If Tony Blair left a handover note for Gordon Brown, I hope he included a warning about best-laid plans. You can draw up all the plans you like, it would have said, but a single, unforeseen event can destroy every last one of them. For Blair it was Iraq. For Brown it could be Iran.
If the British prime minister fears as much, he gave little inkling of it in his foreign policy speech at the Mansion House on Monday night. He did not so much as mention 9/11, still less deliver a sermon on the true nature of Islam.
Instead, Brown devoted only a few sentences to Iran and they were sober ones, shorn of all rhetoric. Nevertheless, they did manage to contain the three strands of current thinking on how to deal with Tehran and its nuclear ambitions, artfully keeping each option — carrots, sticks and sharper sticks — in play.
Initially, he established that there is indeed a problem to solve. In defiance of those who insist there is no evidence that Iran wants anything more than a civil nuclear capability, Brown drew attention to the fact that Iranian nuclear activity had been “hidden from the world” for many years. It is this record of evasion, “of lying and cheating to the International Atomic Energy Agency”, according to Charles Grant of the Center for European Reform, that has persuaded many European governments that Tehran is up to something.
Those watching are also puzzled as to why the Iranians had documents showing how to cast uranium in hemispheres, a step only required for making warheads. They also ask why, if civil nuclear power is all the Iranians want, they don’t simply import enriched uranium from abroad.
These signals, and several others, have persuaded governments that, even if there is not definitive, fizzing-fuse proof of an Iranian bomb, this is the direction in which the Iranians are heading.
Why is that a problem? Israelis would offer an existential answer — “Because an Iranian nuke would wipe us off the map” — but Europeans have a different reply. They fear a nuclear Tehran would trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, the most volatile region in the world. Even if you accept that Iran has more justification than most for wanting a deterrent, sandwiched between US forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan and with nuclear Pakistan next door, the danger of proliferation is a real one.
Unless Iran manages to allay some of these fears in reports due imminently from the EU’s Javier Solana and from the IAEA, then the debate will remain fixed not on whether there is a problem, but on solutions. Start with the scariest: Military action. Brown was careful not to rule it out — indeed, he even hinted at it: “Iran should be in no doubt about our seriousness of purpose.” But is it really possible?
No one, not even the wildest neocon crazy, is imagining an Iraq-style invasion: America is too stretched, if nothing else. But a series of airstrikes on selected targets, as in 1998’s Desert Fox assault on Iraq, is at least under discussion. One US commentator wrote recently that George Bush and Dick Cheney do not look like men about to leave office without getting this done.
But the plain fact is that Bush lacks the political strength, especially in Congress, to act. Those same military planners are counseling against it, while it’s widely believed that Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, would quit rather than attack Iran. The reasons are obvious: Iran would hit back, through its militias at US troops in Iraq, and through terrorist sleeper cells abroad.
Which means the next 12 months could see the status quo hold, as the international community hopes that the stick of sanctions will make unnecessary the sharper stick of force. So far, their defenders say, sanctions are having an effect.
Some, though none now in the British government, reckon the way to deal with Iran is to shower it with carrots, to hug it into submission. No one in power is arguing for an all-hug strategy just now. Instead, it’s promised as the reward for good behavior. Note Brown’s offer of “a transformed relationship with the world”.
It all adds up to a delicate geometry, in which every element is connected: Sanctions, the possibility of force, and the rewards that will come with compliance. The aim is to alter the Iranian calculus so that pursuing nukes becomes too costly, and giving them up too advantageous, to continue. It’s subtle, tricky work — and as big a test of Brown’s political agility as there will be. Unless something even harder comes along.
