Two meetings in the coming week could have significant consequences for the standoff over Iran’s nuclear programme: the first, in Vienna, is yet another meeting between Iranian negotiators and their counterparts from the P5+1 group, seeking an agreement on Iran’s uranium-enrichment programme in exchange for sanctions relief. No agreement seems imminent, but both sides would face political challenges if they accept a further extension of the November 24 deadline for a deal.
The second meeting, in London on October 14, is the Europe-Iran investment conference, at which officials from Iranian banks and corporations will solicit capital from investors, presenting their country as a great opportunity for those seeking profits in emerging markets.
The prospects for the London meeting producing any rush to invest in Iran would, supposedly, depend heavily on the outcome of the Vienna meeting. After all, the US and its allies have made clear that sanctions relief can only come if Iran satisfies western concerns regarding its nuclear activities.
But even if the Iran nuclear stalemate has remained largely static, the regional and global context around it continues to shift.
Washington likes to imagine that Tehran is internationally isolated, and will remain in an ever-tightening economic and diplomatic chokehold until it complies with western demands. But there’s growing evidence to the contrary: last month, China’s navy conducted its first-ever joint exercises with Iran’s fleet. That came a month after Russia had announced the purchase of 500,000 barrels of Iranian oil (with an option for more) not for its domestic use, but for resale on world markets. And Iran continues to supply one million barrels a day to China and India, between them, on the basis of a waiver of US sanctions.
The sanctions on the energy and banking sectors that have done most damage to Iran’s economy were never adopted by the UN Security Council and do not have the force of international law. They are kept in place by the ability of the US to persuade countries who don’t necessarily support the sanctions to refrain from trading with Iran for fear of being shut out of the US banking system, which remains the gatekeeper to a dollar-denominated world economy.
It’s not hard to see why Russia and China have less regard for US-EU unilateral measures today than they did even five years ago. Beijing is antagonised by US intervention in China’s disputes with neighbours over various properties in the South China Sea. Russia itself has become the target of US-EU sanctions over Ukraine and therefore has precious little incentive to cooperate in making such measures work against Iran. Both countries are increasingly coordinating their foreign policy positions to challenge those of the US, and together with others are working to end the dominance of the dollar as the global reserve currency – a status that gives the US the power to coerce many other countries to heed sanctions they may oppose.
Through no doing of its own, Iran has seen the global context change in its favour over the course of the standoff. It may be more confident now of taking advantage of shifting tides elsewhere to loosen the grip of sanctions regardless of the outcome of negotiations with the P5+1.
Russia, China and most of the international community have never embraced the alarmist view of some US allies that paints Iran as racing to build atomic weapons, although they will insist that Tehran meet its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The NPT does not, of course, preclude Iran from enriching uranium for energy purposes under the scrutiny of the IAEA, as it currently does. The question being negotiated is how far Iran has to go above and beyond the terms of the NPT to satisfy western concerns of possible military intent.
That may be a shifting target, depending on the geopolitical balance.
What’s often forgotten is that the NPT, which took effect in 1970, had two sides: signatories without nuclear weapons would refrain from seeking them and accept measures to verify their restraint, while nuclear-armed signatories would move quickly and in good faith to a negotiated complete nuclear disarmament.
Iran could legitimately complain that while it faces draconian sanctions for building dual-use technologies permitted under the NPT, it is being pressed hardest by nuclear armed countries that either refused to sign the treaty (Israel) or violate its spirit by their failure to take meaningful steps towards disarmament (France and the US).
Barack Obama may have spoken loftily about the goal of disarmament, but he recently ordered a wide-ranging modernisation of the US nuclear arsenal – including the development of a new generation of delivery systems of these ultimate weapons of mass destruction – that will, according to a US government study, cost America up to $1 trillion over the next three decades.
The Russians, for their part, are testing delivery systems again, and are currently reported to have more nuclear warheads (8,000) than the Americans do (7,300). France is believed to have 300, China 250, and Britain 225. Germany is the only country in the P5+1 without nuclear weapons.
And while those countries might share a consensus on not discussing their disarmament obligations under the NPT, the rest of the world has not forgotten.
The New Agenda Coalition – Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand and South Africa – for example, routinely upbraid the nuclear armed countries of their failure to meet their own NPT obligations. And, of course, it’s on the cooperation of countries outside of the P5+1 that US sanctions against Iran depend. Many of them don’t see the Iran nuclear issue in the same way that western powers do – and their weakness relative to those powers makes them intimately aware of shifting balances of global power. More aware, in fact, than policymakers in the West may be. Tony Karon teaches in the graduate programme at the New School in New York
