Looks like Iran will have to get nuclear stuff from North Korea. Or Syria. Or Venezuela. Or Bolivia. Or Pakistan.| Not Syria. Israel took care of that a few years ago. |
The goal of American policy right now is to slow down the clock--that is, to stretch out the time Iran needs to become nuclear-arms capable. The hope is to buy time to give other kinds of pressure a better chance to work before military options move to the fore.
That's why the current foot-dragging in adopting new economic sanctions at the United Nations Security Council is so troublesome. In an ideal world, and in the Obama administration's original vision, a U.N. resolution imposing new economic penalties would have been passed two months ago.
In an ideal world Iran wouldn't be a problem.
So now, here's where things are headed: American officials say they hope a U.N. resolution will pass in the next few weeks. That would clear the way for step two, in which the U.S. and its European allies, with some help from Japan, would layer on additional sanctions of their own with more bite, clamping down on Iran's access to the international financial system and squeezing its Revolutionary Guards, the real power behind Iran's nuclear program.
Getting this economic squeeze in place is crucial. The hope is that when Iran's leaders see that economic pressure has moved from possibility to reality, they will return to negotiations over their nuclear program, which they contend is for producing energy, not weapons.
Keep hoping, Barack. Hoping for Change.
It's worth pausing here to note that having a credible military threat on the table is useful for both prongs of this strategy--getting biting sanctions, as well as getting Iran to take its predicament seriously. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while feuding with the Obama administration on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, is extremely useful on this front.
Credible? Barack, they're dissing you left and right and are getting away with it. They won't believe you until after they're dead.
Already, informed sources say, the U.S. has essentially said to the recalcitrant Chinese: "Look, you'd better cooperate on sanctions, because if we don't do something, Netanyahu is just crazy enough to attack Iran." And if there's a silver lining to the military exercises Iran just launched, it's that they suggest Tehran is taking the military threat seriously.
If these combined pressures compel Iran's leaders back into negotiations, the goal would be to revive the kind of nuclear-swap deal Iran agreed to, then backed away from, last fall. Under that agreement, Iran was to ship about half of the low-enriched uranium it has accumulated to Russia and France for reprocessing into fuel for a nuclear reactor in Tehran.
The beauty of that deal was that, by taking potential nuclear-weapons material out of Iran's hands and turning it into something else, the world would know with confidence that it had slowed down Iran's march toward nuclear-weapons capability by a year or so. That would, in the words of one senior Obama administration official, "shift the timetable to the right," extending the time available to find a longer-term solution.
That breather would be crucial on several fronts. First, the U.S. would buy more time to build a real regional security arrangement under which it would help strengthen the defenses of friendly Persian Gulf states and work out a plan for a joint response to Iranian provocations. More time also would allow the U.S. to move ahead in building a defense system to knock out Iranian missiles that could carry nuclear warheads.
It's possible that the combination of a regional defense plan and a real American missile-defense shield would signal to Iran that acquiring nuclear arms wouldn't give it the power to intimidate its neighbors that it might envision, and help convince Tehran that developing nuclear weapons isn't worth the economic pain the world can inflict.
And if that doesn't work, slowing down the nuclear program would at least create more time to determine whether opposition forces within Iran have any hope of threatening the regime.
There's at least some reason to hope new pressure might pull Iran back into negotiations. U.S. officials suspect that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for all his bluster, actually wanted to do the nuclear-swap deal last fall, but was stopped by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
And in recent days, Iranian officials have been floating an alternative to last fall's deal, indicating they want to talk to other nations about it, perhaps at a meeting on nonproliferation in New York next month.
Meanwhile, though, nuclear centrifuges in Iran continue to spin out enriched uranium. Iran's ultimate goal may well be to leave the outside world paralyzed in a state of suspended animation by demonstrating it has developed the ability and material to make nuclear arms, while stopping just short of making the weapons themselves.
Even that nebulous outcome would compel the world to ponder two far less appealing options. One would be that military strike.
The second would be to accept that Iran has become a nuclear-capable state, and adopt a strategy of containing it while using economic pressure--perhaps even an economic blockade--to force a reversal or to bring down the regime. That's essentially what the West did to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It did, however, take 50 years.