While American and European supporters of
the July 14 Iran nuclear deal claim it will bring peace in our time, Asian
allies concerned about China's regional ambitions are worrying about the
precedent it sets for U.S. leadership in their region.
Energy-starved countries such as
Japan and India may welcome the opening of Iran's oil and gas markets.
But America's U-turn in the Middle East, from a policy of working with allies
to contain Iran to one that facilitates Iranian leadership at their expense,
should make its Asian friends anxious.
The deal lifts tough
international sanctions immediately in return for long-term pledges of Iranian nuclear
restraint -- the sincerity and verifiability of which are both in doubt. The
effect will be to unshackle constraints on Iran's military power and regional
influence, enabling it to pursue its designs for primacy in the Middle East
more aggressively.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Barack
Obama is pledging to employ stronger military alliances and new economic
coalitions like the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal to constrain China's
ability to pursue parallel designs for primacy in Asia.
In Asia, Obama pledges that
America will stand by its friends and cede leadership to no other power. In the
Middle East, he has broken with America's friends, doing a deal that will
facilitate Tehran's accumulation of military and economic strength in ways that
will undercut the security of allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia and of
pivotal states like Iraq. The president's judgment of American interests is
less than fully convincing, but he is already threatening to veto an emerging
Congressional majority for the rejection of the agreement.
Obama's approach would be less
problematic if Iran were not so aggressively pursuing policies that have wildly
destabilized the Middle East. It is the chief sponsor of the regime of
President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, whose war against his country's population
has caused the collapse of that state and the biggest refugee crisis since
World War II. Authorities such as America's former top military commander in
the Middle East, General Jim Mattis, assess that Assad's regime would have
fallen several years ago had Tehran not deployed forces to fight on his
behalf.
The Syrian fire fanned by Iran
has produced the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group (an enemy of Iran)
and the spread of its villainy across the region, among other instabilities.
Iran is the chief sponsor of the Houthi rebels who have brought about the
collapse of Yemen. It is the dominant external power in Iraq, where Iranian
forces filled the vacuum created by Obama's withdrawal of all military forces
in 2011 -- securing for Iran the gains that had previously accrued to the U.S.
and Iraq from the end of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Iran is also the sponsor of the
potent terrorist group Hezbollah, which has helped to construct a violent
"Shia crescent" across the heart of the Arab Middle East, making much
of it an Iranian sphere of influence and igniting proxy wars between Iran and
U.S. allies there.
This week's agreement in Vienna
between Iran and the U.S.-led negotiating coalition, which also includes the
other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany,
will nullify previous Security Council sanctions against Iran, including some
that are unrelated to the nuclear issue such as those concerning support
for terrorism and Tehran's proliferation of ballistic missile technologies. The
deal will also lift an international arms embargo on Iran, including on its
ballistic missile program.
"Snapback"
mechanism
The deal calls for a complex regime of inspections of Iranian nuclear
facilities. But Iran has the right to object, with conflicts between Tehran and
international inspectors ultimately refereed by the Security Council, where
they will be subject to Russia's veto. The agreement also includes a
"snapback" mechanism to reimpose sanctions should Iran violate its
terms -- but the reimposition would need to be negotiated between many countries
whose corporations are preparing to invest in Iran, creating domestic lobbies
that will oppose any renewal of sanctions in the face of Iranian
noncompliance.
Most importantly, in return for the partial
(not total) and time-limited (not permanent) suspension of Iran's production of
nuclear fuel, the agreement will open Iran's economy after biting sanctions had
largely closed it off to the world and undercut the standing of its leaders
among a young population hungry for change. The removal of economic sanctions
will produce rapid economic growth and waves of foreign investment. This influx
of capital and technology could give a new lease of life to the regime in
Tehran, providing substantial new resources for it to use on behalf of its
aggressive and destabilizing foreign policies.
In Asia, U.S. nuclear deals with North Korea in
the 1990s and 2000s, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, offered
sanctions relief that enabled the Pyongyang regime to consolidate power and
resources -- only to reject elaborate international inspection mechanisms and
push on to test and deploy a growing number of nuclear weapons. In Iraq, it was
Saddam's expulsion of nuclear inspectors from the International Atomic Energy
Agency that precipitated repeated Security Council condemnation followed by the
invasion of that country by the U.S. and allies in 2003, with all that
followed.
This points to the danger that America and its
friends are setting themselves up not for a new era of peace and harmony with
the regime in Tehran, but for a potentially escalating series of confrontations
over nuclear inspections by international monitors -- leading to conflicts that
will be products of the current agreement.
In Asia, American allies such as Japan worry
that a U.S.-China agreement could produce a separate peace that would undercut
the interests of other regional powers -- just as the Iran nuclear deal has
been met by opposition in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States threated by
Washington's "Persian pivot." They see a U.S. government that has
tired of maintaining a regional military posture to balance Iranian power, and
has instead determined to do a deal with its primary strategic competitor to
ease the burden on America -- allied concerns notwithstanding.
Asian friends worry that Washington may
ultimately make the same calculation in their region, striking a bargain with
China that leaves U.S. allies exposed to that country's unchecked power without
an American counterweight.
Obama and his team believe that a nuclear
settlement with Iran will allow the U.S. to focus its diplomatic and strategic
energies on Asia, a region that will do more to determine the history of this
century than the morass in the Middle East. But if the deal liberates Iran to
cause more regional mayhem, the U.S. will have less time and energy, not more,
to manage its intensifying strategic competition with China in Asia.
Japan, India, and other regional states will
take note, and will make their own arrangements -- just as America's allies in
the Middle East are now doing. The results may produce exactly the
proliferation, proxy wars and great power conflicts that the Iran deal is
designed to prevent.
Daniel Twining is senior fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund. He
previously served on the U.S. Secretary of State's policy planning staff
(2007-9) and as foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain (2001-4).
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