While all eyes focus on Afghanistan, the situation with Iran is spiraling out of control.
Iran failed to accept a tentative deal signed in Vienna last month to send most of its current stockpile of low-enriched uranium abroad – and Secretary of State Clinton announced that the deal could not be changed.
Then Iran refused to stop work on its newly-declared enrichment facility near Qom. The West responded last week by pushing through an IAEA Board Resolution reprimanding Iran for that refusal. An infuriated Iran retaliated by announcing last Sunday that not only will it continue work at Qom, Iran plans to build ten new enrichment facilities.
Last May, President Obama said he would assess “by the end of the year” whether talks are moving in the right direction. Right now, they clearly are moving in the wrong direction, yet the New Year will dawn with no good options for the West. Sanctions will fail, war will make things far worse, and choosing between sanctions and war is a lose-lose proposition.
A couple weeks ago, I blogged on the promising efforts of outgoing IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei to find a long-term solution to the nuclear stand-off between Iran and the West. Unfortunately, hopes for a long-term settlement are receding in a fog of passions aroused by conflict over two short-term issues that ought to be solvable. A foreign policy fiasco is shaping up that doesn't need to happen.
How to get negotiations back on track? Let’s begin by taking another look at the moribund stockpile deal that was supposed to build confidence and ended up undermining it.
The original plan worked out in Vienna on October 22 was an ingenious improvisation playing off a serendipitous development: the Tehran Research Reactor, which manufactures medical isotopes, happens to be running low on fuel. The Vienna plan calls for Iran to ship most of its known stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia for further enrichment and then to France for processing into fuel rods to re-supply the Tehran Reactor. This seemingly win-win arrangement would meet Iran’s medical reactor needs while physically removing from Iran a stockpile of raw LEU that has greatly worried the West.
Both sides welcomed the accord initially. Then criticisms emerged. The objections in Iran, ironically, came not from Iran’s firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (he praised the deal as a “victory” for Iran) but from his conservative rivals joined by the titular leaders of the Green Movement in Iran.
Their objections are two-fold. First, critics point out that the deal as written requires Iran to give up a major bargaining chip (most of its hard-won stockpile of LEU) without getting anything of strategic value in exchange (such as recognition of Iran’s right to enrich).
Second, Ahmadinejad’s rivals in Iran have heaped scorn on the idea that Iran’s hard-won LEU is being entrusted to France. France may be the only willing country with the technology to manufacture the fuel rods for the French-made Tehran reactor. But France’s President Sarkozy can barely bring himself to say the word “Iran” except as part of a call for tougher sanctions. And France is remembered in Iran as the country that two decades ago expropriated a billion-dollar Iranian investment in a multinational enrichment consortium (Eurodif).
Given these troubling facts, it is actually not surprising that the Vienna deal would come in for close scrutiny in Tehran.
What to do? The key thing to remember now is that the crux of the nuclear dispute with Iran is not the disposition of 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium that may or may not be shipped abroad, but will soon be replaced in any case. The main issue is the long-term future of enrichment in Iran. Even if the stockpile deal were to be shelved completely while long-term talks are ongoing, Iran is highly unlikely to “break out” from Natanz in the next few months, with barely enough fuel for a single bomb, in the middle of talks aimed at a permanent accommodation with the West. Certainly the risks of that scenario are far smaller than the risks flowing from the alternative outcome of no talks, sanctions and war.
Moreover, the stockpile deal may yet be salvageable. Iran has said it accepts the deal in principle but wants greater guarantees of supply. Towards this end, Iran has informally broached the idea of a simultaneous swap on Iranian soil of raw LEU for fabricated fuel rods. Nuclear non-proliferation experts Jim Walsh at MIT and Harold Feiveson at Princeton believe this sort of swap could be structured in a way that meets Iran’s need for supply assurance with minimal added risk to U.S. security.
For example: Russia might supply low-enriched uranium to France. France would process the uranium into fuel rods for Iran. Iran, upon receiving the fuel rods, would immediately send the promised LEU to Russia. Any move by Iran to seize both LEU and fuel rods during the exchange would be immediately detected and would stand as a major provocation not merely to the United States and France, but to Russia, Iran’s most important ally. The odds of that happening are quite small.
Other variations of the deal might work as well. The main point for the present is that while Western hawks and neo-cons have interpreted Iran’s dissatisfaction with the stockpile deal as proof that Ahmadinejad is just stalling for time -- or evidence that Iran is so riddled by internal faction that it cannot deal at all -- this is not true. As seen, Iran has respectable (if not compelling) reasons for wishing to modify the original stockpile deal. Ahmadinejad would not stall for time by approving and praising a deal his own side denounces days later, thereby making himself look foolish. Yes, Iran has internal factions that complicate its foreign policy. So do we; in fact, the United States leads the world in bringing home agreements that it fails to ratify or demands be modified thanks to its own internal factions – the Kyoto Protocol being merely the latest example. In this case, Iran could say the United States is so paralyzed by faction that it cannot cope with proposals to modify a simple stockpile deal.
At the end of the day, the stockpile deal may be salvageable in modified form, or it may not. Either way, long-term talks on the issue that matters most -- the future of Iran's nuclear program writ large -- can and should proceed in a constructive vein.
What is needed now is not hot heads, moralistic rhetoric and ominous reminders that we’re “losing patience” and “running out of time.” What is needed is leaders with the pragmatism and vision to know a workable (if not perfect) deal when they see it, and the courage to make that deal.
*Richard Parker is a Professor of Law at University of Connecticut Law School and the Founder and Executive Director of the American Foreign Policy Project (AFPP). The AFPP’s Iran Policy Group has studied all aspects of the Iran foreign policy conundrum to produce a comprehensive website offering rigorous analysis and policy recommendations on the critical question, “What to do about Iran.” The views expressed in this blog are his own
