The US-Iranian conflict in Obama’s New Era of Engagement: Smart Power or Sustainable Diplomacy?

The greatest threat to contemporary international security is the dispute that continues to exist between the US and Iran regarding the latter’s nuclear energy programme. This programme involves the enrichment of uranium certainly and the recovery of plutonium possibly, activities that are consistent with developing a power generating capacity and acquiring nuclear weapons. The Iranian government maintains that it is interested only in the former, but has declared its nuclear activities to be both a right and a supreme national interest critical to the country’s security and dignity and, indeed, to the security and dignity of the entire Islamic world (Cooper, 2007 and 2008; Hosseini, 2007; Jafarzadeh, 2007; Maher, 2008; Mottaki, 2007). Thus, they assert, it is a goal for which Iran and its people are prepared to pay any price and from which they will not be deterred. Most other countries wish that Iran did not seek to acquire this capacity. They do so on the assumption that any horizontal proliferation of nuclear capacities is dangerous, but also because they regard Iran as a troubled and potentially dangerous country, a view reinforced by the actions and utterances of its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Accordingly, they support a variety of incentives and sanctions designed to persuade Iran to abandon the more dangerous elements of its programme (UN Security Council, 2006). The US shares these views but also, until recently at least, has also presented Iran as an incorrigible and fanatically religious rogue or outlaw committed to the destruction of Israel and the removal of US influence from the Middle East. This image has been softened under the Obama administration, but the latter continues to maintain its predecessor’s position that Iran cannot be allowed to acquire the capacity to produce nuclear weapons and the leverage that threatening to use them or transfer them to others would result. The Bush administration’s emphasis on its readiness to use force has been replaced by a new one on securing a negotiated outcome, but the outcome has remained unchanged. Iran must not develop a capacity for making nuclear weapons and the US will ensure that it does not (Mahnaimi, 2005; Spillius, 2007). Iran shows no sign of changing course and so it is probable that at some point in its term of office, the Obama administration will come under pressure to take military action which, faut de mieux, will consist of airstrikes to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. The prospects of success for such a use of force are uncertain at best, while the costs in human, economic and political terms are potentially very great. The most likely outcome would be an expansion of the asymmetrical wars of attrition and willpower currently being fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both Iran’s quest for a nuclear capacity and American attempts to suppress it would probably continue. However, they would so under conditions even more neuralgic and unstable than those that presently exist, placing great strains in the Middle East on international relations between states, political relations between governments and their own peoples, and civilizational relations between the world societies of which those peoples are also members.