China Confidential
Foreign Reporting and Analysis Since April 2005
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Washington's Waffling on Iran is Dangerous
Washington's insistence that Tehran cease its nuclear enrichment makes sense. While proponents of diplomacy call this a precondition, abandoning such a demand both unilaterally sets aside three United Nations Security Council resolutions and enables Iranian officials to run down the clock as they near irreversible nuclear capability.
Even if the White House waffles back to its earlier position, the damage is done. By establishing - and then voiding - the "red line" laid down by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the United States would not talk until the Islamic Republic suspended its uranium enrichment, the Bush administration undercut the credibility of future red lines. Indeed, this is the message that many Iranians have taken. On August 1, 2008, for example, Ali Reza Hosseini, an employee at the Strategic Studies Institute at the Iranian Foreign Ministry, urged the Iranian leadership "not to take the secretary of state's ultimatums seriously."
This raises the probability that Iranian officials will misread the determination of Bush or his successor administration to prevent the Islamic Republic from achieving nuclear capability. Where self-described realists and progressives see flexibility, Iranian officials see weakness. "America has no other choice but to leave the Middle East region beaten and humiliated," stated Mohammad Jaafar Assadi, the newly-appointed chief of the Revolutionary Guards' ground forces, on July 16, 2008.
Diplomacy absent opponent sincerity does more harm than good. The West has already suffered for its efforts to accommodate Tehran. Between 2000 and 2005, European Union engagement with Iran led to a near-tripling of trade. Rather than use its hard currency windfall to build civilian infrastructure and improve the economy, the Iranian leadership invested perhaps 70 percent of its hard currency and oil windfall into its military and nuclear programs.
Click here to read Rubin's entire essay in The Daily Star, the remarkable Lebanese newspaper with publishing roots that date to the early 1950s.
Common Sense on Russia
1. US policy toward Russia has been a disaster. NATO, a Cold War relic, should have been disbanded or phased out after the collapse of Communism. NATO has been a force for destabilization instead of peace preservation. The current crisis is the culmination of tensions created by the US-NATO dismemberment and bombing of Yugoslavia, the recent recognition of Kosovan independence, and the expansion of the US-led military alliance that was founded "to keep the Russians out" in the words of its first secretary general.
2. In its pursuit of Central Asian energy resources and Caucasus transit routes, the United States should never have provoked, pushed, antagonized, and attempted to weaken and isolate Russia. The US had no business egging on Georgia--a former Soviet republic--against Russia. The US-Georgian Security Cooperation Agreement threatened the status quo.
3. The US can't possibly afford a new Cold War. The idea is irrational. Having failed to defeat radical Islam, seven years after 9/11, the US, on the verge of becoming a permanent debtor nation, is in no position to plunge into a prolonged confrontation with a nuclear superpower. Besides, there is no ideological struggle between post-Communist Russia and the US; and Moscow, unlike Tehran (or Beijing, for that matter) does not aim for global dominance. Instead, it seeks to restore hegemony over a region that it ruled for over two centuries before the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Tuesday, 12 August 2008
Michael Rubin, an American academician and think-tank scholar who edits The Middle East Quarterly, takes a critical look at the Bush administration's attempts to accommodate nuclear-arming, Islamist Iran. Rubin writes:
Russia's ugly, nationalistic side is clearly on display in Georgia. The fighting there should stop immediately. That said, the following points need to be made:
Posts
