U.S. Policies toward Tehran: Redefining Counterproliferation for the Twenty-First Century
Quicktabs: Citation
Up to this point, the United States has applied a military- and sanctions- focused counterproliferation approach toward all regions of the world based upon a mix of deterrence, coercive diplomacy, unilateral and multilateral financial and trade instruments, global military superiority, and the pre ventive or preemptive use of military force. This broad strategy is based on a distinctly American, Wilsonian, liberal internationalist ethos, including heavy rhetorical and moral reliance on the global Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT. Under this treaty, US sanctions and diplomatic threats tend to be “zero sum” in that they are now asking Iranian leaders essentially to submit to Western demands for zero enrichment on Iranian soil or face potentially crippling sanctions against both the Revolutionary Guards and Iran’s imports of processed gasoline for its citizens.9
Overall, non-Western developing nations and rising powers (beyond Iran’s own Arab Gulf neighbors) are demonstratively not moved by US arguments saying that Iran is an unrepentant rogue or militarized state, both domestically and internationally, that must be treated like a pariah and to tally isolated. Strategic competitors to the United States and various other rising powers—including India, Russia, China, and even US allies Turkey and South Korea—have burgeoning energy, defense, and diplomatic ties to Iran.23 These powers all interpret the NPT to mean that Iran does have a right to enrichment. Their problem is rather in the area of Iranian trans parency and intentions. For instance, the United States can expect Turkey and Brazil to continue to play a classic “nonaligned” role as cultural and political mediators between East and West, North and South, essentially giving a less ideological face to programs and demands already made by the P-5, such as compromise proposals by Russia. They will continue to capitalize on the inherent political capital built up as part of their own grand strategic foreign policies of “zero problems with other countries.”24 Additionally, Brazil has innate political capital with Iran because of the tortured history of its own illicit nuclear program in the 1970–80s.25
India, for its part, will continue to be “tactically tough” on short-term votes by the IAEA board of governors (of which India is a member) against Iran’s continuing opacity on supplying data, albeit just enough to ensure continuing smooth strategic relations with the United States. However, it will also continue to cooperate with Iran on building oil and gas pipelines on Iranian territory to get badly needed fuels to India’s economy as well as modernizing Iranian energy transportation infrastructure, possibly even making Iran an energy transportation hub linking Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East through new ports and railroads. It may in fact do the latter in cooperation with Russia and China. Further, India can be expected to support Iran in niche areas of conventional defense technologies and weaponry (e.g., India recently supplied better fuel bat teries to Iran’s Russian-made submarines, as well as servicing its naval and air force equipment). It will also continue pursuing strong cultural ties that emphasize commonalities between Iran’s Shia culture and India’s own burgeoning Shiite population.26
Meanwhile, Russia will continue to use the P-5 diplomatic process (in side and outside the UN) to push forth compromise proposals that in volve enriching and/or storing fuel on Russian soil as a way to give Iran a symbolic claim to autonomy but also giving the West what it wants on nonproliferation. As part of such a strategy, it will still oppose tougher, “crippling” sanctions toward Iran in the P-5 diplomatic process as part of a larger position that honestly does not consider a heavily monitored, conditioned enrichment program to be a strategic threat (i.e., Russia will continue acting on its analysis that “zero enrichment” is not feasible and, in terms of curtailing threats, is not even needed). More expansively, in terms of geopolitics beyond the nuclear portfolio, Russia can be expected to continue to curtail US and NATO geopolitical and geostrategic influence by cooperating with Iran (as well as China) on Caspian Sea, Central Asian, Caucasus, and South Asian issues. It will undoubtedly increase strong bilateral trade links with Tehran, providing Iran with consumer goods, foodstuffs, and oil and gas equipment as well as assistance on infra structural projects. In the Gulf conventional military context, it will keep supplying important niche military defense capabilities such as ballistic missile technology and contracts for a range of jet fighters, helicopters, submarines, tanks, and air-defense missile systems to Iran. Finally, the delays caused by Stuxnet aside, Russia will help run, maintain, and service the Bushehr nuclear power reactor as a part of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure that does not pose the most serious danger of weaponization, including supply of needed feedstock.27
