As if to demonstrate that Washington refuses to be upstaged by lesser powers, Hillary Clinton blazed away in the campaign to impose not-quite crippling sanctions on Iran, after winning Russia and China’s agreement today on a draft resolution that will go to the Security Council.
Washington called the proposed sanctions the toughest to date, but U.S. officials acknowledged they had to be softened in key areas to gain Russian and Chinese agreement.
And even as China joined in, Beijing also praised the last-minute deal Iran made with Brazil and Turkey to try to pre-empt the sanctions, calling the two efforts “dual tracks” and leaving some uncertainty over where China would ultimately side.
The agreement on a draft U.N. resolution was reached within the last several days. Senior administration officials said the timing of the announcement was intended as a direct response to the Turkish-Brazilian pact, in which Tehran renewed an offer to swap much of its nuclear fuel outside its borders for enrichment.
“This announcement is as convincing an answer to the efforts undertaken in Tehran over the last few days as any we could provide,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday.
Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin told reporters that Russia would have preferred to wait a day or two after the Brazil-Iranian deal, but the U.S. wanted to put it on the table right away.
Western officials feared that the deal reached in Tehran could throw up new hurdles to the already-delayed sanctions regime.
Mrs. Clinton said Tuesday that while the U.S. believed Turkey and Brazil’s moves were “sincere efforts,” the U.S. and its fellow permanent members of the U.N. Security council were “proceeding to rally the international community on behalf of a strong sanctions resolution.”
There was no immediate, public reaction from Iranian officials late Tuesday to the announcement of a sanctions deal.
The Turkish and Brazilian efforts still could throw a wrench into the U.S. plans. Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, Brazil’s ambassador to the U.N., told reporters outside the Security Council after seeing the draft that Brazil wasn’t ready to engage in negotiations over the text because of the “new situation” presented by the fuel-swap deal.
“It is the first time that the Iranians, at such a high level, have put in writing the swap, which creates a new confidence building,” she said. The fuel-swap deal is not “meant to address all the issues,” she added, “but it is a very important first step and we should seize this opportunity.”
Washington’s reaction to the Brazilian-Turkish deal has created some apprehension in the international community. The Obama administration has worked diligently to overcome the credibility gap America developed with the international community under President George W. Bush. One element of this effort was to utilize diplomacy as a premier tool of US foreign policy.
Punitive measures such as war or sanctions would no longer be the instruments of first resort. But the reaction to the Brazilian-Turkish deal may undo some of the progress the Obama administration has achieved with the international community. Washington’s lack of appreciation for the breakthrough may fuel suspicions of whether sanctions are pursued to achieve success in diplomacy, or whether diplomacy was pursued to pave the way for sanctions – and beyond.
In a world long dominated by Western powers, the global order has been one shaped by coercion. Although the twentieth century saw the end of formal colonialism — the most overt coercive system — the perpetuation of economic colonialism has meant that the United States and its allies still expect to have the final word on most issues of global importance.
It seems natural then as a new global order emerges, Western domination will not get replaced by another form of domination — the Western coercive paradigm itself will be rejected. This indeed, is the new approach to diplomacy that is being pioneered by Brazil and Turkey.
If Barack Obama really embodied a new way of thinking, we’d have reason to hope that he’d be nimble enough to adapt to the momentous period of change that is now unfolding, yet so far all the indications are that whatever his personal abilities might be, he remains firmly tethered to an arthritic diplomatic and political establishment.
The nuclear swap deal just struck by Brazil, Turkey and Iran could be grasped as an unexpected but welcome opportunity. Instead, Washington’s guarded response barely conceals the fact that it sees it own power as being usurped.
In the Financial Times, Jonathan Wheatley notes that the deal may vindicate Brazilian diplomacy and prove the skeptics wrong.
The idea that Iran would abandon its alleged nuclear weapons programme in favour of a peaceful nuclear energy programme in response to amicable talks rather than under the threat of UN-backed sanctions seemed unrealistic, even naïve. But it may well have paid off. Even a US official conceded today that the latest news was “potentially a good development.”
If so, Celso Amorim, Brazil’s foreign minister, can be forgiven some self-satisfaction. “We are holding conversations in a respectful manner and with conviction . . . Our language is not that of pressure. Our language is that of persuasion, friendship and cooperation,” he told reporters in Tehran on Monday.
The recent visit by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, to Iran is part of a broad multilateral foreign policy that he believes is commensurate with his nation’s ever-growing importance in a changing world axis.
Brazil under Lula’s eight year reign has promoted trade between Israel and Latin America, while supporting talks with Hamas and Palestinian statehood. It has balked at US urges for sanctions on Iran over their nuclear programme, which Washington believes has nefarious intentions, while on Sunday it brokered an agreement in which Tehran exchanges low-enriched uranium for nuclear fuel.
Diplomatic ties have been created with more than 40 nations, including North Korea, and Brasilia maintains good relations across divides, for instance with foes Venezuela and Colombia.
Like India, Brazil is advocating for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council and wants reform of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to better represent developing nations.
For as Lula said in an interview with Al Jazeera this week, international geopolitics is shifting and global governance needs to change with it.
