nonproliferation

The Financial Times' Simeon Kerr and Harvey Morris report on one of those stories that the Bush administration would have killed for about, oh, seven years ago: 

The United Arab Emirates has seized a ship secretly carrying embargoed North Korean arms to Iran, say diplomats.

The interception comes at a sensitive time. North Korea has invited the US for bilateral talks on nuclear issues and the UN Security Council’s western members are pressing for greater Iranian co-operation over its nuclear programme.

The UAE has reported the seizure of the vessel to the UN sanctions committee responsible for vetting the implementation of measures, including an arms embargo, imposed against North Korea under Security Council resolution 1874, according to diplomats in New York. The committee, chaired by Turkey, has made no formal announcement about the case.

Diplomats at the UN identified the vessel as the Bahamian-flagged ANL-Australia. The vessel was seized some weeks ago. The UN sanctions committee has written to the Iranian and North Korean governments pointing out that the shipment puts them in violation of UN resolution 1974.

The authorities seized “military components”, but the vessel has since departed, a person familiar with UAE thinking said. The seizure took place in the UAE, but not the shipping hub of Dubai, the person added.

So, in the past two years, North Korea has been linked to arms build-ups in Syria, Myanmar, and Iran. 

Come to think of it, maybe it's not an Axis of Evil so much as North Korea desperately trying to export the one thing they make that has market value. 

Reports like these are actually good news, I suspect.  It suggests that the enhanced sanctions regime is making it tougher for North Korea to export its ilicit wares.  Which means that the status quo favors the other members of the Six-Party Talks more than it favors Pyongyang. 

Gosh, maybe there's something to this containment idea. 

UPDATE:  More info on the shipment itself here. 

My latest bloggingheads diavlog is with David Frum.  We discuss the situations in Iran and North Korea, and whether John Bolton is the Glenn Beck of U.S. foreign policy. 

Reuters' Inal Ersan reports on a shocking announcement from Al Qaeda: 

If it were in a position to do so, Al Qaeda would use Pakistan's nuclear weapons in its fight against the United States, a top leader of the group said in remarks aired Sunday....

"God willing, the nuclear weapons will not fall into the hands of the Americans and the mujahideen would take them and use them against the Americans," Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, the leader of al Qaeda's in Afghanistan, said in an interview with Al Jazeera television.

Well, blow me down!!  I had no idea that this would have been their intent!  It's a good thing Al Qaeda clarified their policy on nuclear weapons, because there had been some ambiguity on the matter.  I, for one, am also unclear about Al Qaeda's position on Israel, or whether they think Adam Lambert got jobbed in American Idol. 

Seriously, there was one interesting wrinkle in the interview:

The militant leader said al Qaeda would be willing to accept a truce of about 10 years' duration with the United States if Washington agreed to withdraw its troops from Muslim countries and stopped backing Israel and the pro-Western governments of Muslim nations.

I'm not saying the United States should take Al Qaeda up on the bargain, but I do find it interesting that they occasionally float bargains like this out there. 

As you can tell from my last post, I think here's an excellent chance that the status quo persists in Iran, with a small chance that the entire edifice crumbles in the wake of a social movement unafraid of security forces.  What does this mean for U.S. foreign policy towards Iran? Here's a dirty little secret -- this might actually be the best possible outcome for the Obama administration. 

Well, not for the next few days. The administration is going to have to tap-dance for the next few days in order to avoid the Schylla of a "Chicken Kiev" moment and the Charybdis of going all in with the reformers only to see them crushed. 

After that, then what? Well, I think the only way the reformers win is with Khamenei going down, which would mean a genuine regime change, which is a game-changer. A new Iranian regime is not going to give up its nuclear program lightly, but I do suspect that negotiations with a reformist regime would be pretty fruitful. 

What if, as I suspect, the current regime keeps its grip on power?  Well, the Obama administration still has a stronger hand to play.  Here's why: 

1)  Tehran's influence in the region is going to ebb. Iran's power in the Middle East in recent years has emanated from a mix of hard power (nuke progam, oil, support of Hebollah) and soft power (Ahmadinejad's economic populism, ranting against corrupt Arab elites, and general pugnaciouness towards Israel).  Regardless of the result now, the election has killed their soft power in the region.  This doesn't mean that Iran's influence disappears -- see all the hard power stuff.  Still, with each passing day of protests, Ahmadinejad looks more like a bully than a leader of a transnational social movement. 

2)  Multilateral coordination just got easier.  Just as with North Korea, it gets ever easier for the United States to create a united front among its allies and other great powers when dealing with Iran going forward.  The reaction in the West has been pretty uniform on the election results.  When the nuclear negotiations break down -- and they will break down -- it should be easier to coordinate both the security and foreign policy responses.

