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It's hard to imagine why Tehran would accept the current nuclear status quo. (Indeed, every time it is pressed on the issue, it raises Israel's nuclear capability as a prime concern.) Still, if Iran did go nuclear, some of its non-nuclear rivals might e pushed to do the same, chief among them Saudi Arabia, whose own strategic relationship with the U.S. is in decline. Nor will it stop there. Globalization has put nuclear weapons capability in the hands of far more states, while a multi-polar world increases the incentives to build the bomb.
The original logic of the Non-Proliferation regime was not to entrench the nuclear monopoly of the original five nuclear powers; it was to stop the spread of nuclear weapons to new states as part of a wider process pointing towards global nuclear disarmament. That's not going to happen for the foreseeable future, which is why the Bush administration wants to initiate research into a new generation of bunker-busting nuclear weapons, i.e. nukes that can take out other people's nukes.
So why should it surprise us that when states outside of the nuclear club who see their enemies enjoying all the strategic benefits of nukes move to assemble their own strategic deterrent? There are exceptions, of course: In the mid-nineties South Africa became the first state in history to allow its nuclear arsenal to be destroyed under international supervision. And, after a decade of negotiating his way back into the international mainstream, Libya's Colonel Muammar Ghadafi last year renounced his nuclear ambitions and handed over the goodies to the U.S. But in the South African case, the weapons were built by the apartheid regime fearful, like Israel, of being swamped by a hostile neighborhood — and they were destroyed by the same regime shortly before the first democratic government was elected in 1994. Libya? Well, let's just say that Ghadafi has never exactly been embraced as a model of rational behavior or inspired much emulation in the wider international community.
So, if — or more likely when — the European diplomatic efforts on Iran fail, Bush administration hawks will smile a told-you-so smile and move to the next phase. But the Europeans will likely see the failure as at least partly caused by the U.S. staying away from the table and adopting a menacing pose.
Worse, for the Bush administration, is that the Security Council isn't likely to offer the sanctions the U.S. is hoping for. For one thing, Iran has not actually been accused of nuclear-weapons activity by the International Atomic Energy Agency, despite IAEA concerns over Tehran's failure to reveal key elements of its uranium enrichment activities. Until now, U.S. efforts to have Tehran referred to the Security Council, a step that must be taken by consensus of the IAEA board of governors, have floundered. That may be one reason the Bush administration continues to actively seek the ouster of IAEA chief Dr. Mohammed El-Baradei. El-Baradei, remember, irked the U.S. by his contention, since vindicated, that Saddam Hussein did not have an active nuclear weapons program at the time the U.S. invaded.
Making the case against Iran won't be made easier by the fact that the U.S. credibility in making claims about others' weapons program suffered a body blow in Iraq. So the bar for the U.S. to prove its case will be a lot higher over Iran, and going after Dr. El-Baradei at this point will likely raise suspicions among many UN member states that Washington is trying to game the system.
Even if the U.S. did manage to win European support for a Security Council resolution holding Iran in violation of its non-proliferation obligations, there's little doubt that China — now heavily invested in Iran's energy resources — would veto any call for sanctions or any other punitive action. In light of the Iraq WMD debacle, imagining that the UN Security Council is likely to take up Washington's Iran case in a manner favored by the Bush administration is wishful thinking.
Either way, the failure of diplomacy would leave the Bush administration forced to choose between some form of military action and simply living with a nuclear-armed Iran. Dr. Rice was reportedly shocked to hear, at a meeting with French intellectuals in Paris, that European public opinion, and even many elected officials, may incline toward accepting a nuclear-armed Iran as inevitable.
There's no question that European governments share the U.S. opposition to the emergence of a nuclear-armed Iran. But if the question becomes would they be willing to support a war in order to prevent it, the smart money says the U.S. would find fewer allies for a new military campaign than when it went to war in Iraq. The French foreign policy wonks with whom Rice met pointed out to her that they considered a nuclear-armed Pakistan a far greater danger than a nuclear-armed Iran — a point with which she demurred. That's unsurprising, given that despite the fact that Pakistan's own nuclear program has served as the world's secret nuclear supermarket and its military regime faces a substantial domestic challenge from radical Islamists of the Qaeda stripe, the country remains a U.S. ally.
The realpolitik that forced the world to accept India and Pakistan's nuclear arrival in 1998 will see likely see new nations accepted into the club, because the options for enforcing its exclusivity are seldom palatable. As long as nations have been prone to conflict with one another, each new military technology that altered a strategic balance has compelled rivals to match it as quickly as possible. A century ago, it might have been nice to imagine that the airplane or the tank would remain the exclusive property of the U.S. and its allies. As the U.S. intelligence community's own projection of trends over the next 15 years puts it:
A number of countries will continue to pursue their nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs and in some cases will enhance their capabilities. Current nuclear weapons states will continue to improve the survivability of their deterrent forces and almost certainly will improve the reliability, accuracy, and lethality of their delivery systems as well as develop capabilities to penetrate missile defenses... Countries without nuclear weapons, especially in the Middle East and Northeast Asia, may decide to seek them as it becomes clear that their neighbors and regional rivals already are doing so. The assistance of proliferators, including former private entrepreneurs such as the A.Q. Khan network, will reduce the time required for additional countries to develop nuclear weapons.
In other words, get used to it.