Warning to Iran

THE FOREIGN ministers of Britain, France, and Germany gave the Iranian regime a much-needed reality check last week when they signed a letter warning Iran that it will be arraigned before the United Nations Security Council if it carries out a threat to resume enrichment of uranium after a six-month hiatus. Iran's threat was intended either to elicit a better package of rewards for an agreement to forswear uranium enrichment or to force the Euro-3 to give in to Iran's demand to be permitted to go on enriching uranium.

ADVERTISEMENT

The letter's firm stand is a good thing for the trans-Atlantic alliance, fulfilling Europe's part of a bargain that persuaded the Bush administration to back negotiations with Tehran. And it also instructs President Bush on the necessity of mixing diplomatic engagement with a credible threat of punishment. In addition, the letter can help show Iranian policymakers that their true interest does not lie in a heedless pursuit of nuclear weapons.

If Iran's threat to resume enriching uranium was connected to that country's presidential election next month -- as part of a scheme to show that Iranians need former president Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani once again as a shrewd deal-maker -- the conclusion can only be that Tehran must not rashly break off the negotiations with the Europeans. This is indeed Rafsanjani's public position.

Implicitly, the letter demonstrated that the Euro-3 are inseparable from the Americans on a key demand: that the end-point of any negotiation must be a verifiable Iranian commitment not to create the fissile material for nuclear weapons, either by enriching uranium or by processing plutonium.

Bush and the Iranians both need to draw the right conclusions from this demonstration of European seriousness. If the Iranians have to accept that they will not be allowed to progress up to the point of being able to make a nuclear weapon, Bush has to become a player in the negotiating process. That means finding out what Iran's real terms might be for abjuring nuclear weapons and deciding if the United States is willing to meet those terms.

As a key part of this search for a diplomatic way to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, the Iranian decision makers have to be made to understand that they will be less, not more, secure if they go nuclear. For they would then provoke one of two developments they should most want to avoid: either their neighbors in the region will follow them into the nuclear club, or the United States will be invited to participate in muscular security arrangements with Iraq, Turkey, the Gulf monarchies, and Jordan. It is as much in Iran's interest not to acquire nuclear weapons as it is in America's interest to keep Iran free of those ultimate terror weapons.