The best of our bad options

Such a tremendous agitation is being made about improved prospects for a nuclear deal with Iran by the embattled media claque still generating a hallelujah chorus for the Obama administration, that it would be churlish not to examine the possibilities.

It must be said that the Iranians have done nothing but swindle and confound the West for 10 years. All the threats, from Hillary Clinton's "crippling sanctions" (whose allegedly crippling effects we are still awaiting, though the sanctions that have been imposed, less severe than the U.S. Congress approved, are admittedly causing considerable inconvenience), to the many references to the military option being "on the table" (where it has remained), have not elicited a single concession from Iran. That country's official position has remained a litany of non sequiturs: It is developing a nuclear potential for non-military uses; it will not submit to the inspections required by the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1968 (NPT), which Iran signed; and its leaders still believe that Israel should be destroyed.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — though generally run by, and favourable to, Third World and especially Muslim countries — after shilly-shallying for some years under the tedious and pedantic Egyptian, Mohamed ElBaradei (who departed to seek, unsuccessfully, the parlous presidency of his country), repeatedly has accused Iran of lying to the international community, violating its treaty obligations, and endangering international stability. There is no doubt that these allegations are justified. Still, it must be said that Iran has performed a modest service by exposing the hypocrisy of the world's non-proliferation regime.

This is a club that has grown slowly, and each new member — till now — has behaved responsibly in this area. This is true even of China under Mao (when he was musing to sycophantic Westerners such as Edgar Snow that China could endure a nuclear attack and absorb the deaths of hundreds of millions of people); and of Pakistan, with all its instabilities, and its military and intelligence communities effectively running free and ignoring the elected leaders — apart from periodically sending them packing and, in a moment of particular pique, hanging Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979. (His executioner, Zia ul-Haq, like Bhutto's daughter, Benazir, were themselves assassinated. It's a rough-and-tumble system.)

As long as the incoming nuclear club members appeared unlikely to detonate such weapons frivolously, not much was done about it. The exception was Bill Clinton's inane double quarantine of India and Pakistan, an ineffectual move that artfully shut the United States out of South Asia, and added usefully to its cold war with Iraq and Iran, making an arc from Jordan to China of countries with which the United States was not on official speaking terms.

Under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the nuclear powers were pledged to seek nuclear disarmament, but of course they did nothing of the kind. The Americans and Russians negotiated some arms limitation and reduction agreements, but none of the others joined in. The reductions slowed the arms race but did not bring either country beneath the threshold of being able to kill everybody and everything in the world with hydrogen warheads. Iran has at least exposed the moral palsy of the hypocrisy of the self-perpetuating nuclear club under the NPT.

If it turns out that there is anything to the prospect of Iranian co-operation, much of the credit will have to go to Vladimir Putin. He is, of course, an odious man, but, thanks to the lassitude and maladroitness of the regime in Washington, he has played above his head more consummately than any statesman in the world since Charles de Gaulle held something of the fulcrum between Moscow and Washington, and bestrode the world harassing the Anglo-Saxons with such initiatives as keeping Britain out of the European Common Market, inciting the Arabs against Israel and the Indochinese against the Americans, and urging Quebec to break up Canada.

Putin is no de Gaulle (who did come to the Western Alliance party in serious crises, such as that over Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962). But Putin may have maneuvered himself into the position where the Iranians have to take him seriously if they wish to retain any influence at all in Syria. And Putin, though he has been helpful to terrorism-exporting states such as Iran and Syria in the past, does not highly appreciate Muslim terrorists in Russia, especially Chechen secessionists; and this creates at least the notional possibility of common ground with the West.

© 2025 Conrad Black