The impact of the agreement on Israel — where coercion is generally regarded as the only effective tool of persuasion — was summed up by Yossi Melman:
The agreement on the transfer of Iran’s enriched uranium, achieved via Turkish-Brazilian mediation, is an important victory for Iranian diplomacy and a debacle for Israeli policy. The deal reduces the chances, which were slim to begin with, of new sanctions being imposed on Iran, and makes a military strike against Iran even less feasible.
Turkey is the deal’s big winner. Trade between Iran and Turkey already stands at $10 billion annually, so if sanctions were imposed on Tehran, Turkey would suffer a massive blow to its economy – and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party would suffer a major political setback. Alternatively, should Turkey decide not to uphold the sanctions, it might find itself in a crisis with the United States and Europe. Hence the tremendous effort Turkey made to achieve the deal, despite American warnings that Iran might be using Turkey in order to buy time.
Why did Iran choose to see Turkey as an “honest broker” and make the deal with it instead of with the permanent Security Council members? The two countries’ good relations are not free of suspicion, but both Iran and Turkey have adopted a policy of expanding their influence in the Middle East, influence of the sort that relies on cooperation rather than competition.
The closer ties between Turkey and Syria, Iran’s ally; the similar attitude that Turkey and Iran have toward Hamas; their shared interests in Iraq; and a similar view of radical Islamic terrorism all combined with Turkey’s disappointment over European views of its candidacy to join the European Union to create a confluence of interests that, for the time being, trumps their disagreements. Moreover, from an ideological standpoint, Iran prefers Turkey to the U.S.: Any concession to Washington or its Security Council partners would be perceived as a surrender.
China welcomed Iran’s new nuclear fuel-swap agreement, saying the deal supports Beijing’s long-held position that the international dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions can be resolved through diplomacy rather than sanctions or force.
“We hope this will help promote a peaceful settlement of the Iranian nuclear issue through dialogue and negotiation,” foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said Tuesday at a regular press briefing. “We believe dialogue and negotiation is the best approach to settle the Iranian nuclear issue.”
Under the deal arranged by Brazil and Turkey, Iran will ship out some of its uranium to Turkey, have it enriched and then shipped back to Iran for use in a medical research reactor. Western powers want to keep Iran from enriching uranium on its own soil, because it fears that fuel will end up being used for nuclear weapons, which Tehran denies. The latest deal is a weakened version of one that was negotiated last October but fell through after Iran’s government didn’t approve it.
For China, a deal brokered by Brazil and Turkey is in line with its broader vision of a more multipolar world order not dominated by Washington.
Julian Borger thinks that Iran might have overplayed its hand.
The initial western response to the new Turkish-Brazilian-Iranian uranium swap deal was akin to a chess player realising loss is inevitable. There was an awkward silence and quietly spreading panic as western capitals looked a few moves ahead and could not think of a way of escaping the trap they had fallen into. The deal would have to be accepted, even though it did little to slow down Iran’s nuclear drive, and the push for sanctions in New York would deflate.
And then, the Iranian foreign ministry decided to speak. The spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, declared: “Of course, enrichment of uranium to 20% will continue inside Iran.”
The announcement was stunning. Iran’s justification for beginning 20% enrichment in February, was that it needed the material to make medical isotopes for the Tehran research reactor, although it was unclear how the Iranians were going to fabricate the necessary rods. Under this new deal, the rods will be provided free of charge. What then would be the civilian use of Iran’s home-enriched uranium?
For those already convinced Iran is working its way to breakout nuclear weapons capacity, the point of enriching to 20% is clear. In engineering terms it is a lot more than half way to 90% weapons-grade material, and an important test of the reliability of Iran’s centrifuges in reaching that goal.
Within minutes, the western capitals, tongue-tied over their response for the first few hours, began to rally.
But if Washington hoped that there might at least be unity in the expression of Western reservations about the deal, that hope was swiftly undermined as the French President Nicholas Sarkozy said he sees this development as a “positive step.”
If President Obama had accomplished what Brazil and Turkey are about to pull off — a deal through which Iran will exchange its stockpile of enriched uranium in return for fuel rods for a medical research reactor — then the US media would be hailing this as a diplomatic breakthrough. Instead, this is being described as a possible obstacle to sanctions. The New York Times reports:
Brazilian and Turkish government officials said Sunday that their leaders had brokered a tentative compromise with Iran in the international standoff over Iran’s nuclear program, a development that could undermine efforts in the United Nations to impose new sanctions on the Iranians.
A spokesman for the Turkish Foreign Ministry said that after 17 hours of talks in Tehran, ministers from Brazil, Iran and Turkey had reached an agreement on the “principles” to revive a stalled nuclear fuel-swap deal backed by the United Nations.
The spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the deal would be presented to the leaders of the countries for “final touches,” with a statement on the agreement expected as early as Monday. The exact terms, notably the amount of nuclear fuel to be swapped, were not revealed.
The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, canceled an official visit to Azerbaijan late Sunday and instead joined officials in Tehran in what was seen as a sign of progress in the talks.
[A] Washington Iran expert said the fact that the alleged nuclear deal was connected to Lula’s meeting with the Iranian Supreme Leader, as opposed to with the Iranian president, may be significant.
That signals that Khamenei “is endorsing the deal,” the National Iranian American Council’s Trita Parsi said, adding it may reduce the bouts of Iranian domestic political infighting that have plagued earlier rounds of negotiations that failed to hold up. “That means this is no longer Ahmadinejad’s nuclear deal, this is Khamenei’s nuclear deal.”
