The P5+1 nations threw away their leverage in the nuclear negotiations by not treating Iran as a “determined proliferator” and pushing it to comply with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), opting instead to approach negotiations as “a political dispute,” Emily Landau, a leading nonproliferation expert, wrote Saturday in The Times of Israel.
Had the P5+1 nations taken a different approach, Landau argued, they might have been able to achieve better results through negotiations.
The first step should have been to expose Iran’s work on the military aspects of its nuclear program in order to break its narrative of having “done no wrong” in the nuclear realm. The exposure of Iran’s NPT violation is important for verification purposes, as many analysts have pointed out. But it also touches upon narratives and framing, a no less important aspect of the negotiation. While Iran is highly aware of the value of narratives, the P5+1 virtually ignore them, at their own risk. The narrative of having done no wrong has been a clear asset for Iran – it plants in peoples’ minds that there is no justification for a game of compellence, and there should be some give and take.
If weaponization work had been exposed, the P5+1 should have then been emphasizing at every turn that this is not a give and take setting where each party has an equal responsibility to move closer to the other, but that because Iran violated the NPT, it must return to fold of the treaty. It is Iran that must work to regain the trust of the international community, and there is no equivalence between Iran and the P5+1 with regard to this negotiation.
There would also have been implications for the specific P5+1 demands from Iran. Because Iran lost the trust of the international community by cheating on its NPT commitments, and deceiving the international community for decades, clearly its nuclear infrastructure must in the main be dismantled.
Landau further wrote that the P5+1 nations erred in “projecting an eagerness for a deal,” especially after effectively taking the threat military action off the table. Once Iran knew that it would not be compelled militarily to stop its nuclear program, its leverage was enhanced. By declaring that the crisis with Iran could only be solved through negotiations, the P5+1 nations signaled to Iran that all it had to do “is sit tight” and the concessions would come “rolling in.”
The overarching repercussions of these flawed negotiating tactics include an Iranian expectation that a deal will remove its nuclear program from the authority of Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter. A source close to the negotiations was quoted in Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency on Sunday as saying:
“The upcoming UN Security Council resolution – that will call all the previous five resolutions against Iran null and void – will be the last resolution to be issued on Iran’s nuclear program and withdraws Iran’s nuclear dossier from under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. This last resolution will remain valid and will be implemented for a specifically limited period of time and will then automatically end at the end of this period.”
The United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for sanctions against Iran are governed by articles 40 and 41 of Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. These articles call for action based on a “threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression.” Actions instituted under article 41 include economic sanctions and blockades. If the emerging deal removes Iran’s nuclear program from the authority of Chapter 7, Iran will have had its violations legalized without changing its behavior.
[Photo: Nuclear Threat Initiative / YouTube ]