With Iran’s eastward shift, nuclear talks are dead in the water
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Iran is taking Western nuclear negotiators for fools. The newly announced talks for reviving the 2015 nuclear deal are about running down the clock, while advancing nuclear capacities and neutralizing the impact of sanctions by enmeshing Iran’s economy with that of Asian neighbors. How do we know this? Because Iran’s leaders told us!
In his instructions to Iran’s new Cabinet, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei denounced US President Joe Biden as a “predatory wolf,” telling ministers: “Diplomacy must not be influenced and linked with the nuclear issue.” Instead, President Ebrahim Raisi’s team must focus on eastward-leaning “economic diplomacy.” Both Raisi and Khamenei denounced presidential predecessor Hassan Rouhani’s “naivety” for negotiating with the West, with Khamenei explicitly stating: “Trust in the West does not work.”
Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian have committed Iran to an “Asia-focused” or “Look to the East” policy, while bolstering their western flanks with vast armies of paramilitary proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. With Hezbollah and Al-Hashd Al-Shaabi in recent days threatening civil conflict in order to achieve partisan objectives, the willingness of Tehran’s new leaders to push the region past boiling point is only too obvious.
In one of Raisi’s first tangible victories from his eastward pivot, Iran has been admitted to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. During this group’s latest meeting, Raisi incited Asian powers toward aligning themselves as an anti-Western bloc. “Sanctions are not against only one country,” he thundered. “Sanctions have targeted more independent countries, especially members of this organization.” Raisi urged the collective development of mechanisms to combat sanctions.
With Iran, Russia, China, Myanmar and other Asian powers facing an accumulation of sanctions, these states are already integrating themselves as an economic bloc in which entire financial networks become immune to outside pressures. When China uses such banking networks to pay for millions of barrels of Iranian oil, and pours investment into Iranian infrastructure, what can America do other than issue irritable statements? The rapid development of Iran’s nuclear industry was likewise credited to clandestine pan-Asian ties with networks in North Korea and Pakistan.
The $400 billion Beijing-Tehran investment deal signed this year now looks increasingly like a game-changer: First, because of Raisi’s eastward focus; second, because of Biden’s hard-line China policy; and third,because Afghanistan’s neighbors, disconcerted by the Taliban’s victory, have been brought closer together out of regional stability concerns. Tehran last week hosted a conference for Afghanistan’s six neighbors plus Russia.
Iran provided the Taliban with covert support to kick out the Americans, but Tehran never expected its former enemies to return to power so quickly or decisively, particularly given the Taliban’s anti-Shiite leanings. “Iran has come to understand that the enemy’s enemy is not your friend, and the Taliban are a more complex problem than Americans,” said Mohammad Hossein Emadi, a former Iranian diplomat who worked extensively on Afghanistan. “The consensus is to deal with the Taliban very carefully and pragmatically.”
Raisi’s strategy will be to keep nuclear talks going to avoid additional sanctions, but not to allow negotiations to achieve significant progress. An Iran analyst at the Eurasia Group affirmed that Iran’s agreement to hold talks appeared to be a “tactical move to forestall a censure resolution” at the November meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog. These negotiations will become increasingly irrelevant because sunset clauses on uranium enrichment are set to expire, and because according to IAEA chief Rafael Grossi Iran is “within a few months” of possessing the necessary materials to construct a nuclear bomb.
The $400 billion Beijing-Tehran investment deal signed this year now looks increasingly like a game-changer
Baria Alamuddin
Because Israel would never allow Tehran to reach that point, military strikes become the most likely option. It was in this context that Naftali Bennett and Vladimir Putin went to enormous lengths last week to demonstrate that they could cultivate a relationship as strong as the regular love-ins between the Russian president and the Israeli prime minister’s predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu. Bennett referred to Russia as a “neighbor for us in the north” — a bizarre reference to Moscow’s occupation of Syria. Putin has previously condescendingly referred to Israel, with its more than a million Russian Jews, as a “Russian outpost.”
Putin favors his relationship with Israel over tactical alignments with Iran. However, he is a ruthless global player who sees few costs in allowing Israel to continue bombing the hell out of Iran’s Syria assets, while aiding and abetting Tehran on other fronts — largely because Moscow and Tehran’s interests closely intertwine when it comes to blunting the impact of sanctions and reorienting economies away from westward dependence.
Israel’s defense establishment warns about Iran’s installation of batteries of surface-to-air missiles in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and its game-changing reliance on drone technology. Iranian commentator Reza Parchizadeh argued that these air defenses were being developed in anticipation of Israeli strikes against nuclear facilities: “The regime knows that once the charade of the Vienna talks for reviving the 2015 nuclear deal is over… it will have to get entrenched and make the final rush for the nuclear bomb.” Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman was echoing the view of numerous Israeli officials when he said a military clash with Iran was “only a matter of time.”
Obama-era foreign policy adviser Dennis Ross argues that America must put the threat of military force back on the table. Iran exploited Israeli sabotage attacks as pretexts for expanding uranium enrichment, because the ayatollahs “expected little or no reaction”. This “loss of Iranian fear” has facilitated the perilous scenarios of either Iran becoming a military nuclear power, or regional war.
In the event of a nuclear conflagration with Israel, the ayatollahs would shed few tears for millions of Lebanese and Syrian allies caught in the fallout. Iran’s psychopathic new president boasts of his culpability for the killing of thousands of dissidents. He gives every indication of relishing such an apocalyptic conflict.
Because Iran has been permitted to deploy hundreds of thousands of missiles throughout the region, even a non-nuclear war would be incalculably destructive, with Iran having demonstrated its readiness to wreak massive damage upon GCC civilian and economic targets. However, it remains to be seen whether, in the event of Tehran and the regime being threatened directly with military strikes, the ayatollahs would cave in and accept necessary compromises.
Let us not stupidly and unstrategically sleepwalk into fresh negotiations, while Tehran positions itself for nuclear and strategic supremacy. To paraphrase the poet Yeats, Western leaderships currently “lack all conviction” while Tehran, Moscow and Beijing “are full of passionate intensity.”
Shortsighted negligence and absence of strategic foresight got us to this point where Tehran is passing the threshold of possessing nuclear and paramilitary capabilities with which to menace the planet. It is now incumbent upon all world leaders to take their responsibilities seriously and dig us out of this mess.
* Baria Alamuddin is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster in the Middle East and the UK. She is editor of the Media Services Syndicate and has interviewed numerous heads of state.