Iran’s supreme leader on Sunday praised Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for defying US calls to close ranks against the Islamic regime as the Brazilian leader arrived in Tehran seeking to mediate in the crisis over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
“Brazil in recent years [under Mr Lula] has differed from previous years,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told his visitor. He called on “independent” countries to assert their roles in global affairsnd help to change the UN so it does not favour powerful states.
Israel’s secretive nuclear activities may undergo unprecedented scrutiny next month, with a key meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency tentatively set to focus on the topic for the first time, according to documents shared Friday with The Associated Press.
A copy of the restricted provisional agenda of the IAEA’s June 7 board meeting lists “Israeli nuclear capabilities” as the eighth item — the first time that that the agency’s decision-making body is being asked to deal with the issue in its 52 years of existence.
The agenda can still undergo changes in the month before the start of the meeting and a senior diplomat from a board member nation said the item, included on Arab request, could be struck if the U.S. and other Israeli allies mount strong opposition. He asked for anonymity for discussing a confidential matter.
Even if dropped from the final agenda, however, its inclusion in the May 7 draft made available to The AP is significant, reflecting the success of Islamic nations in giving concerns about Israel’s unacknowledged nuclear arsenal increased prominence.
The U.S. is negotiating with Egypt a proposal to make the Middle East a region free of nuclear weapons, as the U.S. seeks to prevent Iran from derailing a monthlong U.N. conference on nuclear nonproliferation that begins Monday.
U.S. officials familiar with the move call it an important step in assuring countries that Washington—criticized by some for its silence about Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal—will equitably address weapons proliferation across the region, as Iran seeks to shift focus away from its own nuclear program.
But here’s the catch: before Washington applies any pressure on Israel, there must be significant progress in the peace process.
Still, there is one element here that should have been worthy of a headline of its own but doesn’t even get a mention in the article: the Obama administration seems to effectively be ending US complicity in Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity.
Another important part of this story that the WSJ article glides over without clarification is the reason the US is negotiating specifically with Egypt.
Washington is pushing for revisions to the Non-Proliferation Treaty to close some of its loopholes but for these to pass in the 189-nation conference, the US needs the support of the 118-non-aligned states led by Egypt. That support will not be forthcoming without some kind of agreement on a nuclear-free Middle East.
A couple of weeks ago, President Obama hosted a nuclear security summit in Washington to address an issue so grave, 40 heads of state were in attendance. Had Obama also extended invitations to the mayors of America’s major cities, it’s unclear how many would have been able to squeeze the summit into their busy schedules.
The U.S. military has canceled a major field exercise that tests its response to a nuclear attack, angering some officials who say that what is now planned for this month will be a waste of time.
U.S. Northern Command in Colorado withdrew from major participation in this month’s National Level Exercise (NLE), a large-scale drill that tests whether the military and the Department of Homeland Security can work with local governments to respond to an attack or natural disaster.
The exercise was canceled recently after the planned site for a post-nuclear-attack response — Las Vegas — pulled out in November, fearing a negative impact on its struggling business environment.
A government official involved in NLE planning said a new site could not be found. The official also said the Northern Command’s exercise plans for “cooping” — continuity of operations, during which commanders go to off-site locations — also had been scratched.
“All I know is it’s been turned into garbage,” said the official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the information. “It’s a nonevent.”
Will al Qaeda be emboldened by this turn of events? I kind of doubt it. In fact Las Vegas — which might not generally epitomize a realistic outlook — is probably making a safe bet here as it wagers that its economic health takes precedence over its need to be prepared to handle a nuclear attack.
Ten days ago, the New York Times published a story about a memo on Iran from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to National Security Adviser Gen James Jones.
David E Sanger and Thom Shanker reported on the contents of this memo, yet neither of them possesses a copy of the memo, nor have they read it, nor did they even report directly on its contents. In fact, it was not until after their story appeared that they received official confirmation of the memo’s existence.
In an interview on National Public Radio, when asked what the memo said, Sanger neglected to mention that he had never set eyes on the document. Were he to have made that clear, he could not have presumed to say anything about what the memo said — merely what he had been told about what it said. To position his source as the gatekeeper and shaper of the report would make it rather obvious that Sanger was a willing tool of a senior administration official, but no self-respecting journalist wants to be seen prostituting his services.
Sanger’s NPR interviewer, Warren Olney, also appeared willing to collude in this charade by skirting around the fact that the reporter had not set eyes on the memo, but nevertheless Olney pressed Sanger on the issue of his source’s agenda:
Olney: Can you say anything at all about the motivations of the people that revealed this memo to you?
Sanger: Um, no, the only thing I would say is that I would caution people against — I would do this in many kinds of story — the assumption that somebody just dropped off word of this memo in front of us.
A classified memo in an unmarked manila envelope could be dropped off, but how exactly would word of such a memo be “dropped off”?
Sanger wants to dispel an image of his being a passive recipient of information he is being fed, yet given that he has no means to independently interpret the contents of the memo and contrast that interpretation with the one being provided by his primary source, what he recounts is merely his source’s angle.
As I wrote when the article came out, the identity of Sanger’s source may be more significant than the existence of the memo. If it turns out that it was Dennis Ross, then the New York Times may yet again be serving a role in preparations for military action.
