Do Not be Deceived by Iran's Rhetoric

Ray Takeyh, The Financial Times:

After substantial pressure and arm-twisting the Bush administration managed to obtain a resolution at the International Atomic Energy Agency last week accusing Iran of non-compliance with its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The fact that Russia and China abstained, as did many members of the non-aligned group of countries, and that the resolution had no specific trigger date for a referral to the United Nations Security Council, dilutes its impact.

However, beyond such procedural issues, the question remains: will such démarches have an impact on Iran?

Many in the US and European capitals seem to think that a mere invocation of threats and tentative IAEA resolutions will cause Iran to capitulate and once more suspend its nuclear programme. This is a gross misreading of Iran’s newly inaugurated government. The election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hardline president, has ushered in a new international orientation that is determined not just to assert Iran’s ­prerogatives, but is largely indifferent to western rebuke. READ MORE

The results of Iran’s presidential election also reflect an important generational change. For the new cohort of conservatives in charge of Iran, it is not the revolution but the war with Iraq that is their defining experience. Their isolation from the US, suspicion of the international community that tolerated Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran and their continued attachment to the revolution’s original dogmatic ideology defines their mission. Notions of self-sufficiency and self-reliance permeate their speeches and drive their policies. Mr Ahmadinejad and his supporters are unyielding in their ideological commitments, earnest in their belief that the “Government of God” has relevance and persistent in their simplistic claim that all problems could be resolved if Iran returned to the roots of the revolution. In terms of their international perspective, the younger conservatives do not share their elders’ preoccupation with the west. A striking aspect of the empowered hardliners’ message is the notion of “eastern orientation”.

As Ali Larijani, the new head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, noted: “There are certain big states in the eastern hemisphere such as Russia, China and India. These states can play a balancing role in today’s world.”

From the perspective of Iran’s new right, globalisation does not imply acquiescing to the US and its European allies but cultivating relations with emerging power centres on the global landscape. Such relations might conceivably obviate the need to come to terms with the US or, for that matter, the European Union. After a quarter-century of hostility, war and sanctions, Iran’s emerging leadership class is looking east, where its human rights record and proliferation tendencies are not particularly disturbing to its prospective commercial partners.

All this brings us back to the pressing nuclear issue. The defiant approach of Mr Ahmadinejad stems from the emerging perception in Tehran’s corridors of power that the negotiations with the so-called EU3 (Britain, France, Germany) ill-served Iran’s interests. In the end, Iran’s suspension of its nuclear activities neither generated the type of security and economic concessions that North Korea is about to obtain nor sustained European opposition to US attempts to coerce and isolate Iran. The notion that Tehran should offer substantial concessions on critical national issues such as its nuclear programme for the sake of American benevolence and European investment has a limited utility to Iran’s suspicious nationalists.

The intriguing aspect of Iran’s hawkish posture is that it is proving to be surprisingly effective diplomacy. As Iran’s nuclear portfolio moves from one international organisation to another, it can count on the support of not just its economic partners such as Russia and China, but much of the developing world. Tehran has managed to convince a majority of the non-aligned community that the issue at hand is the right of poorer nations to develop nuclear power as a pathway to economic modernisation. Moreover, at a time when the US has blessed India’s nuclear weapons programme despite that country’s snubbing of the NPT, and offered the hermetic North Korean regime a deal acknowledging its right to nuclear energy, Iranian charges of hypocrisy have particular resonance.

Despite its inflammatory rhetoric, Iran’s diplomacy will move in an imaginative direction. In the hope of further fracturing the international community, Tehran is likely to continue accommodating the IAEA inspection process, negating the charges of its non-compliance.

In the meantime, Iran will exert its own economic pressure, offering its lucrative contracts to those states that support its claims. For countries such as India and Japan that voted with the US but have a growing interest in Iran’s energy resources, this will prove a particularly daunting challenge. In the end, Iran’s commercial pressures, its appeals to the non-aligned community and continued co-operation with the IAEA process are likely to ensure that the Security Council will not embrace America’s punitive approach.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.