismissing any suggestion that Iran with its meager role in the global economy
can be legitimately called a "global power".
Others have defended this adjective by pointing at Iran's "spheres of
influence" and its active role in the Developing-8 group, in the Organization
of the Islamic Conference, its observer status at the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization and its NAM membership as evidence of the country's international
dimension, with some pundits insisting that Iran is a "third world vanguard
state".
A vanguard in the disarmament movement that operates by raising the red flag of
nuclear proliferation if the big powers fail to heed their nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty commitments - this is, indeed, how Iran may
increasingly come out in the near future; in other words, a proto-nuclear
weapon state that is perpetually playing the "game changing" role of a
proto-nuclear power based on its latent capability, destined to play a global
leadership role.
Unfortunately, the proponents of a "grand bargain", such as US foreign policy
analyst, Flynt Leverett, completely miss the point about Iran's international
ambitions and orientations, proposing a near simultaneous resolution of all the
outstanding issues between the US and Iran, without presenting any clue as to
how Iran actually perceives itself in terms of world affairs and its long-term
strategic outlook. Such serious omissions in studying Iran and its foreign
behavior are quite clearly unhelpful in addressing the US-Iran stalemate.
But once a proper reading of Iran's foreign policy and its global ambitions is
managed by US policymakers, then the latter may soon discover a potentially
rich area of convergence that is hitherto unknown, that is, the potential
synergy between US President Barack Obama's disarmament vision and that of
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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