{"id":526,"date":"2012-08-22T09:10:34","date_gmt":"2012-08-22T09:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/polsis.org\/?p=526"},"modified":"2012-08-22T09:10:34","modified_gmt":"2012-08-22T09:10:34","slug":"theres-still-time-to-negotiate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/polsis\/2012\/08\/22\/theres-still-time-to-negotiate\/","title":{"rendered":"There\u2019s still time to negotiate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Giving up on international negotiations over the Iranian nuclear issue would be a tragic mistake, write Dani Nedal<\/a> and Nicholas J. Wheeler<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article is part of our securities studies\u00a0research agenda<\/a>\u00a0series.<\/h5>\n<\/p>\n

Optimism regarding nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States and Germany) and Iran has come and gone, and now the familiar drums of war are beating again.\u00a0 The latest round of negotiations initiated little over three months ago seems to have once again stalled.\u00a0 Doves and hawks alike, from lead European negotiator Catherine Ashton<\/a> to Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren<\/a>, are announcing that the time for negotiations is short and receding.\u00a0 Crippling economic sanctions are taking their \u00a0toll on Iran\u2019s economy<\/a> and covert cyber attacks<\/a> on Iran\u2019s nuclear program have forced Iranian Government agencies off the internet<\/a>.\u00a0 But, still, Iran does not look ready to give into Western demands and suspend its enrichment activities.<\/p>\n

In explaining this stalemate, there\u2019s quite a bit of blame to go around. As we have argued elsewhere<\/a> at some length, the failure of recent negotiations is not attributable solely to Iranian intransigence, but also, and crucially, to Western negotiating positions that have been both ill advised and counterproductive. In fact, negotiations have never been given a real chance to succeed by either side.\u00a0 In the first phases of negotiations in the 2003-5 period, Europeans countries were mildly hopeful that negotiations could succeed, but opposition from key neoconservatives in the Bush administration seriously hampered their efforts.\u00a0 As reported in a new book by David Crist<\/a>, the Bush administration failed to act on successive opportunities to improve relations with Tehran. Even Obama, who supposedly came into office proposing to turn a new leaf in US-Iran relations, approached negotiations as \u201ca single roll of the dice<\/a>\u201d.\u00a0 Indeed, as soon as the Iranian Government failed to reciprocate what Obama saw as a genuine cooperative move, the United States retreated back into a strategy of coercive diplomacy.\u00a0 Even if the President had wanted to make additional conciliatory moves, he had hardliners in Congress constantly pushing his administration to adopt ever-tougher measures.\u00a0 Adding to that pressure was Israel and the threat \u2013 sometimes hidden sometimes explicit \u2013 that if the pressure was not ratcheted up against Tehran, then Jerusalem might act unilaterally to stop its nuclear programme.<\/p>\n

Peter Jenkins, a former British Ambassador to the IAEA recently lamented<\/a> that Iran stopped complying with the IAEA Additional Protocol before inspectors had a chance to proclaim their program clean of \u201cundeclared nuclear activities or material\u201d.\u00a0 The problem is that to believe, as Jenkins does, that such a declaration would have mitigated the nuclear crisis is to forget that conservatives in Washington and Israeli leaders don\u2019t exactly hold the norms and rules of international organisations like the IAEA in the highest regard.\u00a0 They are simply not persuaded that these institutions can safeguard US and Israeli security in the face of what these groups perceive as the potential existential threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.\u00a0 Moreover, nor are they shy about their dreams of regime change in Tehran; in fact, they see this as the only long-term guarantee of US and Israeli security.\u00a0 The West demands that Iran fully and indefinitely suspend its enrichment activities, but there are political leaders in the Iranian national security decision-making process, including the Supreme Leader himself, who worry that any major Iranian concession on the nuclear issue would simply whet the appetite of those in the United States and Israel seeking regime change.\u00a0 Consequently, it is hard to see any Iranian leader, even those from the moderate wing of Iranian politics, making the kind of concessions that would end the nuclear crisis.\u00a0 Even if a moderate is elected in the 2013 presidential elections, he would have to calculate how far any concessions would jeopardize his political survival<\/p>\n

Negotiations can only work if both sides are open to the possibility that a mutually agreed solution is possible and will be adhered to.\u00a0 Neither side has done a good job of convincing the other of this.\u00a0 For the past ten years, alarmists have declared vehemently that time is short and should not be wasted on negotiations.\u00a0 Moderates seem almost ready to give up.\u00a0 But this would be a tragic move, not because negotiations stand a chance of succeeding given the dominant mind-sets shaping policy on both sides, but because they are the only thing that stands a chance of preventing the worst possible outcome: war.<\/p>\n

Dani Nedal\u2028<\/a> is a Research Fellow \u2028in the Department of Political Science and International Studies and the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security at the University of Birmingham. From September he will be a PhD student at Georgetown University.<\/em><\/h5>\n<\/p>\n
Nicholas J Wheeler<\/a>\u2028 is Professor of International Relations \u2028and Director of the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security \u2028at the University of Birmingham<\/em><\/h5>\n<\/p>\n
Note: This article gives the views of the\u00a0authors, and not the position of the POLSIS blog, the Department of Political Science and International Studies nor the University of Birmingham.<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Giving up on international negotiations over the Iranian nuclear issue would be a tragic mistake, write Dani Nedal and Nicholas J. Wheeler. This article is part of our securities studies\u00a0research agenda\u00a0series. Optimism regarding nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States and Germany) and Iran has come and gone, and now … Continue reading “There\u2019s still time to negotiate”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":144,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9],"tags":[79,80,102,130,158],"class_list":["post-526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-agendas","category-security-studies","tag-international-relations","tag-iran","tag-nuclear","tag-security","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/polsis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/polsis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/polsis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/polsis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/polsis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/polsis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/polsis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/polsis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/polsis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}