Posted Saturday 4 December, 16:28 Bahrain time
By Emile Hokayem,Senior Fellow for Regional Security, IISS–Middle East
A day ahead of the Geneva meeting between the P5+1 grouping and Iran, serious
differences over visions for regional security emerged from speeches by the
foreign ministers of Iran, Bahrain and Turkey.
A defiant Manouchehr Mottaki insisted that the presence of
foreign powers in the Persian Gulf was the immediate cause for regional
divisions and strife, citing Afghanistan and Iraq. In line with previous Iranian
statements, he called for the indigenization of regional security, claiming that
Iran and its neighbours could themselves work out a regional order. (He did not
mention the recent Wikileaks revelations, which showed that Washington had
resisted Arab demands that the US bomb Iranian nuclear facilities.)
A conciliatory Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al Khalifa sought
to portray Bahrain as a responsible actor in the international arena, keen to
maintain and nurture international partnerships to protect its development and
stability. In parallel with massive arms procurement in recent times and closer
defence cooperation with the US, the Gulf states are leveraging their economic
clout and energy wealth to give a stake to many countries in their own
security.
A confident Ahmet Davutoglu
elaborated on a vision for collective security based on economic integration and
mutual respect. Turkey has made undeniable inroads in the Middle East by
adopting, at least nominally, a ‘zero-problem’ approach. But there are
constraints on Turkey’s strategy, ranging from Western scepticism over its
relations with Iran to Arab unease with the emergence of a new actor in regional
matters.
Naturally, a dominant theme of the
discussion was the upcoming Geneva talks on Iran’s nuclear programme, especially
in the light of Hillary Clinton’s conciliatory remarks at the Manama Dialogue on
Saturday (see Andrew Parasiliti’s post) and in a BBC interview in which she said
that Iran would have the right to enrich once it gets a clean bill of health
from the UN nuclear watchdog and the Security Council.
Sh Khalid suggested the creation of a multilateral nuclear
fuel bank as a solution to the concerns over Iran’s uranium enrichment
activities. The idea received a conditional nod from Mottaki who argued that
Iran already possessed nuclear technology and should therefore host a branch of
the bank. Davutoglu liked the idea but cautioned that it needs to be fleshed
out.
Ideas to allow Iran some enrichment
under tough safeguards and international supervision have been floated for a
number of years. The ‘zero-enrichment’ demand is now giving way to the realistic
admission that Iran has now mastered the technology, so creative proposals are
needed.
But it is unclear why there should be
more confidence that the Geneva talks can be successful this year when a
previous proposal put forward last year by the Vienna group failed in the phase
of Iranian political dysfunction: of all the Wikileaks disclosures, one of the
most interesting is a memorandum of conversation with Michael Postl, a former
Austrian ambassador to Tehran, who describes the political infighting that
followed Iran’s initial approval of the deal. Iran’s political system is no less
dysfunctional this year, and an America whose overtures have been turned down
may become more rigid.