We do not know who leaked the Gates memo. But the “senior officials” who did so were clearly seeking to use their selective description to catalyze more robust planning for potential military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets — the very option that Gates has consistently opposed.
This explains Gates’s public claim that his memo had been “mischaracterized” by the leaker. It also explains [Defense Undersecretary Michele] Fluornoy’s later statement that an attack against Iran is “off the table in the near term.” (Though, after White House intervention, Gates’s spokesman walked back Flournoy’s comment.)
The reality is that a cadre of senior National Security Council officials — including Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and Dennis Ross, senior director for the central region (including Iran) — is resisting the adoption of containment as the administration’s Iran strategy.
For some, containment is problematic because it would be interpreted in Israel and pro-Israeli circles here as giving up on preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear threshold state. Republicans could use this to label Obama as weak on national security.
Others in this camp may actually believe that Washington should be preparing for military action against Iran.
As Ross told us before he returned to government service in the Obama administration, President George W. Bush’s successor would probably need to order military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets.
Pursuing diplomatic initiatives early in Obama’s tenure, Ross said, would be necessary to justify potential military action to domestic and international constituencies.
That is precisely what the administration has done — first, by pursuing halfhearted diplomatic initiatives toward Tehran, then, when Iran did not embrace them, blaming Iran for the impasse.
Adopting containment as the administration’s posture toward Iran might undermine some White House officials’ efforts to prepare the political ground for an eventual presidential decision approving military strikes.
We have also heard former Bush administration officials close to Vice President Dick Cheney take note of the recent rise in U.S. public support for military action against Iran, as measured by some opinion polls.
Against that backdrop, these Republicans say, Obama — “a Chicago pol”— could ultimately see his way clear to ordering military strikes.
The brutality with which the Iranian authorities have suppressed political dissent since last June’s disputed presidential election has been widely reported. The Washington Post now reveals that the political turmoil has had another effect: it has resulted in a new supply of intelligence as disaffected officials leak information about Iran’s nuclear program.
As a result, a National Intelligence Estimate being prepared for President Obama which was due out last fall is not expected to be completed until August.
The revisions to the NIE underscore the pressure on the U.S. intelligence community to produce an accurate assessment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions as President Obama pursues a policy aimed at preventing the country from acquiring an atomic bomb. The community’s 2007 assessment presented the startling conclusion that Iran had halted its work on developing a nuclear warhead, provoking enduring criticism that the report had underestimated the Iranian threat.
Officials briefed on the new version, which is technically being called a “memo to holders” of the first, say it will take a harder tone. One official who has seen a draft said that the study asserts that Iran is making steady progress toward nuclear weapons capability but that it stops short of concluding that the Islamic republic’s top leaders have decided to build and test a nuclear device.
There is little question that Iran sees strategic value in making its nuclear intentions hard to decipher, but let’s for the sake of argument assume that its goal is to put itself in the same position as Japan: not to assemble a nuclear arsenal but to have the means to do so at short notice. Could such a capability pose an existential threat to Israel (or anyone else)?
Israeli leaders have already made it clear that they draw no distinction between a nuclear armed Iran and an Iran that has nuclear weapons capability, yet this may say less about the nature of an Iranian threat than it does about the nature of Zionism. Deprive Israel of its existential threats, and the necessity for a Jewish state becomes less imperative. Take away the fear of annihilation and Jewish identity will lose one of its most unifying attributes.
Israel might fear its enemies, yet can it survive without them?
David Ignatius sketches some of the details in the the sanctions regime being crafted by Stuart Levey, undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, but he concedes that sanctions have rarely been effective instruments for changing policy.
For policymakers, the discussion is beginning to shift to the sensitive area suggested by Gates’s memo — the space between sanctions and outright military action. What options would the United States and its allies have, short of war, to raise the cost to Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program? Are there means of subverting, sabotaging or containing such a program without actually bombing Iranian facilities?
We won’t be hearing a lot of public discussion about this gray area. But that’s where senior officials will focus more of their energy in coming months, as they prepare for the possibility that Levey’s clever trap won’t work.
Is a “gray area” for the Obama administration the equivalent of the “dark side” Dick Cheney made infamous? Are we talking about kidnappings and assassinations? Having demonstrated his willingness to authorize extra-judicial detention and extra-judicial killing, is Obama getting ready to employ full-fledged state-sponsored terrorism?
Graham Allison, who has for years been issuing graves warnings about the danger of nuclear terrorism, writes about last week’s nuclear security summit in Washington:
With all the immediate challenges demanding President Obama’s attention today, his choice to invest so much of his own mind-share and political capital in an issue seemingly so remote is remarkable.
We are accustomed to the triumph of the urgent over the important. In assembling the largest number of heads of foreign governments by an American president since FDR invited leaders to San Francisco to create the United Nations, this president demonstrated his ability to distinguish between the vivid and the vital.
The question remains: So what? How is the world different today? How will it be different a year from now?
To score this undertaking, it is necessary to assess performance on four dimensions. First, what is the single largest national security threat to the lives of American citizens? Far-fetched as it still appears to many, President Obama’s answer is unambiguous. As he said Monday: Nuclear terrorism is “the single biggest threat to U.S. security, short term, medium term and long term.”
Nuclear terrorism — a bigger threat to American security than climate change? Hardly.
