Experts for new Iran strategy

Vienna: With big powers unable to agree tough new sanctions against Iran and military action rife with risks to the West, Cold War-style containment may prove the only realistic way to check Tehran's nuclear ambitions, experts say.

Six world powers held a conference call on Wednesday to discuss a US-drafted proposal for a new round of UN sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme, a Western diplomat said.

China, which had declined for weeks to participate in discussions on a fourth round of UN sanctions against Tehran, took part in the call among senior foreign ministry officials from the five permanent UN Security Council members and Germany, the diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

As expected, they did not agree on a draft sanctions resolution, though the Chinese said they were willing to participate in a further conference call to discuss "more detailed elements" of possible punitive steps, the envoy said.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's airing last year of how Washington might handle a nuclear-capable Iran, by arming Gulf allies and creating a regional defence shield, stunned and angered Israel, which considers Tehran an existential menace.

Obama administration officials hastened to stress then and continue to say now that the world cannot allow a nuclear Iran and harsher sanctions will help forestall any such scenario.

But even Israel's defence minister has suggested an Iran with nuclear "breakout" ability would not doom the world, and policymakers should have a strong fallback plan — even if they don't say it publicly — if sanctions fail to restrain Iran.

Regime protection

"I don't think the Iranians, even if they got the bomb, are going to drop it immediately on some neighbour. They fully understand what might follow. They are radicals, but not total meshugenah," Ehud Barak said in a speech last month.

He was using the Yiddish word for "nut cases", and alluding to the certain threat to Iran of annihilation by foes with massively greater nuclear firepower if it started a nuclear conflict.

As doubts about the feasibility of effective sanctions or pre-emptive war have grown, debate has arisen about whether a nuclear-ready Iran could be "contained", somewhat as the United States did the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War era.

Containment could make sense, Foreign Policy magazine said in an essay entitled, "After Iran Gets the Bomb", because the Islamic Republic's overriding priority was regime protection.

Iran recognised its limitations, operating "among wary neighbours" whom it did not seek to invade. Rather, the point of the nuclear programme was to establish Iran as the "dominant power in the region while preserving political control at home," wrote James Lindsay and Ray Takeyh, strategic analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

A containment, or deterrence, strategy, they said, could spell out to Iran that it could not start a conventional war, use or transfer atomic know-how, materials or weapons to others, or boost support for militant attacks abroad without triggering US retaliation by any means, including nuclear weapons.