It's time for a 'Nixon moment'

Iran's game is clear. It's to thread the eye of the needle: flaunt its growing clout in the region, yet not directly confront the Great Satan.

By rejecting UN demands for an immediate halt to its uranium enrichment programme, even as it offers serious negotiations, Tehran continues its deft strategic play.

The question is how Washington will respond. Will it essentially give up and ac cede to the inevitability of a nuclear Iran or will it get tough?

White House insiders aren't tipping their hand, of course. But American experts are surprisingly divided. Ray Takeyh, at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washing ton and author of a new book, Hidden Iran, believes the Bush administration has run out of options. "They will declare victory and punt."

To live up to its rhetoric, he explains, the US will push for sanctions in the Security Council, even if only symbolic. Failing in that, thanks to likely vetoes from Russia and China, it will then try to put together a "coalition of the willing", comprising a few nations willing to slap modest commercial and trade penalties on Tehran.

"That will get them through the 2008 election," says Takeyh. "After that it's the next president's problem."

Theory

Obviously, not everyone buys this theory. "I don't think this administration or any American administration, Democrat or Republican can accept a nuclear Iran," says Cliff Kupchan, a former National Security Council staffer at the EurAsia Group in New York.

If anything, he suggests, "Lebanon puts an exclamation point on the danger." As Kupchan sees it, George W. Bush, Republican presidential hopeful John McCain and Democratic senate leader Joe Biden are all of the same view.

"There's no weakness in the knees here," Kupchan says. "We're headed for a real stand-off," with serious efforts at imposing sanctions on Iran and a genuine threat of a US military strike if diplomacy fails. Kupchan has previously put the odds of such an armed conflict at more than 50 per cent. Today, they're probably higher.

Enter the New Realists. They make up a small but growing group who think diplomacy might actually work.

One such is Scott Sagan, director of the Centre for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

He disagrees with both "proliferation fatalists", who believe it's impossible to prevent Iran from getting the bomb and those who think Tehran can only be stopped by force.

A face-saving compromise is possible, he writes in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, so long as Washington comes to accept the reason why Iran wants nuclear weapons in the first place fear that the Bush administration is serious about its talk of pre-emptive war, regime change and the Axis of Evil.
If diplomats could engineer a deal which would protect Tehran's "sovereign right" to a nuclear research coupled with a US pledge to relinquish its threat of regime change by force Sagan believes the Iranians would agree to shelve any more ambitious programme.

A very serious crisis would thus be defused. That is a big "if", to be sure. But Iran's response to the package of incentives offered by the Security Council shows promise. What Washington has rejected as defiance is in fact a nuanced nod of concession.

Though insisting on its prerogative to negotiate as equals, and not concede any rights up-front, Iran has pointedly not ruled out a nuclear freeze.

Not made public

The full text of the reply has not yet been made public. But it's full of specific queries concerning economic incentives and (tellingly) membership in some larger "regional security arrangement", according to Abbas Maleki, director of the International Institute of Caspian Studies in Tehran, who goes so far as to claim that the internal debate within the country's leadership has ended "in favour of voices of moderation seeking a satisfactory resolution of the nuclear stand-off with the West".

Mahmoud Sariolghalam, a professor of International Relations at the National University in Tehran, says that the time is ripe for a so-called "Nixon moment".

The former US president broke with decades of convention and mutual hostility to go to China, opening a new era in relations.

So now, he suggests, could George W. Bush suspend his administration's prejudices and attempt a new beginning. He might be surprised by what comes back.

Michael Meyer is the Europe and Middle East editor for Newsweek International and a member of Benador Associates.