Further, the US approach ignores the fact that moderate factions have entrenched views about Iran’s idealized security role in the Gulf, albeit without the religious element added into the mix. Even secular nationalists and reform-minded globalizers tend to believe or argue that Iran is the “natural” or “organic” pillar of Gulf security, or that Iran is the sovereign country most ideally placed to provide for “indigenous” Gulf security. Thus, many Iranians of all ideological stripes will continue to believe that Iran has a special place in providing the public good of security in the Persian Gulf, which means that these Persian nationalist views will have to be massaged and managed no matter which regime is in charge. Indeed, the most ardent nationalists (whether religious or secular) are dead set on keeping the three islands of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs, a claim of historical and legal ownership that remains hotly disputed by the UAE. There is no significant Iranian faction that doubts the necessity of keeping these islands under firm Iranian military occupation and control.34 Implicitly, therefore, if not explicitly, Iranian leaders (with nationalistic support from citizens) presume a right to have at least some say in conventional military control of the Strait of Hormuz.35 However, there are indeed perceptual and value-based attitudes among the current elites that are traceable to the specific experiences and ideology of the Islamic Republic as its own unique regime. Beyond widespread and diffuse Persian nationalism, it is important to keep in mind that Iran is equally motivated by concerns of regime preservation against perceived external socioeconomic, ideological, and military threats. Additionally, this particular regime is motivated by a desire for religious influence throughout the region, both international and transnational.36
Yes, Iran funds and equips anti-Israeli terror groups.46 But if Hamas or Hezbollah were to use nuclear weapons, they would obliterate themselves and their own homeland. Other than raising money abroad, these groups are tied to local concerns in their neighborhoods—neither group is a credible candidate for attacks against New York or Los Angeles. Hezbollah exists largely to serve its own Shiite citizens in Southern Lebanon, a large ethno religious demographic that is not represented by the minority Sunni and Christian order that controls most wealth and government programs in Beirut—itself a result of unjust, legacy colonial institutions left in place by the French after World War II. Of course, Hezbollah is not content with this domestic mission; it also views violent opposition to Israel as a part of its founding identity, and it is currently aiding fellow Shiite brethren in Iraq, both socially and militarily. Meanwhile, Hamas exists to oppose Israeli actions in the West Bank and Gaza through terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens as well as providing social services and political represen tation to portions of the Palestinian populace. But despite such extreme behaviors toward Israel, neither group truly wants to strike American soil; neither is opposed to globalization per se, as is the case with Sunni fundamentalist groups such as al-Qaeda; and neither would even know what to do with a working nuclear weapon (again, unlike al-Qaeda).
With this in mind, a new approach would involve a thorough, upfront construction of a fully fledged US deterrent and containment military posture, certainly requiring explicit forward planning by CENTCOM and others at the concrete operational-tactical levels.78 It would mean a move away from the de facto approach seen so far in which a deterrent policy is only latent in US security assurances toward individual Arab states.79 Deterrence and containment should instead be announced as the explicit grand-policy option for the Gulf region under which security assurances with Gulf Arabs, and toward Israel, would continue. For this approach to be truly sustainable politically, US leaders and the US national security establishment as a whole would have to adopt a revised US threat perception, decisively dropping the popular but empirically dubious assump tion that Iran’s primary intent is to put mushroom clouds over Tel Aviv and Washington as part of an irrational, messianic, and even suicidal approach to foreign policy. However, we are not just talking about changes in US per ceptions and practices. Under the umbrella of deterrence and containment provided by the US military, this approach would require that diplomacy by non-Western rising powers be done strategically and carefully, not ad-hoc, to ensure ever-greater IAEA access and confidence in its findings.80 Thus, while accepting a certain amount of nuclear opacity upfront in the process with Iran, it should be the goal of the United States, its allies, rising powers, and the IAEA to make Iranian activities less opaque over time.
In particular, a truly new approach would enlist several G20 rising powers with past or current sensitive nuclear histories, such as South Africa, India, and Brazil, to work directly with Iran to construct genuinely new technical and political schemes for materials storage and verification, at the same time gradually opening the door to multilateral negotiations on other sensitive regional security concerns. Turkey should also be centrally involved due to its interesting and increasingly complex status as a regional neighbor of both Iran and Europe, a G20 power, a globalizing and rising economy, and a recent reputation for blazing its own path in foreign policy in ways that have gone against traditional North Atlantic security concerns. Meanwhile, on the military front, US forward deployments on Arab soil would continue, albeit geared toward the long-haul task of deterrence of Iranian weaponization rather than achieving the purist goal of nuclear rollback in Tehran.
