Nuclear poker with Iran
THE EFFORT to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapons capability has reached a crisis point. The United Nations Security Council deadline for Iran to cease enriching uranium and return to negotiations passed Wednesday without Iranian compliance. And yesterday the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran has been expanding rather than suspending uranium enrichment while refusing to answer crucial questions about its nuclear program.
Despite the missed deadlines and defied ultimatums, there are heartening signs that the crisis over Iran's nuclear program may be resolved through peaceful negotiation. Achieving such a resolution will require a combination of firmness, patience, and supple statecraft.
Those qualities have not been apparent in the ranting of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or the folly of President Bush's rhetorical invention of an "axis of evil." But lately there have been indications that more sober spirits may be prevailing in the constant arguments between pragmatists and hard-liners in Tehran and Washington.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice emerged from a meeting yesterday in Berlin with the foreign ministers of Russia, Germany, and the European Union to say they had agreed to "use available channels and the Security Council" to encourage Iran to return to the bargaining table. And top Iranian officials have professed a willingness to explore diplomatic solutions.
Certain hard realities stand behind these hints of a quest for compromise. Because Iran subsidizes domestic energy use to the tune of $40 billion a year -- or a quarter of that country's entire economic output -- and because its oil infrastructure is desperately in need of capital investment and technology from abroad, the Islamic Republic could have no oil available for export within a decade.
Lacking refinery capacity and needing to import gasoline, Iran has already been hit hard by the mildest of UN sanctions, combined with declining oil prices and US financial restrictions. Notwithstanding Ahmadinejad's bluster, Iran's powerful merchant class abhors the specter of harsher Security Council sanctions being imposed on Iran for its refusal to comply with IAEA requirements.
At the same time, Bush's strategic blunders have left him without any realistic military option against Iran -- even if some hard-liners might want to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities.
This symmetry of vulnerabilities can be a good thing if it leads to adoption of one of the ingenious compromises that have been proposed -- permitting Iran to develop peaceful nuclear energy, as it is entitled to do under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but without having access to the highly enriched uranium needed for nuclear weapons.
