The return of multilateralism

For the last three years, the US has been trying to stop Iran from going nuclear. It has tried negotiations as well as the threat of force. Russia, the European powers and China have all tried to intervene. But Iran has not wavered and continues to enrich uranium, which it is entitled to do. In January, Iran ended a 14-month moratorium on uranium enrichment while abandoning talks with the UK, France and Germany. Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not helped matters by saying that he would like to see Israel wiped off the face of the earth. The fact that Israel has undeclared nuclear weapons adds to the richness of the mixture. Matters seem to have reached an impasse, which is probably why the US first said that it would talk to Iran if it stopped enriching uranium. Iran refused at first but is now willing to consider, perhaps because the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is inclined to rein in his President a bit.

President Bush, meanwhile, appears to have been persuaded by his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, that if the US doesn't drop its hard-line positions, it could lose the support of the Europeans. The Russians and the Chinese have already said that they are opposed to the use of force. The US recently said that it would take part in the talks, though it has refused to talk to Iran for the past 27 years. The result now is that Ms Rice has announced that a European diplomat would soon present Iran with a new proposal. A US government press release says: "The proposal lays out two paths, one projecting negotiations once Iran agrees to suspend its uranium enrichment efforts, and the other providing for further steps by the UN Security Council if it fails to do so." No deadline has been set for an Iranian response. Ms Rice also said: "We're going to give the diplomacy a little time here and we're not going to react to everything the Iranian leadership [said] over the last couple of days."

How will the world interpret this new US initiative? When all the diplomatic verbiage is clipped away, there appears to be only one interpretation possible: the US has conceded that it has a weak hand. This means that the one thing it was relying on""force""to get Iran to stop developing nuclear weapons is now no longer credible. In that sense, this is a victory for Iran, whose entire effort has been to buy time. It seems that it has succeeded in doing so. Whether it is three or 10 years away from getting itself a crude but usable nuclear weapon, it now seems fairly certain that it will eventually get itself one. After all, North Korea could, so why not Iran? And Iran has seen how the US has restrained itself from attacking North Korea, which is a much more vulnerable target, choosing instead to initiate the Six Nation Talks, and watching quietly while they get nowhere. The broader lesson from all this is that, for the first time since the collapse of the USSR, the US finds it difficult to use bilateralism and is now once again turning to multilateralism. After Iraq, that is reassuring and a change for the better""though whether the end results will be anything other than failure to achieve the set goals, remains to be seen.