The critical difference is that unlike the threat of nuclear terrorism, with climate change there will probably be no singlular event that will result in any particular political leader being called to task to explain how they could have allowed this unfolding calamity to happen.
So when it comes to the exercises in self-protection that consume a significant amount of time and energy for the world’s political leaders, the issue of nuclear terrorism is indeed more vexing than climate change. Obama’s attention to this issue does not — at least as far as I’m concerned — indicate his willingness to distinguish between the vivid and the vital.
I was impressed with how many Israelis speculate that what Iran wants to do is to get just about where Japan is in terms of nuclear capability. Get to where they could have a few bombs in a few months, or maybe a few weeks, but not overtly test anything to prove they have it and maybe not to claim they have it.
I don’t know where the Iranians might get that idea, but I’d heard about it for a couple of years from Americans who study Iranian apparent nuclear policy and it strikes me as an idea that might not occur to the Iranians but it strikes me as a good idea. I don’t see any way to make them back down from where they are, but it might be possible to persuade them not to take the final step…
Israel’s President Shimon Peres, who also attended the Herzliya Conference yet lacks the slightest nuance in his assessment of Iran’s intentions, yesterday declared that Iran poses a threat to the whole civilized world.
“A threat to the peace of the Jewish people always carries the danger of turning into a threat to the civilized world as a whole,” Peres said in Jerusalem on Sunday.
Which begs the question, given that Israel has an arsenal of several hundred nuclear weapons and Iran so far has none: Of which state should we be more afraid?
In considering the Iranian nuclear threat, there is another reason for thinking that the Iranians may well have calculated that attaining a nuclear capability without assembling a nuclear arsenal is in their best interests — not simply because of the international ramifications but because of the regime’s own internally complex and fractious power dynamics.
For Iran to actually acquire the bomb and not simply the means to produce it, begs difficult questions of command and control. Could the regime withstand a potential power struggle that might ensue over how weapons might be dispersed and under whose authority? The prospect of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards becoming Iran’s nuclear masters might be sufficiently galling to everyone outside the IRG, that nuclear capability appears as full a measure of nuclear power that the Islamic state can safely handle.
When it comes to assessing Iran’s nuclear intentions there is an abundance of evidence that it is indeed a rational actor and virtually none that it operates in the thrall of an apocalyptic vision of the future.
The New York Times reports on a “secret three-page memorandum” that Defense Secretary Robert Gates sent to National Security Adviser Gen James Jones in January, warning that “the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability,” according to unnamed officials who leaked the information.
The narrative line here which is presumably the line which was being fed to the New York Times‘ ever-obliging reporters, was that the there are gaps in the US strategy for dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It’s far from clear that this was actually the thrust of Gates’ memo.
[I]n his memo, Mr. Gates wrote of a variety of concerns, including the absence of an effective strategy should Iran choose the course that many government and outside analysts consider likely: Iran could assemble all the major parts it needs for a nuclear weapon — fuel, designs and detonators — but stop just short of assembling a fully operational weapon.
In that case, Iran could remain a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while becoming what strategists call a “virtual” nuclear weapons state.
To say that the US lacks a strategy here, is itself a statement so vague as to be meaningless. It lacks a strategy to prevent Iran becoming a virtual nuclear state? Or it lacks a strategy for dealing with Iran in such an eventuality? Or it lacks a strategy for dealing with the fact that it may not actually know whether Iran has acquired this form of nuclear capability?
There is no indication in this account that the New York Times reporters saw the memo (and it seems reasonable to infer that they did not), so as is so often the case, it’s likely that the most significant detail in this story is the one that will not be revealed: the identity of the senior official who is the primary source of the narrative.
Was it Dennis Ross? He’d certainly fit the profile of someone in the administration who probably feels like it’s time to change the subject and shift attention away from Israel and back to Iran. As another US official recently told Laura Rozen, “He [Ross] seems to be far more sensitive to Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests.”
There’s been plenty of speculation about Benjamin Netanyahu’s last-minute cancellation of his plan to attend the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington. The official explanation was that it was to avoid facing criticism from Turkey, Egypt and other Middle East states over Israel’s nuclear program. Such criticism was long anticipated so that was never a credible explanation, but maybe the real reason became apparent this afternoon when President Obama said Israel should sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
This is what he said in a news conference:
Scott Wilson, Washington Post: You have spoken often about the need to bring U.S. policy in line with its treaty obligations internationally to eliminate the perception of hypocrisy that some of the world sees toward the United States and its allies. In that spirit and in that venue, will you call on Israel to declare its nuclear program and sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty? And if not, why wouldn’t other countries see that as an incentive not to sign on to the treaty that you say is important to strengthen?
President Obama: Well, Scott, initially you were talking about U.S. behavior and then suddenly we’re talking about Israel. Let me talk about the United States. I do think that as part of the NPT our obligation as the largest nuclear power in the world is to take steps to reducing our nuclear stockpile. And that’s what the START treaty was about — sending a message that we are going to meet our obligations.
And as far as Israel goes, I’m not going to comment on their program. What I’m going to point to is the fact that consistently we have urged all countries to become members of the NPT.
So there’s no contradiction there. We think it is important that we have a international approach that is universal and that rests on three pillars: that those of us who have nuclear weapons are making serious efforts to reduce those stockpiles; that we all are working against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and those countries that don’t currently have nuclear weapons make the decision not to pursue nuclear weapons; and that all countries have access to peaceful nuclear energy.
