By Philip Stephens
Published: September 17 2009 23:06
The west has spent the past several years in an effort to bid up the price Iran must pay for the pursuit of its nuclear programme. The sanctions strategy is running out of road. The time has come to change the argument, turning a threat into an offer. Unless the US and Europe want to join Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government on a shortening path to war, they should set out what Iran would gain from lifting its pariah status.
This would not be the volte-face it might seem. In theory, the west’s approach has always included a carrot as well as a stick. The incentives were set out in a United Nations resolution three years ago. The offer was expanded in June 2008 in a letter signed by the foreign ministers of the so-called European Union 3+3 (The UK, France, Germany, the US, China and Russia).
Since then it has gathered dust in cyberspace – posted on the websites of various foreign ministries, but largely overlooked in the diplomatic discourse. Those engaged in the negotiations will recite from memory the list of sanctions already imposed on the Tehran regime. They are more likely to stumble in the effort to list the incentives.
Barack Obama has reversed the previous US administration’s refusal to participate in negotiations with Iran. A senior US diplomat will join the Europeans, Chinese and Russians in talks with Iranian officials early next month. The US president has also said he is ready to rebuild a bilateral relationship; the hand remains outstretched in spite of the repression that followed this summer’s Iranian elections.
It is time to go further. Mr Obama needs to recast the west’s offer in terms simple enough to be understood by every Iranian and comprehensive enough to remove ambiguity in the west’s intentions.
Such a thought elicits noisy tut-tuts from those who see the election fraud and subsequent violence as cause to further isolate Iran. Engaging with Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, they argue, would “legitimise” an indisputably noxious government. They are right that it would be distasteful, but the risks of the nuclear stand-off are too serious to be derailed by diplomatic posturing. Isolation would play to Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s favourite narrative of a western plot to humiliate Iran.
As to whether the elections have strengthened or weakened pressure on the Iranian president to negotiate, candid western diplomats admit they do not really know. On the one hand, the economy is in dire straits; that could nudge him towards negotiations. On the other, support for a nuclear programme – the peaceful part at least – bridges all the internal political divides.
The release of previously classified US documents detailing Washington’s relations with the then Shah during the 1970s, provides a timely reminder that the ayatollahs were not the first to insist on Iran’s right to nuclear technology. Five years before the 1979 revolution, when the Shah wanted to buy nuclear reactors from the US, he stressed that Iran had an “inalienable right” to full control of the nuclear cycle.
In Washington, the Ford and Carter administrations feared the Shah wanted a military capability – he had said as much after India tested a bomb in 1974. They insisted that a reactor sale be accompanied by safeguards against proliferation. But the declassified papers assembled by the Washington-based National Security Archive show that the US was willing to take risks in support of its broader strategic partnership with the Shah.
The striking thing is the similarity between then and now in the language used by officials in Tehran. Iran, the Shah’s negotiators said, would not accept infringements of its “sovereign” rights. In particular, it would not accept new obligations “dictated by the nuclear-have nations”. It sometimes seems Mr Ahmadi-Nejad is reading from the Shah’s negotiating brief.
Sanctions have not worked in slowing the nuclear programme, even if western intelligence services differ on just how far Iran has got. Where should we draw the line anyway? Is it the acquisition of sufficient uranium to build a bomb; or perfection of the technology required to put the material on the end of a missile?
For all this, foreign ministers of the six are due to explore additional sanctions when they meet in New York next week. Expectations are low. The Russians do not want further punitive measures by the UN. The Chinese hide in Moscow’s slipstream. That leaves it to the US and European Union to tighten the economic screws.
This is the agenda Mr Obama should put to one side – at least for the time being. It should be replaced by a package of political and economic incentives, reframed to strip out the diplomatic gobbledegook, cautions and caveats of the June 2008 document.
The first paragraph of a new offer would state that the international community respects Iran’s right to mastery of the nuclear cycle as long as Tehran fully accepts the safeguard arrangements in the NPT and its additional protocols. The second would spell out unequivocally that the US is not seeking regime change in Tehran and is ready to broker regional arrangements that acknowledge Iran’s weight and guarantee its security. The third would set the objective of a full normalisation of economic and trade relations, contingent on the withdrawal of Iranian support for regional terrorism.
A European diplomat scolded me the other day for being naïve. The Iranians, he said, would take what was offered and continue to strive for a nuclear capability, if not for the bomb itself. At best, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad would play for time. This diplomat friend may be right; and yet, when pressed, he was equally unconvinced that more sanctions would do the trick. In this trial of strength, he conceded, Iran would not back down.
So the unpleasant choice comes down to one between a sanctions-led fatalism that leads inexorably to a reckless, Israeli-inspired attack on Iran’s nuclear installations, and a fresh attempt at engagement. No, I am not optimistic the incentives will work. The odds are that an Iranian regime of any colour would seek a “break-out” capability: the option of building a bomb if they want to. But what is to be lost by trying? And when the loudest critics of less-threatening diplomacy are Israeli hawks and Arab despots, might there not be something going for it?
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.
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