This week the secretary of state seemed to
encourage Yair Lapid’s talk about using
force. Is diplomacy dead?
By Daniel Larison
October 17, 2021 -- "Information
Clearing House -
"Responsible
Statecraft" -
As indirect talks to restore the
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)
remain in limbo, the U.S. and Israeli
governments continue suggesting that “other
options,” including military action, are
available and will be considered if the
talks should fail.
The latest example of this came during a
press conference between Israeli Foreign
Minister Yair Lapid and Secretary of State
Antony Blinken earlier this week along with
their counterpart from the United Arab
Emirates. Commenting on Iran’s nuclear
program, Lapid said that “Israel reserves
the right to act at any given moment, in any
way,” and he stated, “We know there are
moments when nations must use force to
protect the world from evil.” For his part,
Blinken said that “time is running short” to
restore the nuclear deal, and he affirmed
that “Israel has the right to defend itself
and we strongly support that proposition.”
In the context of discussing Iran’s
nuclear program, what Lapid and Blinken are
referring to is an endorsement of an illegal
and unprovoked attack on Iran in the name of
“preventing” Iran from acquiring a nuclear
weapon that Iran is not seeking. It is a
measure of how ineffective U.S. diplomacy
has been over the last six months that
administration officials are now
contemplating “options” that have already
failed or should never be tried.
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Blinken said that diplomacy is still the
“most effective way” to keep Iran’s nuclear
program peaceful, but the record of their
diplomacy to date has been underwhelming.
Slow to engage, unwilling to offer even the
smallest goodwill gestures, and refusing to
take the initiative in rejoining the
agreement, the Biden administration has gone
through the motions of diplomatic engagement
without offering Iran anything of substance
to kickstart the process of returning to
full compliance. The new Raisi government in
Tehran has responded to this by engaging in
its own delaying tactics for the last few
months. As frustrating as the negotiations
have been up until now, there is no
realistic alternative that would restore
restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program
except to stick with the talks to a
successful conclusion. The fact that the
Biden administration has been glancing at
the exits for the last several months has
hardly helped matters.
While there is
grumbling from the Israeli side that
their government does not believe the Biden
administration is serious when it talks
about “other options” or “other avenues” if
diplomacy should fail, U.S. officials are
signaling that the U.S. views Israeli
attacks on Iran’s facilities and territory
as self-defense. That is dangerous, and one
that puts the U.S. in the awful position of
having endorsed an Israeli attack that it
cannot control. Even if this is meant only
as a sop to hard-liners, it identifies the
U.S. with whatever the Israeli government
chooses to do. When Israel’s political
leadership keeps
hinting at taking military action, it is
irresponsible for the U.S. to be giving them
a green light. As Lapid said during the
press conference, “by saying other options,
I think everybody understands here, in
Israel, in the Emirates, and in Tehran what
is it that we mean.” The threat to commit
acts of war is clear.
It is important to understand that there
is nothing defensive about the actions
Israel has already taken in sabotaging
Iranian facilities and assassinating Iranian
scientists, and there would be nothing
defensive about direct military attacks on
Iranian soil. It should go without saying
that having a right to self-defense is not a
license to initiate hostilities against
another country on the pretext that it might
pose some future danger. It wasn’t
self-defense when the U.S. invaded Iraq, and
it wouldn’t be self-defense to drop bombs on
Iran.
Any “preventive” military action against
Iran would not only be a flagrant violation
of the
U.N. Charter, which prohibits the use or
threat of force in international relations
except in self-defense, but it would also
likely produce the outcome that it is
supposedly trying to stop, namely Iran’s
development of a nuclear weapon. Even if
Iran were seeking to acquire nuclear
weapons, that would not give any other state
permission to launch attacks on their
territory. Since there is no evidence that
Iran currently has a nuclear weapons
program, that would clearly make military
strikes on their nuclear facilities acts of
criminal aggression. Nothing would give the
Iranian government a stronger incentive to
build its own deterrent than an attack on
their country. Just as the Israeli
attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at
Osirak forty years ago pushed Saddam Hussein
to pursue nuclear weapons in earnest, an
attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would
likely push the Iranian government to make
the political decision to seek nuclear
weapons that it has rejected for almost two
decades before now. Using force to resolve
the nuclear issue is a dead end, but it
seems to be one that the U.S. and Israel are
willing to entertain.
The Biden administration claims that time
is running out for Iran to resume full
compliance, but there is no option for
restoring the nuclear deal that doesn’t
involve a diplomatic compromise. “Maximum
pressure” sanctions have failed, as the
Biden administration has acknowledged more
than once, so keeping sanctions in place or
piling on more will achieve nothing except
to spur continued expansion of Iran’s
nuclear program. Covert sabotage has
succeeded only in provoking Iran to enrich
uranium to higher levels than ever before
and to end its voluntary implementation of
the IAEA’s Additional Protocol. Military
action would be illegal and wrong, and it
would all but guarantee the outcome that the
nuclear deal had already blocked. It would
also expose U.S. troops throughout the
region to reprisal attacks and possibly
trigger a larger war.
Before the U.S. undermined it, the JCPOA
was a major nonproliferation success story,
and it was also a victory for resolving a
longstanding international dispute through
compromise. The conclusion of the agreement
in 2015 reduced regional tensions and made
war with Iran much less likely, and it is no
accident that regional tensions and the
likelihood of war have both spiked as the
agreement has gone on life support. When the
Obama administration was first presenting
the agreement to the world, they argued that
its opponents had no alternative except war.
As the negotiations over restoring the JCPOA
falter, we are reminded once again that this
is the only real alternative that hawks have
to offer. The “options” that the hawks talk
about are doomed to fail, and the cost of
these options will be far greater than the
sanctions relief that is needed to salvage
the nuclear deal.
Diplomatic compromise with Iran was the
only thing that resolved the nuclear issue
six years ago, and it is the only thing that
is going to revive the JCPOA now. The “other
options” that Lapid and Blinken mentioned
lead to more failure and possibly to new
conflict. In that respect, Blinken was wrong
to say that diplomacy is the “most effective
way” to prevent Iran from acquiring the
nuclear weapon. As we should all realize by
now, it is the only way.