Diplomacy, quiet or public

The Times comments on the lessons of the Iran hostage crisis:

The first is that in dealing with a maverick and unpredictable country such as Iran the West cannot rely on past experience. Tony Blair hoped at first that quiet diplomacy would lead to the swift, face-saving formula that secured the release of British servicemen seized in a similar incident three years ago. But after four days it was clear that this was achieving nothing except to make the Government look weak abroad and spineless at home. It was important to demonstrate to Tehran that the political costs would rise sharply, and Mr Blair was right to make clear the consequences.

I agree. It is a mistake to argue that quiet diplomacy secured the release of the British servicemen. That approach was tried by the Government in the first place and it turned out to be an underreaction. It didn't work, any more than quiet diplomacy on the nuclear issue has worked. A more fruitful course was public diplomacy and the application of pressure through the means and institutions available to us. That is the course that Western diplomacy needs to adopt with Iran more widely.

I was asked in a television interview this morning whether I thought there had been a deal behind the scenes. Not having been born yesterday, I declined to speculate. But publicly the outcome of the imbroglio is clear. We applied pressure and Iran backed down. Moreover, the manipulation of our servicemen – coaching them in what to say and write, and using them as means of propaganda – was so obvious that it undermined any claim Iran might have to be treated as a normal state actor. The notion that Iran is being magnanimous by releasing people it illegally abducted in the first place may have some appeal to the simpleminded, but it can’t disguise the fact that Iran gained nothing but a reputation for lawlessness.

The lesson I would infer for negotiations with Iran is this. We cannot know what the internal politics of the regime are; all we can go on are its actions and statements. So far these have been obstructive, malign and dishonest. The US and its allies have accepted that Iran has a right to peaceful nuclear technology and to have some parts of the fuel cycle on Iranian territory. This is a far more dovish position than that of, say, the Socialist candidate for the French Presidency, who maintains that Iran has no right to any nuclear programme, civil or military. The US and the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany) have moreover accepted Moscow's proposal that Iranian enrichment activity should take place in Russia. The US and its allies have also pressed for and obtained unanimity on the UN Security Council and the Board of Governors of the IAEA. The outcome is Iran's withdrawal from cooperation with those bodies.

You can imagine some form of deal being agreed with Iran on technology and long-term diplomatic relationships, much as the EU-3 have offered and had spurned. This would probably take the form of Iran's having access to some parts of the fuel cycle, such as conversion but not enrichment, while ratifying the Additional Protocol. This would allow some room for manoeuvre - or at least extra time - in dealing with the threat of a future nuclear-armed Iran. The problem is that we can't believe anything Iran says, because the regime has already lied continually. If it maintains covert enrichment facilities then this sort of deal would be worse than useless. The problem with such discrete and incremental negotiations is that they don't take account of the nature of the regime we're dealing with. On this point, the much-maligned neoconservatives are right. We can't allow even dual-use technologies to be controlled by a regime whose word is worthless, that pursues its ends through terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, and that gleefully anticipates the annihilation of a member state of the UN.

Yesterday Tony Blair said there would be no negotiation or confrontation with Iran. It seems to me that threatening the second is a prerequisite of securing the first. The regime may have calculated that a tight oil market will work to its advantage. Tougher economic and diplomatic sanctions are necessary to dissuade the regime from that view - with an opportunity at each stage for Iran to reverse its position, but with each step more serious than the last.