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THE presidential campaign failed to address the hard choices America must make to contain the Iranian nuclear threat. By focusing almost exclusively on tactics, the election obscured the questions that really matter: What should the United States demand when it finally talks to Iran? And when Iran rejects our opening position, how much should we compromise to come to a deal?
The opening act, after all, is entirely predictable. The Obama administration will likely begin negotiations by insisting that Iran suspend its efforts to enrich uranium. Compliance with this requirement — imposed by the United Nations Security Council in July 2006 and reiterated several times since — has been the goal of the European-led negotiations with Iran that President Obama faulted the Bush administration for not joining. Iran has consistently rejected the demands of the United Nations and our European allies, however, and it would be naïve to expect a different answer just because the United States is at the negotiating table. Iran will almost certainly say no, presumably calculating that it can eventually force the world to accept its enrichment program.
So what then? After a few unsuccessful meetings, experts both in and outside of government will increasingly express doubts about the American position. They will ask: Aren’t we demanding too much? Perhaps it was reasonable to call for suspension in 2006 when Iran had 164 centrifuges spinning, but is it reasonable now that Iran claims to have more than 5,000 in operation, and more on the way? Some will argue that time is on Iran’s side: As we negotiate, Iranians will continue to install more centrifuges. So shouldn’t we cut the best deal we can now, even if it allows Iran to continue enriching?
The critics will propose fallback positions like allowing enrichment, but under enhanced international safeguards that supposedly can detect the development of nuclear weapons. Perhaps they will propose strict limits on the amount of uranium that Iran can enrich. Or, as suggested last year by the retired diplomat Thomas Pickering and his co-writers William Luers and Jim Walsh: allowing enrichment, but only on the condition that Iran converts its national enrichment efforts into a multinational program that is owned and operated by a consortium of countries.
The problem is that other countries in the region could demand the same treatment. Such is the lesson of the Bush administration’s decision to abandon its opposition to Iran’s construction of a nuclear power reactor at Bushehr. This eliminated the option of opposing civil nuclear power elsewhere in the Middle East. How could we explain to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for example, that we trust Iran to have civil nuclear power reactors, but not them?
The same principle applies to enrichment. Once we accept enrichment in Iran, it will become impossible to deny the same arrangement to friendly governments in the region, let alone unfriendly ones like Syria. The result will be the proliferation of dangerous nuclear technologies that we have been seeking to avoid.
The risks will be even greater if we agree to convert Natanz into an international enrichment center. International partners will not invest in a primitive enrichment operation that relies on old and unproven technologies. They will insist on state of the art enrichment equipment, Western management and access to export markets — the absence of which has hindered Iran’s enrichment progress up to now. By contrast, so long as Iran’s nuclear enrichment program remains illegitimate and subject to international censure, it cannot serve as an attractive model for other countries.
For these reasons, the United States cannot be more eager than Tehran to reach a deal, and Mr. Obama must persuade Iran that he can afford to see negotiations fail. Of course, he will have to do so amid the high expectations that he has created by calling for direct, unconditional engagement with Tehran. This may turn out to be the new president’s greatest diplomatic challenge.
Stephen Rademaker was an assistant secretary of state responsible for arms control and nonproliferation from 2002 to 2006.
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