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Obama’s Hurricane Has No Eye
The upcoming six-party nuclear talks with
By Shaan Sachdev
NEW YORK, Sept 20 -- Hundreds of heads of states arrive in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly summit, Washington reconsiders its placement of missiles in Eastern Europe, Arab-Israeli peace talks are just around the corner, and, in the midst of the ongoing political whirlwind, President Ahmadinejad decides to restate his belief that the Holocaust is “a lie based on an unproveable and mythical claim”.
President Obama must miss the relatively uneventful summer, as the imminent weeks present several formative events for America’s relationship with the Middle East. One of the most significant: Washington and Tehran’s ongoing tension may finally be lessened, even if momentarily, as Iran’s Saeed Jalili and the EU’s Javier Solana set nuclear talks for October 1. The meetings will be held between representatives of the five permanent Security Council members, Germany, and of course, Iran.
The indirectness of the upcoming talks, embodied in both sides’ unwillingness to send more than representatives to the table, has raised questions, at least among friends of Israel in the United States.
“On what seems like a daily basis, Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reaffirm their determination to accelerate Iran's nuclear program and add to the rapidly growing stockpiles of low-enriched uranium. The talks are not likely to throw them off this path,” writes Steven J. Rosen, former foreign-policy director of AIPAC and director of the Washington Project at the Middle East Forum, in Foreign Policy magazine.
Could such “reaffirmations” be the reason for the equivocal nature of the talks? Iran’s unclenched fist is a response to what Obama promised before and after his inauguration: a belief in the efficacy of diplomacy over aggressive rigidity. His administration couldn’t have refused Iran’s invitation, as the costs both in the Middle East and United States would have been tremendous.
Yet, other exprerts argue that close contact or dialogue with Ahmadinejad would only legitimize the leader who wrenched his presidency (and the democracy) out of the 2009 elections, while the world watched hundreds of thousands of Iranians humiliated and tyrannized.
Such legitimization would, apart from horrifying Obama’s Congressional adversaries, cast a serious shadow over another upcoming affair—Obama’s peace talks with Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, and Binyamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister. The talks mark Obama’s first personal efforts to jumpstart the peace process deemed unquestionably vital to international stability.
The sit-down between Palestine and Israel, capitalizing on the international political presence in New York this week as the annual General Assembly kicks off, is being held at an especially sensitive time, thanks to Ahmadinejad’s recent anti-Israel protests. There is no doubt that the White House is formulating what the Times of London termed “a carefully choreographed diplomatic dance” for Obama as he hopes to avoid potentially publicity-explosive encounters with leaders like Ahmadinejad and Colonel Gaddafi.
Putting aside the oblique nature of the upcoming talks between Iran and the great powers, is there a possibility for real progress to be made? Can the six delegations, headed by the United States, finally eliminate the stalemate that has existed for over a decade?
Hillary Clinton, U.S. secretary of state, in a speech this Friday, recognized that dialogue was the first step and in no way guaranteed any progress. Yet at the same time she pointed out that the last administrations’ stance “yielded no progress on the nuclear issue, nor did it stem Iran's support for terrorist groups.”
In an effort to convey both an extended diplomatic effort and the American government’s solemnity on the issue, she said, “Our message will be clear: We are serious. And we will soon see if the Iranians are serious. This is not about process for the sake of process…We have no appetite for talks without action”.
One way to convince Iran to ease its uranium-enrichment program is to unite Middle Eastern countries against it, said Defense Secretary Robert Gates. According to Gates, Iran poses a threat to the Middle East in addition to the West, as its acquisition of a nuclear weapon would cause an arms race in the Middle East, further destabilizing the region.
The Obama administration remains cautious and yet determined in its efforts to negotiate with Iran in the upcoming weeks. Is such optimism warranted despite years of refusal to alter its enrichment program, or does Steven J. Rosen hold validity in his derision of the six-party talks?
Hillary Mann Leverett, former director for Iranian and Afghani affairs at the National Security Council, presents vehement support of such talks in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine last February.
Using first-hand experience of what she describes as successful diplomatic interactions with various Iranian delegations, Leverett says, “If the United States and its allies want to stop Iran from going all the way to overt nuclear weaponization, they need to be prepared to address the Islamic Republic's most fundamental security concerns -- not to demonize individual Iranian politicians as latter-day Hitlers bent on a second Holocaust.”
Perhaps Leverett would change her mind after the catastrophic Iranian elections and further foolish inquiries into the Holocaust. Nevertheless, Deepak Malhotra, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, asserts the importance of diplomacy despite controversies such as those that plague the Iranian political arena.
“The ability of extremists to derail negotiations through violence and belligerence presents policymakers with a high-stakes dilemma: Should the muzzling of extremism be set as a precondition to negotiations, or should negotiations be initiated in order to reduce support for extremism?” Malholtra ultimately believes that discarding such preconditions would usher in an ambitious yet more successful era in foreign policy.
But what happens if the talks fail? Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, believes that there are three options. One, the United States could ensure that Iran accepts a limit on their nuclear enrichment program through severe sanctions. Two, America goes to war. Three, the United States simply lives with Iran’s current situation.
Scott Silverstone, Associate Professor of international relations at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, might believe that the latter point holds some merit, as he stresses the importance of not pushing Iran over the edge and ultimately causing its abdication from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (which would put Iran in the same boat as other states possessing nuclear weapons without overstepping legal boundaries, such as Israel).
The upcoming political hurricane presents Obama with the challenge of engaging in diplomacy regardless of Israel’s bitterness, Ahmadinejad’s rhetorical circus, and a looming domestic audience. If he wants to keep America in the direction it has just started to head, one devoid of international aggression and militaristic conclusions, diplomacy may be the only answer he has.