There has been a lot of attention on the immense domestic challenges that Obama will face once he has been sworn in, but the foreign policy problems haven’t gone away. Not only is America fighting two wars but Obama is almost going to have work out what to do about Iran which is far along the path to nuclear status. As The New York Times puts it in its story on the latest IAEA report:
“Even so, for President-elect Barack Obama, the report underscores the magnitude of the problem that he will inherit Jan. 20: an Iranian nuclear program that has not only solved many technical problems of uranium enrichment, but that can also now credibly claim to possess enough material to make a weapon if negotiations with Europe and the United States break down.
American intelligence agencies have said Iran could make a bomb between 2009 and 2015. A national intelligence estimate made public late last year concluded that around the end of 2003, after long effort, Iran had halted work on an actual weapon. But enriching uranium, and obtaining enough material to build a weapon, is considered the most difficult part of the process.”
What to do about Iran is one of the most complicated foreign policy problems there is. But the consequences of Iran going nuclear are so dire—a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, Iran as the regional hegemon and stepped up Iranian support for rejectionist terrorists—that everything from direct negotiations to a full blockade, needs to be done urgently. Time for a full-court press is running short. If these approaches do not work, the adage that the one thing worse than bombing Iran is a nuclear Iran still holds to my mind.
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