3)  No more two-level games for Iran. If Mousavi had won outright, the Obama administration would have been in a serious bind on the nonproliferation question. The president of Iran doesn't control the nuclear program; the supreme leader controls it. With Mousavi as the public face of Iran, however, it would have been tougher for the Obama administration to describe Iran as unyielding when it refused to make any serious concessions on its nuclear program.  Furthermore, Mousavi could always ask the Obama administration to back off on the nuclear question because of hardliner resistance back home. That gambit won't play, now.

This doesn't mean that nuclear negotiations will go swimmingly -- I expect they will fail.  What it does mean, however, is that the rest of the world will be hard-placed to blame the end of the negotiations on the Obama administration.  Iran is going to look like the intransigent actor from here on in. 

Just to be clear:  I'm not saying that this outcome is a great one for the United States.  Washington has a weak hand to play.  My point is that, compared to the counterfactual of an Iran with Mousavi as its public face and Khamenei remaining the true leader, this is somewhat preferrable. The "pleasing illusions" of clerical power in Iran have now been stripped bare.

My pace on commenting on Iran has been about as sluggish as CNN's.  By my rough estimate, I'm now approximately 4,567 posts behind Andrew Sullivan on the Iran election. Let's try to get back in the game! 

In this post I want to look at what's likely to happen in Iran; the next post will look at what the Obama administration's response. 

OK, so, Iran. There are protests, riots, and Twitters galore -- will it amount to regime change? 

Alas, I think the answer is no.  I don't want this to be the answer.  No matter how I slice the data, however, I get to that outcome.

Let's stiputlate that the election results were rigged.  Here's the question -- why were they so blatant about it?  The speed and skewness of the "official" results seemed design to trigger disbelief. Was that intentional? 

Hey, you know what, I think it was.  University of Chicago political scientist Alberto Simpser has written about why authoritarian leaders like Khamenei would engage in electoral corruption (.pdf). The answer is not pretty: 

[A]n overwhelming victory today can send a powerful signal to the citizenry tomorrow – a large margin of victory can deter opposition turnout, discourage opposition coordination (e.g. when the opposition is fragmented into a number of parties), and increase the winner’s bargaining power with respect to electorally important social actors by rendering it less likely that they are pivotal in a winning coalition.

I suspect that this was the intent in Iran. The question is whether it will work. Khamenei has backtracked a little from his endorsment of Ahmadinejad as the winner, and now wants the Guardian Council to investigate allegations of election fraud. I suspect this is an effort to play for time, however, in order to get his security apparatus prepped for a more brutal crackdown. Twice in the past 10 years (1999 and 2003), this regime has been perfectly willing to crack down on reformist groups to secure its hold on power. I see no reason for Khamenei to hold back this time around. 

In other words, unless Iran's security apparatus starts to split, I don't see how this ends in any outcome other than Khamenei staying in power. 

What does this mean for the rest of the world?  On to the next post! 

In the past 24 hours, there's been some interesting stuff coming out on both North Korea and Israel. 

On the North Korea issue, Bob Gates' chat with an FT reporter is worth reading just to savor the man's obvious efforts to signal to the North Koreans that they can't control the agenda.  However, Mark Landler and David Sanger's New York Times story today suggests that China is thinking about putting the economic and financial hurt on North Korea. 

Meanwhile, the United States and Israel appear to be at loggerheads on the question of West Bank settlements.  This is particularly interesting: 

[T]he tenor of Mrs. Clinton’s comments Wednesday indicated to some analysts that the Obama administration was unlikely to budge from its position, even at the risk of putting Mr. Netanyahu’s government into jeopardy.

“She is stripping away whatever nuance, or whatever fig leaf, that would have allowed a deeply ideological government to make a settlement deal that is politically acceptable at home,” said Aaron David Miller, a public policy analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “They’ve concluded, ‘We’re going to force a change in behavior.’”

Within the Israeli government, however, there is a consensus that the ever-growing settler population must be accommodated.

No one is talking about sanctions just yet on Israel, but the historical precedent here is telling.  The last time the U.S. sanctioned Israel was in 1991 on the question of housing settlements.  The eventual result was the fall of the Yitzhak Shamir government. 

So China is contemplating sanctions against North Korea, and the United States a step away from doing the same thing vis-a-vis Israel.  This highlights a cruel irony when it comes to the use of economic pressure -- it works on your friends a lot better than it does against your foes. 

[I see where this is going.  Stop it!--ed.]  Of course, countries are understandably more reluctant to pressure their allies than their adversaries.  [I'm warning you!--ed.]  Why, it's almost like there's a paradox when it comes to economic sanctions.  [All right, that's it, this ridiculously self-promotional blog post is over!!--ed.]

UPDATE:  Ed Morse and Michael Makovsky have an excellent essay in The New Republic on the prospects of sanctioning Iran. 

