THAT IRAN’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says his nation “welcomes a hand extended to it should it really and truly be based on honesty, justice and respect” is a significant response to the United States’s decision to join direct negotiations with world powers on its uranium enrichment programme. It is doubly so since it was made on the eve of Iran’s national nuclear day yesterday, when it was announced that the programme’s productive capacity has developed so substantially.
These talks are still intended by the US to convince Iran its enrichment programme should be suspended, because it is steadily accumulating the potential means to manufacture nuclear weapons. That is the nub of US and other international concern about it. But the US decision to become fully and directly involved with Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the European Union shifts the suspension from a condition to an objective of the negotiations. Washington insists it is not relaxing that objective in favour of allowing Iran to develop its nuclear power programme.
This is despite the fact that Iran is entitled under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to pursue a peaceful nuclear power programme, subject to detailed international scrutiny and investigation that it is not aimed at producing weapons. The country has a substantial energy shortage and needs alternative sources so it can export more of its plentiful oil. The nuclear programme has become an important symbol of its independence. But, so far, the most reliable international assessments say it falls well short of a weapons capacity – and nor is it convinced this is necessary, even though it is strategically surrounded by nuclear powers in Israel, the US, India and Pakistan.
In these circumstances Mr Obama’s strategy of pursuing an opening to Iran should not be narrowly confined to the nuclear issue, but should seek a much wider political and cultural engagement. That will take a long time to achieve. In the short term, it must await the outcome of the June presidential elections, when Mr Ahmadinejad is seeking re-election. It will be bound up with the developing political and military crises in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where Iran has common interests with the US in greater regional security. The pace of events is likely to determine the new administration’s policy as much as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the search for a Middle East settlement. There, too, Iran can have a constructive role to play if Mr Obama is willing to pursue a broad negotiating agenda.
