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The Next Steps With Iran
Negotiations Must Go Beyond the Nuclear
Threat to Broader Issues
By Henry A. Kissinger
Monday, July 31, 2006; washingtonpost
The world's attention is
focused on the fighting in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, but the context
leads inevitably back to Iran. Unfortunately, the diplomacy dealing with
that issue is constantly outstripped by events. While explosives are
raining on Lebanese and Israeli towns and Israel reclaims portions of
Gaza, the proposal to Iran in May by the so-called Six (the United States,
Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China) for negotiations on its
nuclear weapons program still awaits an answer. It's possible that Tehran
reads the almost pleading tone of some communications addressed to it as a
sign of weakness and irresolution. Or perhaps the violence in Lebanon has
produced second thoughts among the mullahs about the risks of courting and
triggering crisis.
However the tea leaves are read, the current Near Eastern upheaval could
become a turning point. Iran may come to appreciate the law of unintended
consequences. For their part, the Six can no longer avoid dealing with the
twin challenges that Iran poses. On the one hand, the quest for nuclear
weapons represents Iran's reach for modernity via the power symbol of the
modern state; at the same time, this claim is put forward by a fervent
kind of religious extremism that has kept the Muslim Middle East
unmodernized for centuries. This conundrum can be solved without conflict
only if Iran adopts a modernism consistent with international order and a
view of Islam compatible with peaceful coexistence.
Heretofore the Six have
been vague about their response to an Iranian refusal to negotiate, except
for unspecific threats of sanctions through the United Nations Security
Council. But if a deadlock between strained forbearance by the Six and
taunting invective from the Iranian president leads to de facto
acquiescence in the Iranian nuclear program, prospects for multilateral
international order will dim everywhere. If the permanent members of the
Security Council plus Germany are unable jointly to achieve goals to which
they have publicly committed themselves, every country, especially those
composing the Six, will face growing threats, be they increased domestic
pressure from radical Islamic groups, terrorist acts or the nearly
inevitable conflagrations sparked by the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction.
The analogy of such a disaster is not Munich, when the democracies yielded
the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, but the response
when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. At Munich, the democracies thought that
Hitler's demands were essentially justified by the principle of
self-determination; they were repelled mostly by his methods. In the
Abyssinian crisis, the nature of the challenge was uncontested. By a vast
majority, the League of Nations voted to treat the Italian adventure as
aggression and to impose sanctions. But they recoiled before the
consequences of their insight and rejected an oil embargo, which Italy
would have been unable to overcome. The league never recovered from that
debacle. If the six-nation forums dealing with Iran and North Korea suffer
comparable failures, the consequence will be a world of unchecked
proliferation, not controlled by either governing principles or
functioning institutions.
A modern, strong, peaceful Iran could become a pillar of stability and
progress in the region. This cannot happen unless Iran's leaders decide
whether they are representing a cause or a nation -- whether their basic
motivation is crusading or international cooperation. The goal of the
diplomacy of the Six should be to oblige Iran to confront this choice.
Diplomacy never operates in a vacuum. It persuades not by the eloquence of
its practitioners but by assembling a balance of incentives and risks.
Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is a continuation of diplomacy by
other means defines both the challenge and the limits of diplomacy. War
can impose submission; diplomacy needs to evoke consensus. Military
success enables the victor in war to prescribe, at least for an interim
period. Diplomatic success occurs when the principal parties are
substantially satisfied; it creates -- or should strive to create --
common purposes, at least regarding the subject matter of the negotiation;
otherwise no agreement lasts very long. The risk of war lies in exceeding
objective limits; the bane of diplomacy is to substitute process for
purpose. Diplomacy should not be confused with glibness. It is not an
oratorical but a conceptual exercise. When it postures for domestic
audiences, radical challenges are encouraged rather than overcome.
It is often asserted that what is needed in relation to Iran is a
diplomacy comparable to that which, in the 1970s, moved China from
hostility to cooperation with the United States. But China was not
persuaded by skillful diplomacy to enter this process. Rather, China was
brought, by a decade of escalating conflict with the Soviet Union, to a
conviction that the threat to its security came less from capitalist
America than from the growing concentration of Soviet forces on its
northern borders. Clashes of Soviet and Chinese military forces along the
Ussuri River accelerated Beijing's retreat from the Soviet alliance.
