In Russia and China, We Trust?

The Wall Street Journal:

In two years of fruitless negotiations with the Europeans, Iran won precious time to work on the world's first Islamist atomic bomb. Yesterday, the diplomatic two-step moved to Moscow with the full blessing of an "international community" apparently willing to keep engaging the mullahs in open-ended negotiations. The West, it seems, is now putting its future security in the hands of Russia and China. READ MORE

This week's talks center on a Russian plan to enrich uranium, send it to Iran, collect the spent fuel and reprocess it in Russia. Moscow claims that will stop the mullahs from enriching uranium to bomb-grade levels. A former Russian prime minister and current head of the nuclear agency RosAtom, Sergei Kiriyenko, said in a Newsweek interview last week that if Tehran goes along with the idea, "there will be no danger that the development of atomic energy in Iran . . . will become a proliferation threat." China, a fellow permanent member of the United Nations' Security Council, also supported the plan, too, alongside the EU and U.S.

Those assurances are hardly convincing, even if Iran decides to play some version of Russia's game. Tehran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, last year categorically ruled out ceding any controls over the nuclear enrichment process but then put the option back on the table to divide the world powers. Tehran canceled the Moscow round, rescheduled, canceled, finally turned up in Moscow yesterday, and then hinted that it may continue enriching uranium, even if a deal is reached.

Future delays are to be expected since the Iranians seem happy to use any diplomatic "process" to gain time to pursue their nuclear ambitions unmolested by threat of U.N. sanctions, or worse.

China has ample reasons to drag things out, too. As we type, Beijing is toiling hard to clinch a multi-billion-dollar deal to develop an Iranian oil field in exchange for a 25-year contract for liquefied natural gas. China's oil majors have already invested in Iran to obtain fuel for the mainland's red-hot economic growth.

Let's make a big assumption, though, that Iran's leaders were taken back by the rare show of resolve at the International Atomic Energy Agency, which last month found the courage to refer Iran to the Security Council. And let's say they sign a deal with Moscow. But must we then assume that Iran will quietly shut down all those centrifuges at Natanz and elsewhere they've already installed for weapons-grade enrichment? And who can trust Russia to run the program competently and cleanly? Recall that the biggest beneficiaries of the Oil for Food payments handed out by Saddam Hussein were in Moscow.

So why is so much political capital vested in this newest stab at negotiation? Well, the other option, the referral to the Security Council followed by possible economic sanctions, isn't very attractive either, given the failures of U.N. sanctions in the past. Its main merit would be to clarify the choices before the "international community."

We would then find out if China and Russia would choose to wield their veto power in the Security Council if sanctions against Iran were proposed by the U.S. With their commercial ties to Iran, they've made plain their reluctance to support any serious action against the regime, and are busy trying to play down the threat of any sanctions. President Vladimir Putin earlier this month in Madrid even insisted that Iran wasn't "referred" to the Security Council by the IAEA, a semantic distinction of some sort. China's foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang cooed in a press conference on Thursday that Beijing advocates "peaceful resolution of the Iran nuclear issue through diplomatic negotiations."

So long as Tehran's nukes don't physically threaten China, Beijing's leaders will remain reluctant to endanger their investments in Iran. It's not clear, however, that Moscow will always toe that line. Influential Putin advisers say that the new Iranian rulers have annoyed them with all that fiery rhetoric about wiping Israel off the map. The Kremlin has been embarrassed, too, by Iran's hot-cold response to the Russian diplomatic initiative to reprocess uranium. The offer had been constructed with a view to improving Moscow's reputation in the West, tarnished by backsliding on democracy at home in recent years.

The reality of a nuclear Iran is also starting to resonate with the Russian public. An RTV newscaster recently pointed out that "The radius of existing Iranian missiles extends not just to Israel, but to Volgograd, Astrakhan and Samara." In the oil- and gas-rich Caspian basin, Russia and Iran are competitors for contracts and influence. A recent commentary in the business daily Kommersant accused the Kremlin of letting itself be "manipulated" and "blackmailed" by the mullahs. Some people in Russia belatedly realize that Moscow's skills at political maneuvering may not be working as well as expected with the mullahs.

National security interests ought to lead Russia to take a dim view of Iran's nuclear ambitions. But the Kremlin clings to the idea that it can employ the mullahs for its own purposes. As with China, a "special relationship" with Iran was built on common commercial interests and a shared dislike of American power. The Russian nuclear industry, desperate for markets for its Chernobyl-style reactors, is finishing construction of Iran's nuclear power plant at Bushehr and hopes to build others. The other vibrant Russian export to Iran -- as with China -- is arms, including missile contracts that Mr. Putin isn't eager to give up.

All this presents a hard reality for the West. As long as the autocrats in Beijing and Moscow nurture close ties with a regime that's no friend of the free world, Washington or any European capital cannot place any serious hopes on Russia or China to talk Iran out of building a nuke. No negotiations with Iran, or any rogue state, can ever hope to achieve success without credible threats being brought to bear. Therein lies the problem for the West, a puzzle the Bush administration surely understands. If the Russian scheme or even U.N. sanctions can't deter the mullahs, the world is running out of remedies.

That leaves the military option, which if used would no doubt produce a global outcry fanned by Russia and China -- and perhaps the French as usual. But it should be made clear to Russia and China that they too would pay a price if they force the West into drastic measures. China is far more dependent on Western trade than on Iranian fuel and Russia needs Europe's good will. The time is approaching when everyone may have to make a tough choice between business and diplomacy as usual and the existential threat posed by Iran.