European Approach to Nuclear Proliferation

Via Pejmanesque I find this article on the Iranian nuclear program:

NINE MONTHS AGO, as a confrontation loomed between Iran and the United Nations over Iran's illicit nuclear programs, three European governments staged a preemptive operation. Flying to Tehran, the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany struck a deal with Iran's Islamic regime: The Europeans would block a referral of Iran's violations to the U.N. Security Council and provide technical cooperation, and in exchange Iran would stop its work on uranium enrichment, fully disclose its nuclear programs and accept a new U.N. protocol giving inspectors greater access. The Bush administration was upstaged; some in Paris and Berlin smugly suggested that it had been given an object lesson by the Europeans in how "soft power" could be used to manage the rogue states in President Bush's "axis of evil."

This week, with the world's attention focused on the troubled situation in Iraq, the European version of preemption is yielding its own bitter -- if less bloody -- result. Inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency have reported that Iran never honored its agreement; it has stalled and stonewalled the inspectors while continuing to work on elements of a nuclear program that could soon allow it to produce weapons. The Europeans have responded by drafting for approval by the 35-member IAEA board a stern statement demanding Iranian cooperation; Tehran has replied with threats to restart uranium enrichment and suspend negotiations with the West.

Probably there will be no such rupture, and IAEA inspectors and European officials will resume their efforts to obtain Iranian cooperation. But there can be no disguising the fact that the European strategy for handling one of the world's most dangerous proliferation problems is proving feckless. It has not produced the daily casualties and chaos now seen in Iraq. But it could, within a year or two, lead to an outcome as bad as or worse than any now foreseen in Baghdad: possession of nuclear weapons or the means to quickly make them by a hard-line Islamic regime that sponsors several anti-Western terrorist organizations. Both the United States and Israel have said they will not tolerate such an outcome.

For now, military action is not an option in Iran, at least for Western countries. But if a crisis is to be avoided, a better strategy is needed. The Bush administration, which once advocated referral of the Iranian matter to the Security Council for consideration of sanctions, now is merely pressing for a deadline for Iranian compliance. The Europeans reject even that as too aggressive. Yet it should now be clear that if Iranian nuclear ambitions are to be checked, Europe -- and Russia -- will have to forcefully employ the leverage of their diplomatic and economic relations with Tehran. So far, only carrots have been offered -- and they have produced no results.

Copyright held by the washingtonpost

Now, anyone with any knowledge of recent history could have told you this would happen, but when Europe intervened nine months ago the 'promises' secured was greeted thusly : "Europe demonstrated yesterday that there is a different, more effective way. And it is not the American way. "

But anyone who has watched the Iran-UN nuclear dance for any period of time could have told you that the most likely outcome of that negotiation would be to allow more time for the Iranian government to continue its advance toward nuclear capacity. America already tried the European way with North Korea in 1994. You may notice now that it has nuclear weapons.

I believe that the closing comment of the editorial which I cited is exactly what many people feel. They believe that negotiation is the way to deal with nuclear proliferation. The EU ministeriat failed to acknowledge that even their pathetic 'success' was tied to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Without a threat of force, they had been laughed at by Iran for years. But now that the US has slowed down in Iraq, and especially now that it has become clear that Europe will do little or nothing to improve the situation in Iraq (or indeed anywhere in the Middle East) Iran feels that it can more publically resist European diplomatic 'pressure'.

The European approach to nuclear proliferation was tried by the U.S. in 1994. It failed utterly against a country with far fewer resources than Iran.

Comments

[Timmy the Wonder Dog]

In September the IAEA will present findings of a stain found in one of the Iranian enrichment factories which maybe the first clear evidence of Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Libya in the coming months will provide full details of their various relationships in its nuclear weapon's program (like buying yellow cake from Niger).

Come late September or October the UNSC will then decide what to do and if their actions aren't sufficient, I suspect a small M.E. nation will take actions similar to the 1980s with regards to Saddam.

[Katherine]

Do you think economic/diplomatic threats will really work? It's better then no action at all, of course.

I don't really have a solution. Prioritizing real nuclear threats over fake ones would not be a bad start.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

So far as I can tell, European countries are not even willing to seriously consider economic threats against Iran. I don't believe that economic actions against Iran would work, but the European refusual to even seriously consider that route suggests that their answer to Iran is to ignore it (I mean of course to 'condemn' it but only through diplomatic channels.)

[sidereal]

The politics of nuclear proliferation are peculiar. Iran (and NK) clearly have the will to obtain nuclear weapons. Furthermore they believe (maybe correctly, maybe not), that once they get there, they're untouchable. In that situation, the correct thing for them to do is to hem and haw and delay until they get it done, at which point their past hawing and delaying doesn't matter.

I don't see any way for diplomacy to get past this, unless you can offer something more valuable than being a nuclear state. For the kind of power-obsessed and militant states involved, there isn't much that would qualify.

[Matt Weiner]

Side--
This is a very difficult issue. It may be that the best we can do is to try and run out the clock on the regimes seeking nuclear weapons, in the hopes that if we can delay their programs the regime will have liberalized somewhat by the time it gets nukes.

Which makes hard monitoring, like the kind we had on NK's plutonium rods, absolutely invaluable. Every source I've read says that uranium enrichment takes a lot of time and won't produce many nukes. As long as the UN security cameras were in place on North Korea's plutonium rods we knew they had to take the slow road to nukes. When the cameras went off--and every indication is that a little bit of carrot would've worked there--they were in a position to get a lot of nukes, quick.