And so whether we’re talking about Israel or any other country, we think that becoming part of the NPT is important.
US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs Ellen Tauscher spoke with Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon last week and said that the US was going to adopt a policy of “calculated ambiguity” towards friendly nuclear nations that are outside the NPT.
That calculated ambiguity may be exactly what spooked Netanyahu. In a play on Israel’s own policy (which is that it will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East), did the Obama administration merely promise the Israelis that at the summit the US would not “introduce” the topic of Israel’s need to sign the NPT?
Here’s how President Obama states the nuclear paradox:
The risk of a nuclear confrontation between nations has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.
Here’s how I define it:
Hypothetical nuclear threats provoke more fear than real nuclear threats.
Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in Tel Aviv and Tehran.
Which city is currently in greater jeopardy of nuclear annihilation? Tehran.
Which city’s residents are repeatedly being told by their political leaders they should be afraid of nuclear annihilation? Tel Aviv’s.
So, to return to Obama’s assessment, when he says the risk of nuclear confrontation between nations has gone down, he’s saying something that’s both obvious and deceptive. What’s obvious is that the Cold War risk of a nuclear war between nuclear-armed states has diminished, but what he purposefully did not say is that the risk of any nuclear-armed state actually using its nuclear weapons has gone down.
The risk that Israel could use tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities is real. I don’t believe that Israel is likely to do so because its current leadership — despite its willingness to engage in hyperbolic rhetoric — probably recognizes that the regional and global impact of the first use of nuclear weapons in warfare since 1945 would seal Israel’s fate as a pariah state.
Still, the risk that Israel might use nuclear weapons is indisputably greater than the risk of nuclear weapons being used by any organization or state that is not currently armed with such weapons.
The risk of nuclear terrorism should not be dismissed, but as Brian Michael Jenkins notes, it’s important to distinguish between nuclear terrorism and nuclear terror. In 2008 he wrote:
Will terrorists go nuclear? It is a question that worried public officials and frightened citizens have been asking for decades. It is no less of a worry today, as we ponder the seventh anniversary of 9/11.
Might Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions lead eventually to arming Hizbollah or Hamas with nuclear weapons? Might a financially desperate North Korea sell the wherewithal for nuclear weapons to terrorist buyers? Might a political upheaval in always turbulent Pakistan put a nuclear weapon in the hands of extremists? Could there, ultimately, be a nuclear 9/11?
We have to take the long-shot possibility of nuclear terrorism seriously, but we must not allow ourselves to be terrorized by it.
Nuclear terrorism and nuclear terror reside in different domains. Nuclear terrorism is about a serious threat — the possibility that terrorists might somehow obtain and detonate a nuclear weapon — while nuclear terror is about the anticipation of that event. Nuclear terrorism is about terrorists’ capabilities, while nuclear terror is about imagination.
Fear is not free. Fear can pave the way for circumventing established procedures for the collection of intelligence, for attempts to operate outside the courts, and perhaps for torture. Distinguished scholars discuss the durability of the U.S. Constitution in the face of nuclear terrorism.
Frightened populations are intolerant. Frightened people worry incessantly about subversion from within. They worry about substandard zeal. Frightened people look for visible displays to confirm unity of belief–lapel pin patriotism.
Fear creates its own orthodoxy. It demands unquestioning obeisance to a determined order of apprehension.
During the Cold War an all-out nuclear exchange would have meant planetary suicide. Today, we face one tyrant in North Korea with a handful of nuclear weapons, an aspirant in Iran enthralled by first-use fantasies, and a terrorist organization with an effective propaganda machine-dangerous, vexing, but not the end of the world, not the end of the nation, not the end of a single city.
Undoubtedly, a terrorist nuclear explosion of any size would have a huge psychological impact on America. But whether it would lead to social anarchy would depend heavily on the attitudes of the nation’s citizens and the behavior and communications of its leadership.
We may not be able to prevent an act of nuclear terrorism. But we can avoid destroying our democracy as a consequence of nuclear terrorism.
Whether or not we as citizens yield to nuclear terror is our decision.
John Mueller from Ohio State University’s department of political science wrote last year:
The evidence of al-Qaeda’s desire to go atomic, and about its progress in accomplishing this exceedingly difficult task, is remarkably skimpy, if not completely negligible. The scariest stuff — a decade’s worth of loose nuke rumor — seems to have no substance whatever. For the most part, terrorists seem to be heeding the advice found in an al-Qaeda laptop seized in Pakistan: “Make use of that which is available … rather than waste valuable time becoming despondent over that which is not within your reach.”
As Mueller and Mark G. Stewart note in an article in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, if America’s counterterrorism policy was actually based on objective risk assessment, we’d understand that the risk al Qaeda poses to each American is about the same as the risk posed by kitchen appliances.
As a hazard to human life in the United States, or in virtually any country outside of a war zone, terrorism under present conditions presents a threat that is hardly existential. Applying widely accepted criteria established after much research by regulators and decision-makers, the risks from terrorism are low enough to be deemed acceptable. Overall, vastly more lives could have been saved if counterterrorism funds had instead been spent on combating hazards that present unacceptable risks.
