WarSclerotic

The discovery in 2002 that Iran had failed to declare a uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and a major heavy water production facility at Arak marked the beginning of a decade-long effort by UN agencies and most of the international community to pressure Tehran to come clean on its nuclear activities.

While Iran’s progress towards acquiring a nuclear capability has been slowed, it remains defiant in denying the International Atomic Energy Agency full access to its nuclear activities.

The IAEA’s decision last month to create a task force to monitor Iran’s nuclear behaviour and its broader compliance with UN security resolutions comes as Israel warns again that it will not permit Iran to enter a “zone of immunity”. From Israel’s perspective, once Iran moves to protect its major nuclear assets in underground basing facilities, all bets will be off. Israel’s warnings are credible given its track record in striking Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981. The US’s support for an Israeli strike against Iran would be welcome in Tel Aviv, but it would not be a pre-requisite for action.

Observers have argued that Israel’s concerns are exaggerated. They claim that if Iran crosses the nuclear threshold it will behave with restraint, as other new nuclear weapons states have done since 1945.

A leading doyen of American realist thinkers, Ken Waltz, has argued recently that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons will induce greater caution in its foreign policy because it will increase the country’s vulnerability as a certain nuclear target. For Waltz, a nuclear-armed Iran may actually enhance stability in the Middle East by making Iran more risk averse in its behaviour.

Putting aside the question of whether it is prudent to assume that every group of national policy-makers in the international system share the same degree of rationality, there are problems with this argument. The biggest problem is the assumption that all states will conform to the same patterns of behaviour once they get the bomb. We need not go too far back in history to understand how flawed this premise is.

The most recent member of the nuclear club, North Korea, has continued to engage in highly destabilising behaviour since testing its first device in 2006.

Since that time, Pyongyang has transferred nuclear and missile components to Syria and Iran in clear breach of UN Security Council resolutions. It conducted a second nuclear test in 2009 in the face of overwhelming international opposition; and in 2010 it authorised the sinking of a South Korean naval vessel and followed this up with an artillery attack on South Korean territory the same year. And all signs point to continued work by North Korea on acquiring a missile capability that can strike targets on the west coast of the US. Nuclear weapons appear to have emboldened Pyongyang to undertake behaviour that can only be characterised as dangerously destabilising.

This raises important questions for those who take comfort in the assumption that Iran will be just like all the other nuclear powers if its crosses the threshold to building weapons. Tehran has hardly been a responsible stakeholder in the Middle East. Threats to close the key chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz, ongoing support for terrorist groups, and provocative rhetoric about wiping Israel off the map hardly promotes a sense of optimism that Iran would behave as a responsible nuclear-armed state.

Iran would probably be deterred from using nuclear weapons but, like North Korea, it would almost certainly see these weapons as a strategic licence to engage in greater destabilisation in the Middle East, and possibly even beyond this region.

That said, we should be a bit sceptical of sweeping claims that Iran’s nuclear program would pose an “existential threat” to its neighbours, including Israel. Policy-makers in Tel Aviv and among the Gulf states are less concerned that Tehran would actually use nuclear weapons and more worried about the licence for destabilisation that any nuclear capability would grant to Iranian policy-makers.

As Iran’s zone of immunity becomes increasingly plausible to Israeli decision-makers, visions of a Middle Eastern North Korea will loom larger than the prospect of widespread international condemnation for unilateral military action.

Andrew O’Neil is director of the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University