Iran’s hard-line leaders will aim to gain time for the nation’s nuclear program at talks with six world powers in Geneva on Thursday and to shore up their own credibility at home after months of postelection turmoil.
Despite the risk of harsher sanctions, Iranian leaders may feel more confident dealing with matters of national pride, prestige and military deterrence than with the internal schisms exposed by the disputed presidential vote in June.
“The leadership can go to the negotiations more sure-footed than at any time since the election,” said Iran analyst Baqer Moin, noting that Tehran had long used external crises to paper over internal divisions. “Because there is no trust on either side, buying time is their only strategy.” This week’s Iranian missile tests displayed customary defiance just days after Western nations seized on Tehran’s disclosure of a second uranium enrichment plant to press demands for Iran to give UN inspectors more information and access.
That said, Iranian leaders will try to prevent any consensus growing among major powers for tougher international sanctions over nuclear work that the West suspects is aimed at building a bomb-making capacity, not just power plants as Tehran says.
“They are willing to concede as much as is needed to avoid China and Russia joining them (the West), without compromising on enrichment,” Moin said. “That has to be their red line.”
Iran’s hard-line leadership was shaken by the postelection unrest, but normality has returned to the streets after the unprecedented mass rallies against the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And splits within the ruling system have yet to heal after some prominent politicians and clerics implicitly or openly criticized supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s handling of the gravest domestic crisis since the 1979 revolution.
Khamenei may calculate he can regain support by defending Iran’s nuclear plans against the US and its allies. “The nuclear program continues to speak to the national elements of Iranian identity,” argued Gala Riani in a note for IHS Global Insight, a London-based analysis firm. “It is also tightly connected with the current regime’s struggle for legitimacy. Amid Iran’s domestic political divides it is an ever potent and needed tool to forge domestic unity.” Iran’s opposition leaders have criticized Ahmadinejad’s strident nuclear rhetoric — but not the program itself.
China and Russia have often balked in the past at proposals to toughen sanctions broadly favored by the US and its European allies, France, Britain and Germany.
US President Barack Obama, jolted by Iran’s cold shoulder to his early overtures and upbraided for his own measured response to the postelection ferment in Iran, will look to the Geneva talks for any sign that Tehran is ready for the broader dialogue he had envisioned to calm decades of mutual rancor. That idea had the appeal of transcending the debate over more sanctions — which might hurt the Iranian people without making their leaders alter course — and the troublesome options of military action or living with a nuclear-capable Iran.
For Iranian hard-liners, engaging the West is problematic and their goals cut across some US interests in the Mideast. Iranian leaders wanted the security and economic benefits that might flow from a rapprochement, but were wary of Western cultural and political influences.
“An opening to the West could gradually erode the foundations of the country, which is at its core an anti-Western revolutionary entity,” he said.
Moin said the West needed a clear strategy and a joint approach with Russia and China, but questioned whether the US could give Iran the regional recognition it craved without antagonizing its own Israeli and Arab allies.
“What we will see in these negotiations is whether there is any indication of any approach toward gradual building of confidence or not,” he added.