This elemental observation is unlikely to change anything, however. The cumulative increased cost of counterterrorism for the United States alone since 9/11 — the federal, state, local, and private expenditures as well as the opportunity costs (but not the expenditures on the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan) — is approaching $1 trillion. However dubious and wasteful, this enterprise has been internalized, becoming, in Washington parlance, a “self-licking ice cream cone,” and it will likely last as long as terrorism does. Since terrorism, like crime, can never be fully expunged, the United States seems to be in for a long and expensive siege.
[Updated below] Whatever else can be said about the strained relationship between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, one thing is clear: Obama seems intent on keeping Netanyahu off balance.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu announced he would be returning to Washington next week to attend Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit. Just days later, he had changed his mind, ostensibly because of “fears that a group of Muslim states, led by Egypt and Turkey, would demand that Israel sign up to the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT,” Haaretz reported.
An earlier report in the Jerusalem Post, however, had raised that specific issue and said this would not deter the Israeli prime minister from attending the summit:
[O]ne main argument against participation was that Netanyahu’s presence at an international forum dealing with nuclear issues would inevitably draw attention to Israel’s own reported nuclear arsenal, as well as its policy of ambiguity on whether it has nuclear weapons.
Countries such as Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia will certainly – as they do regularly at international nuclear forums – shine the spotlight on Israel and a perceived imbalance: Why is the world so keen on stopping Iran’s nuclear development program, but silent in the face of Israel’s reported nuclear arsenal?
One government official said Netanyahu’s decision to attend, despite this likely scenario, had been made because key issues affecting Israel would be discussed there, and it was important for the Jewish state’s voice to be heard – as well as the realization that Israel’s reported nuclear capacity would be an issue whether Netanyahu participated in the meeting or not.
US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs Ellen Tauscher spoke with Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon Tuesday and updated him on US President Barack Obama’s new nuclear proliferation policy.
Tauscher said that the US will strive to protect its allies and work against countries which violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) such as North Korea, or countries that fail to meet their commitments to the international community such as Iran.
The under secretary of state stressed that Washington will adopt a “calculated ambiguity” policy towards countries which do not pose a threat to the US. Despite not explicitly pointing to Israel, it appears her statements were meant to reassure the Jewish state.
It’s unclear however, whether the administration’s “calculated ambiguity” was really meant to reassure Israel or do the opposite.
The United States is not on the brink of pushing Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty but it could be signalling its willingness to see pressure applied by others as it provides a platform in Washington for such an effort. Moreover, in a little noted move, the Obama administration appears to be using a new diplomatic tool to signal that Israel’s days of “nuclear ambiguity” may be numbered: Israel’s nuclear scientists are now being shut out of the United States.
A report on the Hebrew NRG/Maariv website, under a headline, Dimona reactor workers not welcome in the US, says that workers at Israel’s Dimona nuclear research reactor who submitted visa requests to visit the United States for ongoing university education in physics, chemistry and nuclear engineering, have all been rejected, specifically because of their association with the Dimona reactor. According to the report, this is a new policy decision by the Obama administration, since reactor workers were until recently being issued visas to study in the US.
Update: Shortly after I posted this, Politico reported that the White House today denied that there has been any change in its visa policy.
“Obama to take middle course in new nuclear policy,” a headline in the Washington Post declares.
There are a few instances where “middle” signals danger — he was driving drunk down the middle of the road — but generally speaking, middle is supposed to be good. But when the Post tells us Obama is going to take a “middle course” on nuclear weapons, this is one of those perverse instances where the newspaper editors seem to want to direct readers away from the story.
Obama’s going down the middle — not too much, not too little. Yawn, let’s move on to the next story. Oh yeah, but just in case you make it to paragraph three, it’s worth mentioning that the US wants Iran to understand that even as a non-nuclear state, it could be targeted by America’s nuclear arsenal.
That‘s a middle course?! Unless you happen to be in the Iranian government in which case it might sound more like an urgent call to develop a nuclear deterrence capability.
A year after his groundbreaking pledge to move toward a “world without nuclear weapons,” President Obama on Tuesday will unveil a policy that constrains the weapons’ role but appears more cautious than what many supporters had hoped, with the president opting for a middle course in many key areas.
Under the new policy, the administration will foreswear the use of the deadly weapons against nonnuclear countries, officials said, in contrast to previous administrations, which indicated they might use nuclear arms against nonnuclear states in retaliation for a biological or chemical attack.
But Obama included a major caveat: The countries must be in compliance with their nonproliferation obligations under international treaties. That loophole would mean Iran would remain on the potential target list.
At Foreign Policy, Josh Rogin notes that Obama has made yet another reversal on a campaign position. No doubt under the sway of Pentagon and defense industry pressure, he now wholeheartedly embraces the biggest defense boondoggle of them all: missile defense.
For an Obama team that has been skeptical of the past U.S. administrations’ efforts to rapidly deploy ballistic missile-defense systems around the world, missile defense sure does get star billing in the United States’ newly released report on overall nuclear strategy.
The document claims that missile defense is critical to allowing the United States to shift away from nuclear weapons, especially now that the U.S. will no longer threaten to use nukes to retaliate against non-nuclear attacks, such as from chemical or biological weapons.
[…]
The NPR itself was careful to mention missile defense as only one of several capabilities needed to counter non-nuclear attacks.
But Secretary Clinton was less careful.
