Watching foreign diplomats run circles around America’s striped pants set is always a depressing spectacle. In recent days we’ve been treated to some doozies—for instance, Iran being elected to the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women when our own (female) U.N. ambassador didn’t show up for the vote.
But that is nothing compared to what is going on down the hall at the Review Conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Held every five years, the conference is supposed to identify gaps in the treaty’s implementation and suggest fixes. Everyone knows what the gaps are. Indeed, for all practical purposes, there is only one, a loophole so wide you could steam a nuclear-powered submarine through it.
The treaty not only explicitly allows countries to master technology that could be used either to generate power or build weapons, it obligates nuclear-savvy nations to help the nuclear neophytes develop that technology. Hence a duplicitous country can, aided by other parties to the NPT, do virtually everything necessary for building a nuclear weapon and, so long as it refrains from taking the final few steps, remain in full compliance with the NPT—and then withdraw at the last minute and build nukes. Which is exactly what North Korea did and what Iran is on the verge of doing.
Seems like a big problem, no? The Bush administration recognized it as such and at the last conference in 2005 proposed a series of steps that would have gone a long way toward closing this loophole. Unsurprisingly, none were adopted. As President Obama’s nuclear czar Gary Samore has accurately noted, fixing the NPT is “harder than changing the U.S. Constitution.” Diplomats in other countries are not fools. They know how good they have it under the current terms of the treaty and are in no rush to alter a single word.
Thus the Obama administration has understandably shown up for the current conference without an ambitious reform agenda in hand. Rather, officials intended to put the focus, justifiably, on Tehran. “This meeting is all about Iran,” one White House official said. “We’re not going to permit Iran to try to change the story from their failure to comply,” Secretary of State Clinton declared.
In a very narrow sense, her words have been vindicated. Iran hasn’t changed the story—leaving aside the fiery, defiant Monday speech by Iranian strongman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But Iran didn’t have to do anything. Egypt did the dirty work on Tehran’s behalf. And the Obama administration went along with it.
To understand what happened, it’s necessary to take a brief excursion back to the salad days of the mid-1990s—the decade that George F. Will described, on September 12, 2001, as America’s “holiday from history.” The NPT was set to expire in 1995. President Bill Clinton desperately wanted an extension. In order to get it, he needed buy-in from the “non-aligned” movement states, and in particular from the Arabs. Hence he pledged that the United States would back a resolution calling for a “weapons of mass destruction-free zone” in the Middle East.
If this sounds like a gesture packed with many of the worst trademarks of Clintonism—devoid of substance, unenforceable, pleasant sounding, impeccably uncontroversial (who could be for WMD?), oblivious to practical realities, at once utopian and banal—that’s because it was.
But it was more than that. It was also an attempt by Arab states to put pressure on the only nuclear power in the region—Israel. Clinton went along in all likelihood because he calculated that the gesture’s very emptiness posed no real threat to Israeli security. If so, he would have been only partly correct.
It’s true that the resolution had no effect on Israel’s military posture and no power to change anything. However, for a state that routinely absorbs many multiples of its fair share of diplomatic blows, further isolation of this kind is not trivial, especially when that isolation is abetted by its only real ally. Worse, the resolution went beyond moral equivalence and into outright blame, implicitly fingering Israel—a tiny country under constant threat of annihilation, almost destroyed at least three times by neighboring armies in its short existence—as the bad guy in the Middle East’s WMD story. In the main, though, Clinton was right: Nothing really came of it and the whole episode was soon forgotten. There things lay for 15 years. Until this week.
As its opening gambit at the current NPT conference, Egypt revived the idea and convinced the five permanent members of the Security Council—including the United States—to issue a joint statement reiterating their support for the earlier resolution. Voilà! Rather than the conference being, in the White House’s words, “all about Iran,” suddenly it was once again all about the U.N.’s traditional bogeyman.
Israel, of course, is not going to unilaterally disarm, no matter what this or any other resolution says. Perhaps if Tehran reversed course on its nuclear program and the other Arab states formally recognized Israel some modest progress could begin.
If anything, by giving diplomatic cover to Tehran, this move actually solidifies Israeli determination and raises Israeli suspicion. Whatever one thinks about the original Israeli rationale for going nuclear, it’s impossible not to sympathize with and understand Jerusalem’s fear of a nuclear Iran. We are constantly assured that the Sunni Arab states privately fear a Shia Persian bomb as much as or more than the Jewish state does. After watching this latest maneuver from one of the two leading Sunni Arab states, Jerusalem can be forgiven for wondering how seriously to take that bit of conventional wisdom. One Israeli official did his best to put a positive spin on the development. The Egyptians, he said, “know Iran is the problem, but they feel they can’t support a campaign against Iran without also putting pressure on Israel.” Or maybe as much as they distrust Iran, ancient hatred for Israel trumps all.
Right now, plans for implementation are in the early stages and include a possible future conference dedicated solely to this issue and the appointment of a U.N. “special coordinator”—both measures that would accomplish nothing practical but would very efficiently keep the focus and the headlines where they least belong. Which is of course the whole point.
What might have been excused as an empty gesture in 1995 is a dangerous diplomatic mistake in 2010. This time there really is a nuclear threat to the security of the Middle East, to U.S. allies and forces, and (not incidentally) to the credibility of the Nonproliferation Treaty—and it comes from Tehran, not Jerusalem. Changing the focus of the conference from one to the other was a diplomatic master-stroke on Cairo’s part but a disaster for American interests. The Obama administration has amply demonstrated that it will take not one step beyond “diplomacy” in any effort to stop an Iranian bomb. If this is what Obama diplomacy looks like, we are stepping backward.
Michael Anton served in national security positions in the recent Bush administration.
