While all eyes focus on Afghanistan, thesituation with Iran is spiraling out of control.
Iran failedto accept a tentative deal signed in Vienna last month to send mostof 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 itsnewly-declared enrichment facility near Qom. The West responded last week by pushing through an IAEABoard Resolution reprimanding Iran for that refusal. An infuriated Iran retaliated byannouncing last Sunday that not only will it continue work at Qom, Iran plansto build ten new enrichmentfacilities.
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 inthe wrong direction, yet the New Yearwill dawn with no good options for the West. Sanctions will fail, war will make things far worse, andchoosing between sanctions and war is a lose-lose proposition.
A couple weeks ago, I blogged on thepromising efforts of outgoing IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei tofind a long-term solution to the nuclear stand-offbetween Iran and the West. Unfortunately,hopes for a long-term settlement are receding in a fog of passions aroused byconflict 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 ontrack? Let’s begin by taking anotherlook at the moribund stockpile deal that was supposed to build confidence and ended up undermining it.
The originalplan worked out in Vienna on October 22 was an ingeniousimprovisation playing off a serendipitous development: the Tehran ResearchReactor, which manufactures medical isotopes, happens to be running low on fuel. The Vienna plan calls for Iran to ship mostof its known stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia for furtherenrichment and then to France for processing into fuel rods to re-supply theTehran Reactor. This seeminglywin-win arrangement would meet Iran’s medical reactor needs while physicallyremoving 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 thedeal as a “victory” for Iran) but from his conservative rivals joined by thetitular leaders of the Green Movement in Iran.
Their objections are two-fold. First, critics point out that the deal aswritten requires Iran to give up a major bargaining chip (most of its hard-won stockpileof LEU) without getting anything of strategic value in exchange (such asrecognition of Iran’s right to enrich).
Second, Ahmadinejad’s rivals in Iran have heapedscorn on the idea that Iran’s hard-won LEU is being entrusted to France. France may be the only willing country withthe technology to manufacture the fuel rods for the French-made Tehran reactor. But France’s President Sarkozy canbarely bring himself to say the word “Iran” except as part of a call fortougher sanctions. And France isremembered in Iran as the country that two decades ago expropriated abillion-dollar Iranian investment in a multinational enrichment consortium(Eurodif).
Given these troubling facts, it is actually not surprising that the Vienna dealwould come in for close scrutiny in Tehran.
What to do? The key thing to remember now is that the cruxof the nuclear dispute with Iran is notthe disposition of 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium that may or may notbe shipped abroad, but will soon be replaced in any case. The main issue is the long-term futureof enrichment in Iran. Even if thestockpile 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, withbarely enough fuel for a single bomb, in the middle of talks aimed at a permanentaccommodation with the West. Certainlythe risks of that scenario are far smaller than the risks flowing from thealternative outcome of no talks, sanctions and war.
Moreover, the stockpile deal may yet be salvageable. Iran has said it accepts the dealin principle but wants greater guarantees of supply. Towards this end, Iran has informally broached the idea of a simultaneous swap onIranian soil of raw LEU forfabricated fuel rods. Nuclear non-proliferation experts Jim Walsh atMIT and Harold Feiveson at Princeton believe this sort of swap could bestructured in a way that meets Iran’s need for supply assurance with minimal addedrisk to U.S. security.
For example: Russia might supply low-enriched uraniumto France. France would processthe uranium into fuel rods for Iran. Iran, upon receiving the fuel rods, would immediatelysend the promised LEU to Russia. Anymove 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. Theodds 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 interpretedIran’s dissatisfaction with the stockpile deal as proof that Ahmadinejad isjust stalling for time -- or evidence that Iran is so riddled by internal factionthat it cannot deal at all -- this is nottrue. As seen, Iran has respectable(if not compelling) reasons for wishing to modify the original stockpile deal. Ahmadinejadwould not stall for time by approving and praising a deal his own side denouncesdays later, thereby making himself look foolish. Yes, Iran has internal factions that complicate its foreignpolicy. So do we; in fact, the United States leads theworld in bringing home agreements that it fails to ratify or demands bemodified thanks to its own internal factions – the Kyoto Protocol being merelythe latest example. In this case,Iran could say the United States is so paralyzed by faction that it cannot copewith 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, moralisticrhetoric and ominous reminders that we’re “losing patience” and “running out oftime.” What is needed is leaderswith the pragmatism and vision to know a workable (if not perfect) deal whenthey 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 AmericanForeign Policy Project (AFPP). TheAFPP’s Iran Policy Group has studied all aspects of the Iran foreign policyconundrum to produce a comprehensivewebsite offering rigorous analysisand policy recommendations on the critical question, “What to do aboutIran.” The views expressed in thisblog are his own