WarSclerotic

U.S., Israel Need to Be in Sync on Iran Talks – WSJ.com.

Iranian negotiators are meeting officials from the U.S. and other world powers late this week for talks on Tehran’s nuclear program—unless, of course, the Iranians decide they want the talks in a different city, or on a different day, or perhaps not at all.

So it has gone in arranging these talks with Tehran’s leaders, with whom even negotiations are subject to negotiations. Still, it’s now nearly certain that Iran will meet Friday and Saturday with the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, along with Germany, in Istanbul. Since the last effort to negotiate curbs on Iran’s nuclear program fell apart just over a year ago, both Tehran’s enrichment of uranium and international economic pressure on the regime there have escalated significantly—along with the chances of an Israeli military strike.

As that suggests, one of the most important players in this game, Israel, won’t be in the room. But if the talks are to succeed in both halting Iran’s nuclear progress and preventing an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, it will be important for Israel, sitting outside the room, and the U.S., sitting inside the room, to agree on basic strategy.

Both U.S. and Israeli officials think a constructive meeting last month between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu produced more of a meeting of minds than emerged from some previous, famously discordant conversations between the two. If talks get rolling, though, it will be important for Israel and the U.S. to remain in concert on three important questions:

What’s the goal? The U.S. seems prepared to stake out a fairly tough opening position in the talks: Iran would be required to stop producing higher-grade enriched uranium, shut down the new Fordo plant that makes it, and ship out of the country the higher-enriched uranium already produced, in return for nuclear fuel provided by other countries.

Yet even this seemingly hard-line position would represent a rollback from where talks started in 2009. Then, the U.S. insisted—and Iran, by most accounts, nearly agreed—that Tehran would ship out of the country a majority of the lower-enriched uranium it had then produced, in return for fuel rods produced elsewhere for use in Iran’s medical and research reactors.

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Iran has since produced much more low-enriched uranium, while also starting to make higher-enriched uranium. So Israel is seeking more. Mr. Netanyahu declared Sunday that Israel wants an end to all enrichment—not just the higher-grade uranium—and the removal of all the uranium Iran already has enriched, as well as closure of the Fordo enrichment facility. The U.S. would like all those things as well, of course, but likely won’t demand it all at once.

What’s the point of no return? One of the key judgments everybody faces in this process is deciding when Iran will have gone so far toward a nuclear weapon that it can no longer be stopped—and to halt Tehran before it reaches that point.

Yet identifying that point is difficult, and neither Israel nor the U.S. has been very specific in defining it. But U.S. officials seem to think it will come when Iran’s leadership makes a decision to move beyond enrichment to acquire either the ability to construct nuclear weapons, or to build the actual weapons. Unlike Israel (and to some extent Britain and France), the U.S. doesn’t think Iran’s leaders have reached that point.

Israel tends to think the point of no return is reached when Iran has built so much nuclear infrastructure into secure locations—such as the underground, mountainside Fordo enrichment plant—that its program isn’t vulnerable to military attack.

There’s a related gray area. American officials are inclined to think they would know, either through intelligence or telltale actions that can be seen from the outside, when Iran has decided to move from enriching uranium to developing nuclear weapons. Israel isn’t so sure about that.

Are there alternatives to military force? This may be the trickiest, grayest area of all. Everybody agrees that the economic sanctions put into place by the international community—which get tougher this summer when a Western embargo of Iranian oil purchases goes into full effect—have pinched Iran and made pursuit of its nuclear ambitions uncomfortable.

Similarly, it seems certain that efforts to disrupt the workings of that nuclear program, by blocking imports of materials, corrupting nuclear programs and attacking nuclear scientists, have slowed down and complicated Iran’s nuclear quest. Moreover, not everything that could be tried has been tried. One possibility: a full naval blockade of Iran to really shut down its economy as well as its nuclear program.

But would that, combined with diplomacy, be enough to halt and reverse nuclear advances? That is the key question—one nobody can fully answer.

Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com

This entry was posted on April 10, 2012 at 3:24 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.