Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 3, June–July 2009, pp. 19–25
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In April 2009 the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (the P5+1) proposed to restart negotiations with Tehran without first requiring a freeze on Iranian uranium-enrichment activities. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad answered positively while extolling the claimed successes of the Iranian nuclear programme: completion of a fuel-pellet fabrication plant, 7,000 operational centrifuges in Natanz, and the testing of two new types of centrifuge. Meanwhile, Israeli officials and pundits continue to suggest that Israel will attack Iranian nuclear sites should the Natanz expansion continue.
By now two realities should be clear: a solution based on zero enrichment is not feasible, but an unconstrained development of Iran’s nuclear capabilities is unacceptably dangerous. The P5+1 must find a way to persuade Iran to accept limits on the ladder of enrichment capabilities so as to clearly exclude weaponisation, and the Western powers must find a way to enforce those limits. But finding this way out of the current deadlock will only be possible if we abandon four fallacies that are obscuring the way forward.
Four fallacies
It will be possible, through a mixture of carrots and sticks, to convince Iran to give up nuclear enrichment. That this assertion is delusory was shown by the events of spring 2005. When the E3 negotiating nations – France, the UK and Germany – continued to make abandonment of enrichment the central feature of their comprehensive proposal, Iran made clear (even before the election of Ahmadinejad in June) that maintaining this demand would in fact trigger the end of the freeze on the development of enrichment capabilities accepted in November 2003. After first resuming uranium conversion in August 2005 (rejecting a proposal from Russian President Vladimir Putin designed to avoid it), Tehran took the further step of resuming enrichment in January 2006, as well as ending implementation of the Additional Protocol, which it had signed but not ratified. At the time Iran was in a far weaker position than it is today. It is now the dominant regional player in the Middle East with heavy influence in Iraqi and Lebanese politics and has an expanded nuclear programme that has become a key source of national pride. Moreover, the threat of a US surgical strike, the only military threat that could influence the Iranian leadership, became less and less credible over the last two years of the George W. Bush administration. With a new administration and a world economic crisis, such action is now very unlikely. And it has become clear that China and Russia will never endorse really tough UN economic sanctions whose sole aim is to coerce Iran into giving up enrichment.
Tehran would limit enrichment to civil use and never develop nuclear weapons, in line with repeated policy statements and a fatwa from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei against the development of nuclear weapons. This assertion ignores a major principle of strategy attributed to Napoleon: it is useless to wonder about intent; only capability is relevant. Continuing expansion and improvement of the centrifuge cascades at...
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Jean-Louis Gergorin is a consultant and a lecturer at Sciences Po, Paris. He has previously served as Head of Policy Planning at the French Foreign Ministry and as Executive Vice President of EADS.
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