To arrive at this new framework of multilateral verification and control, the US strategic switch would gradually hand over substantial diplomatic heavy lifting and bargaining responsibilities to myriad influential rising powers such as South Africa, Turkey, Brazil, and India, albeit with con stant, close interactions and norms of common consent behind the scenes between these powers and the IAEA, the United Nations, and the P-5+1. This hand-off is necessary due to Iranian beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions that are innately distrustful of, and hostile toward, the West as a whole. Essentially, non-Western rising powers would be used as grand strategic mediators in new diplomatic processes that together firmly commit Iran to nuclear transparency and multilateral involvement in its nuclear pro grams. The final outcome of this grand strategic switch would ideally be explicit international involvement by non-Western powers and the IAEA in new storage, monitoring, and handling options for Iran’s most-sensitive nuclear materials, ideally involving transnational storage of LEU, repatriation of spent fuel from reactors, and strict limits on the amount of 20-percent LEU that could be produced for research purposes. Once this process is underway, the United States should ultimately allow past nascent deals with Western multinational corporations to proceed, especially in areas having to do with modernizing Iran’s deteriorating oil and gas extraction, processing, and storage infrastructure. Eventually, this new diplomatic process could perhaps even produce an internationalized nuclear consor tium on Iranian soil with international scientific and technical personnel working alongside Iranian cohorts on a continuous basis, a policy option already proffered in broad terms by some conservative Iranian political elites themselves in internal political debates as a solution that meets Iranian strategic cultural concerns of independence, sovereignty, and autonomy while making illicit diversion of materials for further enrich ment to weapons-grade levels via batch recycling extremely difficult.
In the end, Iran is likely to follow the path of a latent weapons power, purposefully not constructing an explicit, fully weaponized arsenal, but rather cultivating and maintaining a hedged nuclear weapons infrastructure, much like India did from 1958 to 1998 or like Northeast Asian powers such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have done on and off at various times since the 1970s (e.g., via some mix of enrichment, reprocessing, and missile capabilities). Again, as already shown, this gray-area option historically has been the path most embraced by would-be proliferators who have felt themselves in dire security straits, from South Africa to South Asia to Northeast Asia, because it gives both the security benefit domestically and internationally of having a nuclear program without incurring the global opprobrium of clearly breaking the rules of the NPT.67 Staying within the legal limits of the allowed enrichment of materials indefinitely could create an atmosphere of constructive ambiguity that would provide Iran with international deterrent value, nationalist ideological value (in terms of revolutionary credentials at home and abroad), and a general sense of safety from acute, existential security concerns harbored by the regime. Finally, nuclear opacity would guarantee the continued flow of some im portant conventional weapons capabilities to Tehran from powers such as India, Russia, and China.
Why do such distinctions matter? If Iran’s nuclear and anti-Israeli policies are equated with the global terrorist threats of radical Sunni groups such as al-Qaeda, then US bargaining with Iran over its policies will remain impossible. US threat conflation creates a world in which the only viable US policy option toward Iran is eventual precision military strikes against nuclear facilities, should sanctions ultimately fail to reverse all of Iran’s previous decisions to build up nuclear infrastructure. US military strikes would, in turn, cause an escalation of tensions throughout the region. Iran would work even harder to strengthen the most militant elements of anti-Israeli groups, doing all it could to undermine an Israeli-Palestinian peace. Arab citizens, already disillusioned by the US invasion of Iraq, and now galvanized by a wave of revolutionary movements across Northern Africa, the Levant, and the Gulf, would react to the US use of mili tary force negatively—perhaps even violently—across the Middle East. Further, preventive military strikes with a counterproliferation mission would promise strong retaliation by Iran through missile strikes on Arab neighbors, blocking of Gulf shipping, and paramilitary retaliation via all arms of the Revolutionary Guards, including in Gaza and Lebanon. Brutal repression against the Iranian domestic populace itself would certainly increase.47
Pages
Terms of Use — Privacy Policy