This week, negotiations to disarm Iran's rogue nuclear program get under way in Geneva. How much real pressure can the West apply as the posturing fades and each side reveals its raw leverage? A lot depends on third party players, not just the potential sanction busters such as China and Russia, but also the other countries that enter into the equation, such as Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Let us conduct a brief tour d'horizon of the forces at play and see how things might go.
The Iranians have already conveyed their mood by publicly boasting of a hitherto secret nuclear installation in mountains near the holy city of Qom. A gratuitous act of insouciance. They have followed up with gratuitous acts of transparency: an invitation to inspectors to visit the new site, an offer to send uranium to Russia for processing and quantifying. Tehran is not afraid of what the West knows because we cannot do anything about it anyway. Iran cannot be intimidated. But Iranians will do the right thing of their own volition. That's the message to us.
If the past record is anything to go by, Tehran has no intention of ending its nuclear ambitions. For the moment though, grand Obamaesque gestures of diplomacy fulfill a purpose. They give international fence-sitters an excuse to relax the pressure. But equally for Tehran the entire saga of these talks serves a domestic purpose: as a theater of defiance for Iranian consumption – Iran poised at the pivot of history with the world's great powers dancing attendance. Iran standing tall thanks to the regime. As it is, the nuclear program is pretty much the only populist weapon left in the regime's depleted political arsenal at home. With Ahmadinejad loyalists conducting the drama in Geneva, the government gains enormous stature, bids to reunite the country's fractured populace, and puts into the shade secondary figures such as Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mir Hossein Mousavi who disputed the election results.
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2:39 AM
Moderate Islamist here
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