“It’s no secret that countries around the world remained concerned about our missile-defense program,” Clinton said, explaining that the NPR weighs in on “the role [missile defense] can and should play in deterring proliferation and nuclear terrorism.”
Ok, so now missile defense can deter chemical attacks, biological attacks, proliferation of nuclear technology, and suitcase bombs?
Regardless, the document makes clear that with fewer nukes to be deployed once the new START agreement goes into effect, and with the role of nuclear weapons now limited to responding to nuclear threats, the administration is now looking to missile defense, among other technologies, to fill in the gap.
“As the role of nuclear weapons is reduced in U.S. national security strategy, these non-nuclear elements will take on a greater share of the deterrence burden,” the review reads.
Outside experts doubted that the NPR’s suggested shift toward a reliance on missile defense would provide any deterrence for most types of chemical and biological attacks or the use of a nuclear device by a terrorist.
“If they deliver them by missile, fine, but that’s not likely to be the case,” said Peter Huessy, president of Geostrategic Analysis, a defense consulting firm. “If our biggest threat is terrorists using nukes, then of course deterrence doesn’t apply and missile defense doesn’t apply either.”
Huessy also commented on Obama’s embrace of missile defense in the NPR, which seems out of line with the criticism he leveled when running for president in 2008.
“I certainly see a pivot in the sense of what people expected,” he said. “Missile defense is now front and center in America’s security policy. That’s’ certainly a shift from Obama’s campaign rhetoric.”
If there’s one lesson that 9/11 could have taught us in — oh, let’s say a few seconds — it should have been that in an age of asymmetric warfare, missile defense is a giant waste of money. Yet the only lesson we can draw almost a decade later is that when it comes to the flagrant misuse of tax dollars, so long as it’s done in the name of that holiest of holies, defense, American taxpayers will remain blithely indifferent.
Didi Remez has translated parts of a column by Nahum Barnea that appeared in Hebrew in Yediot‘s Friday political supplement. Barnea considers the assessments by Dr. Moshe Vered who published a study last year on possible scenarios that would result from an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Barnea goes on to say:
The game is now approaching the critical stage, the “money time.” Netanyahu and Barak are waving the military card. “All the options are on the table,” they say, accompanying the sentence with a meaningful look. There are Israelis, in uniform and civilian clothes, who take them seriously. The Obama administration is troubled. It is no accident that US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen was sent here, to make it clear that the US was vetoing a military strike. It is no accident that Barak was invited to Washington and Vice President Biden will be coming here on Monday. He is not only coming to visit Yad Vashem.
I find it difficult to believe that Netanyahu will undertake such a weighty and dangerous decision. It is more reasonable to assume that he and Barak are playing “hold me back.” On the day they will be called upon to explain why Iran attained nuclear weapons, they will say, each on his own, what do you want from me, I prepared a daring, deadly, amazing operation, but they—the US administration, the top IDF brass, the forum of three, the forum of seven, the forum of ten—tripped me up. They are to blame.
Netanyahu and Barak know: there is no military operation more successful, more perfect, than an operation that did not take place.
Netanyahu has upgraded Ahmadinejad to the dimensions of a Hitler. Against Hitler, one fights to the last bunker. This is what Churchill did, and Netanyahu wants so badly to be like Churchill. His credibility—a sensitive issue—is on the table. If he retreats, the voters will turn their back on him. Where will he go? In his distress, he may run forward.
The fascinating side of this story is that very few Israelis would appear to believe their prime minister. If they believed him, they would not run in a frenzy to buy apartments in the towers sprouting like mushrooms around the Kirya. In the event that Iran should be bombed, the residents of the towers would be the first to get it. If they believed [Netanyahu], the real estate prices in Tel Aviv would drop to a quarter of their current value, and long lines of people applying for passports would extend outside the foreign embassies.
Given that, as Barnea notes, Israelis can tell Netanyahu is bluffing, there seems little reason to doubt that the Israeli prime minister’s bluff is equally transparent to both Washington and Tehran.
Washington feels obliged to play along in order to make the Israeli threat seem credible. Tehran in turn needs to show that it will not bow to foreign pressure and thus the likely effect of Israel’s threats is to make the Iranian nuclear program advance more quickly than it would have minus the pressure.
How can this possibly serve Israel’s interests? In terms of thwarting Iran’s nuclear program it doesn’t, but this is not the Jewish state’s primary goal. What it wants more than anything else is to promote division across the region and thereby undermine the power of the opponents of Zionism.
Come the day that “the Iranian threat” turns out to have been overstated, a new threat will emerge. Israel cannot survive without its beloved enemies.
Brazil delivered a wounding blow to Washington’s hopes of international consensus for sanctions on Iran on Wednesday when its president declared his opposition to such measures hours before meeting Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state.
In an indication of Brazil’s growing self-confidence on the international stage – and its effort to chart a path independent of Washington – Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stated his backing for Iran’s nuclear programme, as long as it remained purely peaceful.
The US and its partners say that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons capacity, while the United Nations nuclear watchdog recently suggested Tehran could be working on a warhead.
But in spite of strong condemnation of the nuclear programme by the European Union and Russia in recent days and Mrs Clinton’s visit to Brazil, in which she will focus on the Iran file, Mr Lula da Silva remained unmoved.
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The brutality with which the Iranian authorities have suppressed political dissent since last June’s disputed presidential election has been widely reported. The 