By Daniel W. Drezner

I think the Obama administration has come up with a novel way of dealing with the North Koreans -- get everyone to talk about something else. 

Half-seriously, this is not a bad idea, because I'm not sure that anything else is going to work better (beyond my modest Britney Spears proposal).  For this decade, the following facts have held: 

1. North Korea wants to be able to trade its nuclear program for security guarantees and cash -- and then be able to do it again a few years later.
2. The leadership in Pyongyang is perfectly willing to starve its own population rather than concede a smidgen of autonomy.
3. No one is entirely sure about the internal politics of the DPRK elite.  This includes China, by the way. 
4. None of the actors in the region want North Korea to collapse.  China and Russia likes the buffer, Seoul doesn't want to pony up the cash for reunification, and Japan (and China) doesn't want a unified Korean peninsula. 
5. None of the actors in the region really want North Korea to proliferate either, but that's less important than a collapsing North Korea.  Proliferation is Somebody Else's Problem -- i.e., the Middle East rather than Northeast Asia. 
6. So, oddly enough, the ideal short-term solution for the region is for the continued existence of the DPRK regime, the absence of any new nuclear activity, and some kid of "strategic ambiguity" regarding North Korea's nuclear status. 
7. The alternatives to the repeated short-term carrot strategy are even less appealing.  There is no viable military option unless everyone is comfortable with the destruction of Seoul; there is no viable sanctions option unless China decides to cut off the energy tap, and they'll only do this if they're sure it won't lead to a stream of North Korea refugees entering Manchuria. 

The one thing that seems different this time around is that North Korea is really pulling out the stops this time to strip away the "pleasing illusion" that the U.N. Security Council will do something.  Paradoxically, this might actually goad China and Russia into doing something -- sanctions that might increase the likelihood of a DPRK collapse but also increase the likelihood of Pyongyang altering its behavior before that happens. 

If I, rather than my boss, were advising the Obama administration on this issue, the one other deliverable I would aim for in response to this latest provocation would be to get China to join the Proliferation Security Initiative.  China has resisted this for a whole bunch of reasons unrelated to North Korea.  If Beijing were to reverse course, it would make it much easier to engage in interdiction activities along North Korea's coast.  It would also signal to Pyongyang that, yes, there actually are some serious costs to thumbing one's nose at the U.N. Security Council.   

Am I missing anything?   

Bloggers at Foreign Policy and elsewhere have discovered Strange New Respect for IHT/NYT columnist Roger Cohen.  Cohen has been writing a fair amount about the Middle East as of late.  I've been, well, less enamored of Cohen's writing, though in fairness to him I'm tough on all foreign affairs columnists. 

This brings us to today's Cohen column, and the paradox contained in his last few paragraphs.  Cohen's recent columns have been all about his trip to Iran, in which he accurately described a country that was not spending every waking moment plotting to destroy the United States.

Today's column points to the pragmatism of Iran's leadership and urges the United States to be equally pragmatic:

Pragmatism is also one way of looking at Iran’s nuclear program. A state facing a nuclear-armed Israel and Pakistan, American invasions in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, and noting North Korea’s immunity from assault, might reasonably conclude that preserving the revolution requires nuclear resolve.

What’s required is American pragmatism in return, one that convinces the mullahs that their survival is served by stopping short of a bomb.

I completely agree with the first excerpted paragraph of Cohen's column -- which is why I don't buy the second paragraph. 

As Cohen ably demonstrates, Iran's leadership sees a lot of threats in its near abroad and recognizes the utility of a nuclear deterrent.  What can the United States possibly offer that would convince Iran's mullahs to give that up? 

Security guarantees?  Accepting those is not terribly pragmatic from Iran's perspective.  Why should Iran trust the United States' word on this?  From Tehran's perspective, would you trust the ability of the Obama administraion to rein in Israel? 

The lifting of financial sanctions?  As Iran's mullahs might put this, whoop-dee-frickin-doo.  Rachel Loeffler argues that these sanctions carry some bite, but the nuclear program is a domestic crowd-pleaser and offers the hope of policy autonomy that a lifting of sanctions does not provide.  The only sanction that would really hurt Tehran enough to buckle is a gasoline embargo, and the Russians and Chinese will never sign on to one of those. 

Pragmatically, I seriously doubt that the United States can offer anything to get Tehran to halt its nuclear program.  This leads to one of two possible decisions:  pre-emptive action to delay the program, or accepting the inevitable. 

Contra Cohen, the most pragmatic thing for the United States to do is to expect nothing fruitful to come from negotiations with Iran -- and to (nonviolently) prepare for the contingency of a nuclear Iran.  

A question to my realist colleagues here at FP -- why on God's green earth would Iran ever accede to an agreement whereby it gives up any autonomy in its nuclear program?