The contribution of American diplomacy was to understand the significance
of these events and to act on that knowledge. The Nixon administration did
not convince China that it needed to change its priorities. Its role was
to convince China that implementing its strategic necessities was safe and
would enhance China's long-term prospects. It did so by concentrating the
diplomatic dialogue on fundamental geopolitical objectives, while keeping
some contentious items in abeyance. The Shanghai Communique of 1972, the
first Sino-U.S. communique, symbolized this process. Contrary to
established usage, it listed a series of continuing disagreements as a
prelude to the key common objective of preventing hegemonic aspirations of
unnamed third parties -- clearly implying the Soviet Union.
The challenge of the Iranian negotiation is far more complex. For two
years before the opening to China, the two sides had engaged in subtle,
reciprocal, symbolic and diplomatic actions to convey their intentions. In
the process, they had tacitly achieved a parallel understanding of the
international situation, and China opted for seeking to live in a
cooperative world.
Nothing like that has occurred between Iran and the United States. There
is not even an approximation of a comparable world view. Iran has reacted
to the American offer to enter negotiations with taunts, and has inflamed
tensions in the region. Even if the Hezbollah raids from Lebanon into
Israel and the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers were not planned in Tehran,
they would not have occurred had their perpetrators thought them
inconsistent with Iranian strategy. In short, Iran has not yet made the
choice of the world it seeks -- or it has made the wrong choice from the
point of view of international stability. The crisis in Lebanon could mark
a watershed if it confers a sense of urgency to the diplomacy of the Six
and a note of realism to the attitudes in Tehran.
Up to now Iran has been playing for time. The mullahs apparently seek to
accumulate as much nuclear capability as possible so that, even were they
to suspend enrichment, they would be in a position to use the threat of
resuming their weapons effort as a means to enhance their clout in the
region.
Given the pace of
technology, patience can easily turn into evasion. The Six will have to
decide how serious they will be in insisting on their convictions.
Specifically, the Six will have to be prepared to act decisively before
the process of technology makes the objective of stopping uranium
enrichment irrelevant. Well before that point is reached, sanctions will
have to be agreed on. To be effective, they must be comprehensive;
halfhearted, symbolic measures combine the disadvantage of every course of
action. Interallied consultations must avoid the hesitation that the
League of Nations conveyed over Abyssinia. We must learn from the North
Korean negotiations not to engage in a process involving long pauses to
settle disagreements within the administration and within the negotiating
group, while the other side adds to its nuclear potential. There is equal
need, on the part of America's partners, for decisions permitting them to
pursue a parallel course.
A suspension of enrichment of uranium should not be the end of the
process. A next step should be the elaboration of a global system of
nuclear enrichment to take place in designated centers around the world
under international control -- as proposed for Iran by Russia. This would
ease implications of discrimination against Iran and establish a pattern
for the development of nuclear energy without a crisis with each entrant
into the nuclear field.
President Bush has announced America's willingness to participate in the
discussions of the Six with Iran to prevent emergence of an Iranian
nuclear weapons program. But it will not be possible to draw a line
between nuclear negotiations and a comprehensive review of Iran's overall
relations to the rest of the world.
The legacy of the hostage crisis, the decades of isolation and the
messianic aspect of the Iranian regime represent huge obstacles to such a
diplomacy. If Tehran insists on combining the Persian imperial tradition
with contemporary Islamic fervor, then a collision with America -- and,
indeed, with its negotiating partners of the Six -- is unavoidable. Iran
simply cannot be permitted to fulfill a dream of imperial rule in a region
of such importance to the rest of the world.
At the same time, an Iran concentrating on the development of the talents
of its people and the resources of its country should have nothing to fear
from the United States. Hard as it is to imagine that Iran, under its
present president, will participate in an effort that would require it to
abandon its terrorist activities or its support for such instruments as
Hezbollah, the recognition of this fact should emerge from the process of
negotiation rather than being the basis for a refusal to negotiate. Such
an approach would imply the redefinition of the objective of regime
change, providing an opportunity for a genuine change in direction by
Iran, whoever is in power.
It is important to express such a policy in precise objectives capable of
transparent verification. A geopolitical dialogue is not a substitute for
an early solution of the nuclear enrichment crisis. That must be addressed
separately, rapidly and firmly. But a great deal depends on whether a
strong stand on that issue is understood as the first step in the broader
invitation to Iran to return to the wider world.
In the end, the United States must be prepared to vindicate its efforts to
prevent an Iranian nuclear weapons program. For that reason, America has
an obligation to explore every honorable alternative.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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