By John Chipman
Last week, the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency carried through its longstanding threat to report Iran to the United Nations Security Council. Iran had previously failed to disclose nuclear activities to the IAEA, as it was obliged to do under its agreements with the agency, and more recently was unable to satisfy the board that there was no military element to these activities.
Inviting the Security Council to deal with the Iranian nuclear issue hugely raises the diplomatic stakes. It turns the dispute about the nature of Iran's civilian nuclear programme from a technical discussion about possible Iranian plans for future nuclear weapons development into a geopolitical debate about the threat Iran might pose as a nuclear weapon state.
Iran is still 5-10 years away from producing a nuclear weapon but if it continues its research activities on uranium enrichment it may be able within months to master the techniques for operating a cascade of centrifuges. Once it has this capability it could install cascades at clandestine facilities and work to produce fissile material for a weapon. Preventing Iran from mastering this technology is an immediate goal for international diplomacy.
Were Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, the status quo and the balance of power in the Gulf region would be altered. Israel has had nuclear weapons for decades. Yet this has not invited any strategic response in the region. Whatever their public pronouncements, Arab states privately recognise that Israel's nuclear capacity is intended to preserve its existence and is not aimed at changing the regional balance of power. No regional state has sought nuclear weapons in response. Israel's nuclear strength is seen as diplomatically offensive to the non-proliferation regime, and the west's implicit tolerance of it as a sign of double standards, but no one sees it as a strategic threat.
In contrast, possession by Iran of nuclear weapons would change the balance of power and could threaten the regional status quo. The small Gulf Arab states would seek nuclear guarantees from the west, perhaps even closer affiliation to Nato. Saudi Arabia might reconsider its position and seek some kind of nuclear accord with Pakistan. Further afield, Egypt and Turkey might also think of going nuclear. Even if all this took decades to play out, a nuclear-armed Iran would cause a strategic earthquake leading to all sorts of diplomatic and security realignments.
The aim of diplomacy at the Security Council must be to support the IAEA's diplomatic efforts to ensure the uniquely peaceful nature of Iran's programmes; widen the international consensus against Iran's potential acquisition of nuclear weapons while keeping Russia and China engaged; and invite debate among Iran's decision-makers as to whether mastery of the fuel cycle is worth the international opprobrium and strategic isolation that UN resolutions would bring. For the UN to have a chance of achieving these goals it must give early preference to legal and diplomatic sanctions, rather than to economic or military ones.
Iran defends its position internationally by referring to its legal rights, in particular its right to enrich uranium to develop fuel for its civil nuclear reactor. Given the suspicions held by the IAEA, the UN could respond by progressively removing those legal rights. After the ritual presidential statements urging Iran to return to the negotiating table, the UN could pass legally binding resolutions that made mandatory the permanent suspension of Iran's uranium enrichment work.
Later resolutions could state that a departure by Iran from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty would be considered illegal and a threat to international peace and security, thus making it impossible for Iran to escape the legal duty not to proliferate.
Iran's offence has been to refuse to co-operate adequately with the IAEA, part of the UN family. A proportionate response would be for the UN to suspend co-operation by all UN agencies with Iran, until Iran returned to co-operate fully with the IAEA. At present, some 12 UN agencies operate about 75 projects in nearly every part of Iran. Withdrawing these international teams would send a powerful signal to Iran's leadership that the world was worried about its rejection of IAEA requests for co-operation.
While these projects have worthy goals such as refugee assistance, poverty reduction and drugs control, their withdrawal would not much harm the average Iranian, and would certainly have far less impact than full-blown economic sanctions, not to speak of military strikes. Russia and China, whose energy interests in Iran would not be affected by these measures, could be persuaded to support them, and Iran might prefer to postpone its research activities indefinitely rather than face strategic isolation.
There is no perfect strategy to influence Iran or to divert it from its apparent military intentions. But jumping to economic sanctions would be less likely to change the internal debate in Iran than would shrinking Iran's legal freedom of manoeuvre and isolating it from the UN system. These measures should be tried before more robust ones are contemplated.
The writer is director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies
