Lewis Page
ABOVE: A British arms industry exhibition in London
Britain’s next government will be forced to reduce spending. But given the wide agrement that these cuts should not affect the NHS or social security, the smallish departments, like the ministry of defence (responsible for about 5 per cent of spending) seem the likely targets. A 10 per cent cut at the MoD (some £4bn a year), is on the cards. At the same time, the main political parties agree that the 1998 strategic defence review (SDR), still the main guide to policy, also needs rewriting.
This worries many in the defence sector. The SDR promised that Britain would keep the ability to intervene militarily around the world. A secondary document, the defence industrial strategy (DIS) of 2005, guaranteed the continued existence of Britain’s arms industry. But with a new defence review and cuts in funding, one of those will have to go. And the arms industry is right to fear that the British people would prefer to keep their excellent armed forces, and jettison their economically insignificant, parasitical defence industry.
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Francis Fukuyama
The apparently successful testing of a nuclear weapon by North Korea has raised the issue of proliferation in the region and, in particular, the question of Japanese rearmament. In this context it is worth considering the recent election of Shinzo Abe to leader of Japan’s Liberal Democratic party (LDP), and therefore prime minister. Abe’s predecessor Junichiro Koizumi was a bold leader, who brought the Japanese economy out of the doldrums and smashed the LDP’s faction system. But he also legitimised a new Japanese nationalism. Abe is, if anything, even more committed to building an assertive and unapologetic Japan than Koizumi, who for the past five years has managed to antagonise China and South Korea with his annual visits to the Yasukuni shrine.
Anyone inclined to think that the controversy over Yasukuni is an obscure historical matter that the Chinese and the Koreans use to badger Japan for political advantage has probably never spent much time there. The problem is not the fact that 12 Class-A war criminals are interred in Yasukuni; the real problem is the Yushukan military museum next to it, which is operated by a private religious foundation. Walking past the tanks and machine guns, one finds a history of the Pacific war which, the museum proudly explains, restores “the truth of modern Japanese history.” It follows the nationalist narrative according to which Japan was a victim of the European colonial powers, one that sought only to protect the rest of Asia from them. It describes Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea, for example, as a “partnership.” One looks in vain for any account of the victims of Japanese militarism in Nanjing or Manila.
One might be able to defend the museum as one point of view among many, but for the fact that there is no other museum in Japan that gives an alternative view of 20th-century Japanese history. Successive Japanese administrations have hidden behind the fact that the Yushukan museum is run by a religious organisation to wash their hands of responsibility for the views expressed there. But the truth is that Japan, unlike Germany, has never come to terms with its responsibility for the Pacific war. It has never had a real internal debate and never tried to propagate an alternative account from that of Yushukan to its young people.
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Mark Fitzpatrick
North Korea’s nuclear test alters the balance of power in northeast Asia. In every other field—economics, culture, diplomacy, biotechnology and IT, to name a few—the gap between the impoverished citizens of Kim Jong-Il’s regime and their world-class southern kinsmen could hardly be greater. The north’s ageing conventional military capabilities have also fallen far behind the south. But now North Korea boasts of possessing the ultimate equaliser. The suggestion that the explosion was merely a large quantity of TNT cannot be dismissed entirely without air sampling data, but it is implausible that North Korea would fake what was a technical failure judging from the sub-kiloton yield—eight to ten times less bang than what would have been planned.
Despite the successful test, it is questionable whether North Korea has the means of delivering a nuclear weapon. Miniaturising the weapon for delivery with a ballistic missile is no easy task. The bomb design that Libya received from the AQ Khan network, which North Korea may have bought as well, would not fit on North Korea’s Scud, Nodong or Taepodong missiles. North Korea had trouble enough getting the bomb to work at all, let along miniaturising it. Any plane or ship that North Korea outfitted with a nuclear weapon for a suicide attack would be detected and stopped before it reached its intended target. The only way North Korea today could deliver a nuclear weapon would be overland to the 38th parallel border with South Korea, an unlikely scenario in which casualties and fallout would affect as many Koreans in the north as in the south.
The test will strengthen the new Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s push to give Japan’s Self-Defence Forces a proper military role that would be normal in any other country but that is unfairly cast as “remilitarisation” by many Chinese and Koreans. The key question is the extent to which North Korea’s test will strengthen those inside Japan who argue that the country should consider its own nuclear weapons option. The answer is probably that going nuclear will remain a minority preference as long as the Japanese believe they are covered by America’s nuclear umbrella. The Japan-US security alliance is stronger than ever and America is speeding up delivery to Japan of Patriot missile defence systems that can provide protection to individual locations.
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Michael MccGwire
The exchange between Lewis Page and Rodric Braithwaite over the future of Britain’s nuclear deterrent proved disappointing, since neither party addressed the fundamental question of whether a nuclear capability continues to be in our wider interests.
Braithwaite considers the need for a British nuclear deterrent to be unproven, but he also believes that no political party will expose its electoral flank by renouncing our nuclear capability. Some form of replacement being inevitable, Braithwaite’s objective is to limit the damage to British national interests that stems from our nuclear thralldom to the US. He argues for cruise missiles, which are inherently flexible and would not depend on US technological support and political approval.
Lewis Page is a firm supporter of Trident replacement and believes that only ballistic missiles can provide a credible delivery system. He sees a nuclear deterrent as the all-purpose answer to an unpredictable future, but is weak on geostrategy and seems to believe that because a threat is conceivable it is therefore a live possibility.
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Philip Gordon
Other articles in the Prospect online symposium on the Iranian nuclear crisis:
Mark Fitzpatrick examines Iran’s nuclear process
Michael Rubin argues that diplomacy is not enough
Alastair Crooke says that the west are trampling over Iran’s rights
Nazenin Ansari suggests that the Iranian state may be susceptible to sanctions
Esther Herman on her encounters with everyday Iranians
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As I discovered on a recent trip to London, it’s not easy for an American these days to convince his European colleagues that the US is unlikely to attack Iran’s nuclear sites any time soon. Given the Iraq precedent, and with senior US officials now regularly coming forward with similarly dire warnings about the Iranian threat, Europeans are understandably inclined to believe reports—such as those recently published by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker—that Washington is getting ready to bomb Iran, possibly even with tactical nuclear weapons.
It would be foolish to take these concerns lightly. President Bush has vowed never to “permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons,” and he has proven to be a leader willing to implement his threats even in the face of considerable international and domestic opposition. He may be convinced that only he has the courage to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat and that only an American military attack can reliably do so once diplomatic efforts have been tried and failed. With presumed Democratic presidential candidates like Senators Hilary Clinton and Evan Bayh already attacking the administration for its failure to do anything about Iran, and the increasingly unpopular Republican party in need of a boost, the politics of the 2008 presidential election might also push America in the direction of a military confrontation with Iran.
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Alastair Crooke
Other articles in the Prospect online symposium on the Iranian nuclear crisis:
Philip Gordon explains why the US is unlikely to bomb Iran
Michael Rubin argues that diplomacy is not enough
Mark Fitzpatrick examines Iran’s nuclear progress
Nazenin Ansari suggests that the Iranian state may be susceptible to sanctions
Esther Herman on her encounters with everyday Iranians
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The struggle with Iran over nuclear issues is usually portrayed in the west as a reasonable effort to force Iran to comply with its international agreements. But the agreement at stake here, the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), is not as straightforward as it seems. What we are also witnessing is the playing out of a US controversy dating back to 1967, when the father of US nuclear doctrine, Albert Wohlstetter, made a speech in which he argued darkly that: “An essential trouble with nuclear ploughshares… is that they can be beaten into nuclear swords.”
When the NPT came into force in 1970, the central bargain was between the five nuclear-weapon powers on one hand, and the non-nuclear states on the other. The have-nots agreed to renounce their right to weapons, but only in return for the right to develop the peaceful use of nuclear energy. At the core of the NPT is Article IV, which gives all signatories the “inalienable right… to develop, research, produce and use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes” and to acquire technology to this effect from fellow signatories. Equally important, in return for the have-nots’ renunciation of weapons, the “haves” agreed not to use their stocks of weapons to blackmail the have-nots, and ultimately to get rid of their weapons (Article VI). These are the two pillars of the non-proliferation system.
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Mark Fitzpatrick
Other articles in the Prospect online symposium on the Iranian nuclear crisis:
Philip Gordon explains why the US is unlikely to bomb Iran
Michael Rubin argues that diplomacy is not enough
Alastair Crooke says that the west are trampling over Iran’s rights
Nazenin Ansari suggests that the Iranian state may be susceptible to sanctions
Esther Herman on her encounters with everyday Iranians
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Anyone seeking to build a nuclear weapon needs two things: 1) enough fissile material for a critical mass (either 20-25kg of highly enriched uranium, the material used in the Hiroshima A-bomb, or 6-8kg of plutonium, as used in Nagasaki) and 2) a “weaponisation” package for a controlled fission reaction. They will also need a delivery vehicle—typically an aircraft or ballistic missile, but a suicide vessel or truck would do.
In the case of Iran, attention has focused on its uranium enrichment programme. Uranium enrichment involves increasing the concentration of fissile U-235 in uranium. What does this mean? The U-235 isotope makes up 0.7 per cent of naturally occurring uranium. U-235 is an isotope that will split, or fission, when struck by a loose neutron, emitting radiation energy and more neutrons that can split other atoms in a chain reaction. (Isotopes are atoms of a given element with the same chemical make-up and the same number of protons but varying numbers of neutrons. The number after the chemical symbol—U in uranium’s case—is the atomic mass, the number of protons and neutrons, and is used to denote different isotopes.) But the bulk of natural uranium is the stable U-238 isotope, which cannot sustain a chain reaction. The point of the process of enrichment is to increase the concentration of U-235.
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Michael Axworthy
The Iranians are resuming uranium enrichment, the IAEA has agreed to refer Iran to the UN security council and talks aimed at resolving the problem keep breaking down. Another Iran crisis. The west usually gets Iran crises wrong. We got it wrong in 1953 when we—the US and Britain—removed a democratically elected prime minister, Muhammad Mosaddeq, rubbing out any chance of genuinely democratic politics in Iran for a generation. And we got it wrong a number of times when, after 1979, fear of revolutionary Iran expanding its influence in the region led us to indirectly help in the creation of two of our biggest foreign policy headaches of the last half century—Saddam Hussein in Iraq and al Qaeda during the civil war in Afghanistan.
In both these places we tried to constrain Iranian influence: eventually in both cases we had to accept it and work with it. In Afghanistan we had to invade and support the Iran-backed Northern Alliance to defeat the Taleban, and in Iraq now our position is only tenable as long as the Iran-backed Shias co-operate. Is there a message in this for the nuclear crisis? Might it not be better to accept the inevitable earlier rather than later? Many of our past errors in handling Iran were made for reasons that seemed compelling at the time. But we can see with hindsight that they were nonetheless errors, and in dealing with the current crisis, we should try to learn from them.
It is quite rational for the Iranians to want their own nuclear deterrent. Look at Iran’s neighbours—Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Pakistan to name but four; unstable to lesser or greater degrees, several of them containing groups who hate Shia Muslims as much as they hate the US. Iran is the only country in the world to have had weapons of mass destruction used against it in the last 30 years (by Saddam). On the other hand, Iran is a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and we should expect it to meet its treaty obligations. Israeli concern at the prospect of a nuclear Iran is understandable. From a distance, we can take President Ahmadinejad’s statements about Israel and the Holocaust as empty rhetoric. Up close, the Israelis have to take them more seriously.
So where does this leave the west? Some commentators have suggested that Iran is in a pre-revolutionary situation, and that all that is necessary to tip things over the edge is a nudge from air strikes or economic sanctions, after which the Iranian people will rise up and depose the mullahs. But this is rather like proposing to shake up a kaleidoscope in the hope of getting a Titian. For one thing, a revolution is a great educator—for the people that live through it—about the dangers of revolutions. Iranians don’t want to go through 1979 again. One reason the liberal President Khatami, who held power from 1997-2005, failed to follow through on his promises for reform was that he had a well-founded dislike of political violence, and would not push his disputes with the hardline leadership too far. It is far from certain that another revolution in Iran would produce anything better than the current regime. Others have suggested that the west could encourage regional tensions within Iran and destroy the regime that way. And thereby create another Yugoslavia, or another Iraq? This is hardly a recipe for stability.
Moreover, both air strikes and sanctions are very blunt instruments. Because nuclear development activities are easily dispersed to a multitude of separate, secret, protected sites, air strikes could not halt a nuclear weapons programme. They would be a mere gesture, pointless unless we were prepared to subsequently escalate to a degree that would be politically impossible after Iraq. As for sanctions, from an Iranian perspective—meaning the people rather than their government—imposing sanctions would look like bullying. The Iranians have a deep cultural dislike of arrogance and bullying, which derives from the long history of Shiism as the faith of a persecuted minority within Islam. There are perhaps no people in the world less likely to be persuaded out of what they perceive to be a just cause—ordinary Iranians strongly believe they are entitled to peaceful nuclear power—by threats and coercion. And rather like Fidel Castro blaming Cuba’s economic decline on the US embargo, imposing sanctions on Iran could provide President Ahmadinejad with a nice alibi for failing to deliver on the big economic promises he made during last year’s election campaign for redistribution of wealth and improvement in living standards for the poor. For Ahmadinejad and the other Iranian leaders, the nuclear confrontation looks like heads you lose, tails we win.
But Iran is a complex place, and demands more care and subtlety than we have sometimes given it. It is true that western observers overestimated the liberal, reformist movement in Iran in the Khatami period, and thus were surprised by Ahmadinejad’s election victory last year. But we are in danger of getting Ahmadinejad wrong too. He is no Stalin, as Niall Ferguson suggested in the Sunday Telegraph last summer. Everyday government in Iran has been in confusion since his election. Ahmadinejad’s relationships with the other personalities in the Iranian leadership are troubled, and in his first six months in power, the Iranian parliament repeatedly rejected his nominations for oil minister and other cabinet members. This is not a situation Stalin would have tolerated for a moment.
Meanwhile, the electoral arithmetic suggests that Ahmadinejad’s support may be less strong than it seems. He owes part of his electoral success to a boycott of the elections by many reformist voters. Ahmadinejad won last year with the support of less than 40 per cent of eligible voters, even after suspected vote-rigging and stuffed ballots. Of the votes he won, by a clever campaign that appealed particularly to the poor and unemployed, many were given to him because he was not a mullah. The reformists have not performed well. But they still represent the basic attitudes of many Iranians, especially the young.
So it may be time for some imagination and risk-taking on the west’s part. The EU has failed to persuade the Iranians to do the right thing, so now is the time for the US to attempt it directly, and allow the Iranians to talk to the organ-grinder rather than the monkey. Given the level of anti-Iranian feeling in the US over many years, such a move would be politically risky, but if the continuing talks with North Korea can be justified, then so can a similar effort with Iran. The US should offer direct talks to resolve the problem, and the resumption of full US/Iran diplomatic relations, not as a bonbon for good behaviour, but in a mature way, recognising the true purpose of diplomacy: authoritative, direct communication in difficult circumstances. American diplomats should offer resolution of outstanding debt problems and other disputes, in order to show the Iranian people that they are doing everything possible to resolve the problem with the hardline regime.
Unlike other peoples in the middle east, ordinary Iranians tend to be pro-US and pro-Europe. Mosque attendance levels are low, reflecting widespread disillusionment with theocratic rule, especially among the young. This also sets many Iranians apart from young Muslims elsewhere, for whom Islamic fundamentalism can look like the only viable future. So a resumption of normal relations with the US could well prove popular with ordinary Iranians.
The US government could attempt to negotiate initially on the basis of allowing the Iranians an autonomous, peaceful nuclear programme, subject to UN monitoring at whatever level necessary to ensure nuclear weapons cannot be developed. The Iranians and Russians appear to have made some progress in this direction already. A serious attempt by the US at engagement and negotiation would have the effect of calling the Iranian government’s bluff, and give us a chance of detaching them from the support of the Iranian people. More widely, with seemingly ever-growing tension between the west and Islam, it could only do good for the US to be seen to be talking to a major Islamic country to resolve a problem, rather than threatening or bombing it.
Iran is central to a vital region of the world, and whatever happens in that region over the next 20 years, Iran is going to play a major role in it. Whatever we do about their nuclear programme now, it makes sense to avoid action that would ensure the enmity of the Iranian people over that period. And the chances of a friendly government eventually emerging there are much higher if we avoid attempting to bully them with little prospect of success now. Let’s not make any more mistakes.
Mark Leonard
One of the most significant geopolitical events of the decade has gone almost un-noticed in the west: at September’s meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, India joined the US and the EU in backing a resolution condemning Iran’s nuclear programme.
In deciding to vote with the west—rather than abstaining with Russia, China, Brazil and South Africa—India signalled its willingness to join the top table of international diplomacy and to abandon its automatic solidarity with the developing world.
Western diplomats, who expect Delhi to repeat the move at the IAEA’s next meeting in November, are delighted. A French diplomat said that India has traditionally adopted the foreign policy of a porcupine: it is prickly and hides in a cave, especially when Pakistan is mentioned. The west’s policy, he claims, has been to coax India out of its cave. At the IAEA’s board meeting, Delhi bid farewell to its troglodyte existence with a dramatic flourish.
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Steven Everts
Eclipsed for the past 18 months by the Iraq crisis, Iran is rising to the top of the international agenda. Foreign ministries are assigning their best and brightest to the job of devising a coherent strategy. This is just as well, since dealing with Iran is a bit like playing three-dimensional chess. The west is pursuing multiple, potentially conflicting objectives with a country whose politics are in flux and whose leaders oscillate between hostility and pragmatism. The stated aims of preventing a nuclear Iran, promoting democratic reforms and ending Tehran’s support for terrorist groups sound reasonable enough. The difficulty is that they sometimes conflict: doing a deal with the conservative establishment on Iran’s nuclear programme will be necessary to ensure any agreement is implemented. But this will strengthen the hardliners’ grip and weaken the reformist camp further. Conversely, highlighting the need for regime change, and perhaps acting on it, removes any incentive for the regime to comply with various international demands.
All this, of course, sounds very familiar: regime change, weapons of mass destruction, non-compliance, transatlantic rift, Britain’s choice. However, analogies with the Iraq crisis can be misleading. Iran, unlike Iraq, has no habit of invading its neighbours. There is therefore no comparable set of UN resolutions, and no record of 12 years of UN-mandated sanctions and inspections. As for the domestic scene, disillusionment and anger at the deadlock between reformers and conservatives are certainly rising. None the less, Iran today has a much more pluralistic political landscape than Iraq ever had under Saddam Hussein. The international political geography is different too. First, the big international players – the US, Europe, Russia and Japan – are closer than they were on Iraq. All suspect Iran is developing nuclear weapons, and that concerted international action is needed to prevent this. Second, to the extent that differences in policy exist between the US and Europe – and they do – this time Britain is on the European side.
For the time being, Iran has probably done enough to avoid being declared in breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog. And Washington is reluctant to push the issue to crisis point right now. It has its hands more than full in Iraq and the American public shows little appetite for another major middle eastern crisis. Moreover, there is little chance of getting international agreement on coercive measures. But the Iran problem won’t go away. Washington and Tehran remain on a collision course. Iran almost certainly wants nuclear weapons; Bush has said a nuclear Iran is “unacceptable.” Iranian discontent with the mullahs and disillusionment with the record of the reformers will intensify. Iran is set to be a big story in 2004.
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