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Dealing With Tehran

Iran Could Blow Up in Obama's Face

By Gregor Peter Schmitz

The world may be focused on Iraq, Afghanistan, and terror in India, but experts say the biggest foreign policy challenge for the next US president will be dealing with Iran. Obama has promised a new approach -- but the risk of failure is great.

Between the financial crisis, bankruptcy in the US auto industry, and terrorism in Mumbai, the television sets in President-elect Barack Obama's transition office in Chicago must be flickering with images from a host of crisis spots these days.

Amidst it all, the news from Vienna could easily be missed: According to information from the International Atomic Energy Commission, Iran now has access to more than 630 kilograms of slightly enriched uranium, is building more and more centrifuges for enrichment, and is barely cooperating with inspectors. A successful nuclear test from Tehran is imaginable within a year, the nuclear watchdog warns.

Obama hasn't commented on the grim news yet. But he doesn't have much time. "It is becoming increasingly urgent to find a new diplomatic pathway to Iran," says Thomas Pickering, a former US ambassador to Israel who now serves on the board of the American Iranian Council. Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton's former envoy to the Middle East, goes further: "For the Obama administration there is no greater foreign policy challenge."

What exactly a future Iran strategy would look like is one of the most-discussed foreign policy questions in Washington. For eight years, the US's approach has been largely clear. Relations have been on ice, with ever-widening rumors of a planned military assault on Iran's nuclear plants. As John McCain, the Republican applicant for George Bush's job jocularly sang: "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran."

Nevertheless, Iran has proceeded with its atomic plans so effectively that their success now seems virtually unstoppable. "If Iran wants to, it will soon become a nuclear power. Bush has resigned himself to that," a Republican close to the private circle around the President told SPIEGEL ONLINE. Even a possible first strike from Israel is now out the question in the White House -- although, according to Haaretz, Israel's national security council wants to present a paper in December with plans for attacking Iran.

An Attack Won't Solve the Problem

The Israelis appear to be departing from their hard-line stance. Before Obama's election, many of the country's leading politicians dubbed Obama's proposal to meet with Iran without preconditions as "appeasement." Now, the head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate, Amos Yadlin, says that such an approach would "not necessarily be negative."

Yadlin knows a military assault might delay Iran's atomic development, but it wouldn't bring it to a standstill. As Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, wrote in Newsweek, "a military strike may buy some time, but it won't solve the problem. It will, however, lead to Iranian retaliation against US personnel and interests in Iraq and Afghanistan, and much higher oil prices -- the last thing the world needs, given the financial crisis."

One thing is clear: A nuclear Iran could not only further destabilize the Middle East, it could also trigger a nuclear arms race in the region.

So how should the new US administration proceed? "We should be prepared to have face-to-face talks with the Iranians, without preconditions. In general, it is wiser to see negotiations not as a reward but as a tool of national security," argues Haass. In the meantime, even the Bush administration has negotiated with Iran -- after the Sept. 11 attacks, for instance, when Tehran was helping with the intervention in Afghanistan. At the end of his time in office, even Bush has also considered reopening diplomatic contact. It's a decision that Obama will have to make now.

Even so, the Bush administration has never wanted to back away from its demand for regime change in Tehran -- and it remains fixated on the country's provocative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom many Iran experts do not consider to be the true power-holder.