Bruce Anderson

Let them build nukes

Bruce Anderson says it is dangerous to try to bully the Iranians into abandoning their nuclear ambitions

It would appear to be another August crisis. From Washington to Tel Aviv there are expressions of alarm and despondency, especially in Brussels. It looks as if European diplomacy has failed. The Iranians seem determined to press ahead with their nuclear weapons programme. To judge by the newspapers, one would assume that this has come as a shock. But anyone involved with Iran policy who claims to be shocked is only pretending.

Apart from Britain’s relations with the EU, it is hard to think of a foreign policy question on which there has been a greater divergence between the public version of events and the policy-makers’ private thoughts. Over the past few months, I have discussed Iran in Washington, Paris, London and Tel Aviv. All my interlocutors were dismayed at the dangerous and destabilising consequences of Iran becoming a nuclear power. Yet none of them could come up with a solution. They saw no harm in the Europeans trying to negotiate. But no one had any faith in the possibility of success.

Until the recent Iranian elections, some American neoconservatives thought that there were grounds for optimism. They believed that because of public alienation the regime was on the point of collapse. A couple of years ago I listened to Richard Perle explaining why there was no point in talking to Khatami, the then Iranian president. He was like one of those now-forgotten final-phase communist leaders in Eastern Europe, trying to persuade the West that he was a legitimate reformer when he was about to be swept into history’s dustbin.

In Iran, it has not quite worked out like that. Not that Mr Perle was alone. Hardly anyone predicted the outcome of the recent elections, and almost every commentator overestimated the strength of the Iranian liberal opposition. It appears to have been much smaller and much more Tehran-based than we had thought, or hoped.

There was a further problem.

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