The Fruits of Weakness

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Charles Krauthammer

 

May 21, 2010 12:00 A.M.

The Fruits of Weakness

 

Brazil and Turkey realize there’s nothing to fear from Obama and everything to gain from ingratiating yourself with America’s rising adversaries.

 

It is perfectly obvious that Iran’s latest uranium maneuver, brokered by Brazil and Turkey, is a ruse. Iran retains more than enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. And it continues enriching at an accelerated pace and to a greater purity (20 percent). Which is why the French foreign ministry immediately declared that the trumpeted temporary shipping of some Iranian uranium to Turkey will do nothing to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

 

It will, however, make meaningful sanctions more difficult. America’s proposed Security Council resolution is already laughably weak — no blacklisting of Iran’s central bank, no sanctions against Iran’s oil and gas industries, no non-consensual inspections on the high seas. Yet Turkey and Brazil — both current members of the Security Council — are so opposed to sanctions that they will not even discuss the resolution. And China will now have a new excuse to weaken it further.

 

But the deeper meaning of the uranium-export stunt is the brazenness with which Brazil and Turkey gave cover to the mullahs’ nuclear ambitions and deliberately undermined U.S. efforts to curb Iran’s program.

 

The real news is that already notorious photo: the president of Brazil, our largest ally in Latin America, and the prime minister of Turkey, for more than half a century the Muslim anchor of NATO, raising hands together with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most virulently anti-American leader in the world. photo

 

That picture — a defiant, triumphant “take that” to Uncle Sam — is a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there’s no cost to lining up with America’s enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement.

 

They’ve watched President Obama’s humiliating attempts to appease Iran, as every rejected overture is met with abjectly renewed U.S. negotiating offers. American acquiescence reached such a point that the president was late, hesitant, and flaccid in expressing even rhetorical support for democracy demonstrators who were being brutally suppressed and whose call for regime change offered the potential for the most significant U.S. strategic advance in the region in 30 years.

 

They’ve watched America acquiesce to Russia’s reexerting sway over Eastern Europe, over Ukraine (pressured last month into extending for 25 years Russia’s lease of the Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol), and over Georgia (Russia’s de facto annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is no longer an issue under the Obama “reset” policy).

 

They’ve watched our appeasement of Syria, Iran’s agent in the Arab Levant — sending our ambassador back to Syria even as it tightens its grip on Lebanon, supplies Hezbollah with Scuds, and intensifies its role as the pivot of the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance. The price for this ostentatious flouting of the U.S. and its interests? Ever more eager U.S. “engagement.”

 

They’ve observed the administration’s gratuitous slap at Britain over the Falklands, its contemptuous treatment of Israel, its undercutting of the Czech Republic and Poland, and its indifference to Lebanon and Georgia. And in Latin America, they see more than mere passivity from the U.S. as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez organizes his anti-American “Bolivarian” coalition while deepening military and commercial ties with Iran and Russia. They saw active U.S. support in Honduras for a pro-Chávez would-be dictator seeking unconstitutional powers in defiance of the democratic institutions of that country.

 

This is not just an America in decline. This is an America in retreat — accepting, ratifying, and declaring its decline, and inviting rising powers to fill the vacuum.

 

Nor is this retreat by inadvertence. This is retreat by design and, indeed, on principle. It’s the perfect fulfillment of Obama’s adopted Third World narrative of American misdeeds, disrespect, and domination, from which he has come to redeem us and the world. Hence his foundational declaration at the U.N. General Assembly last September that “no one nation can or should try to dominate another nation” (guess who’s been the dominant nation for the last two decades?) and his dismissal of any “world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another.” (NATO? The West?)

 

Given Obama’s policies and principles, Turkey and Brazil are acting rationally. Why not give cover to Ahmadinejad and his nuclear ambitions? As the U.S. retreats in the face of Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela, why not hedge your bets? There’s nothing to fear from Obama and everything to gain by ingratiating yourself with America’s rising adversaries. After all, they actually believe in helping one’s friends and punishing one’s enemies.

 

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contrast with Joe Klein's take;

 

"Diplomacy emerged victorious," Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared on May 17, after his country and Turkey signed its sketchy nuclear deal with Iran. That was something of a reach. But, if not victorious, diplomacy was taking a rare turn on center stage — especially after the U.S. announced, the very next day, that it had completed the far more tricky feat of getting the Russians and Chinese to sign on to a new round of sanctions against Iran. Neither of these deals will prevent Iran from building itself a nuclear weapon, if that's what it desires — indeed, the Turkey-Brazil deal would allow Iran to enrich uranium at much higher levels of purity than currently allowed by international law. But both, as Vice President Biden might say, are big ... deals. They represent significant changes in the international landscape.

 

The real surprise was the Russians and Chinese signing on to a new round of sanctions. This certainly was a victory for the Obama Administration's patient, collegial diplomacy, but it was also attributable to sheer idiocy on the part of the Iranians. "The Iranians are the world's worst negotiators," says Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution. "They've managed to infuriate everyone."

 

The story begins with a deal that was made last October: the Iranians agreed to send 2,640 pounds of low-enriched uranium (3.5% pure) to Russia and receive a smaller amount of higher-enriched uranium (20%) so it could continue to operate the Tehran Research Reactor, which is used for medical purposes. They also agreed to meet the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) demand for a full accounting of their nuclear weapons program. Iran reneged on the agreement, then tried to change it, hoping to ship the uranium to Turkey instead of Russia, before withdrawing that ploy too. Recently, the deeply goofy Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the U.N. that Iran had accepted the original plan. But it hasn't.

 

All of which ticked off the Russians, who have been close strategic partners of the Iranians. The Russians were not pleased that they had to learn about the secret Iranian nuclear facility in Qum from the U.S. And they were definitely not pleased when the Iranians said they'd be more comfortable sending their uranium to Turkey than to Russia. That fed Russian suspicions that the Iranians and Turks were cooking up a deal to build a pipeline that would funnel natural gas from Turkmenistan and Iran through Turkey to Europe, breaking an effective Russian monopoly. In the proposed new sanctions regime, Russia would ban all arms sales to Iran, as well as joint missile-development projects. That is not insignificant; it may signal the beginning of the end of the historic partnership between those two countries, and the beginning of a new tactical and commercial alliance between Iran and Turkey.

 

The Chinese have also not been overly pleased with Iran, though in a quieter, Chinese sort of way. China prizes stability, and the Iranian negotiating style is mercurial, to say the least. The Chinese have negotiated an estimated $20 billion in oil-development deals with Iran, but only a fraction of those have actually been signed by the Iranians and an even smaller fraction activated. The Chinese were also miffed when they sent a delegation to Tehran to find some common ground on the IAEA deal and the Iranians negotiated them into an impenetrable maze. China cares deeply about economic security; that it is willing to diss not only Iran but also valuable trading partners like Turkey and Brazil by agreeing to a new sanctions regime on the day after the Turkey-Brazil-Iran deal sends as powerful a message as Chinese diplomatic vocabulary allows.

 

Which brings us to the Turkey-Brazil deal: it's a lousy one and, clearly, the Iranians are using Turkey and Brazil as yet another means to delay or avoid compliance with the nuclear nonproliferation treaty to which Iran is a signatory. But what's in it for Turkey and Brazil? There are potential commercial benefits, to be sure. But there is also national pride at stake. Brazil is a global economic power that has been relegated to the back benches of international diplomacy. Turkey, spurned by the European Union, has decided to become a leading player in its region.

 

These impulses are potentially valuable: Brazil's and Turkey's interests will align, most often, with those of the U.S. Indeed, the bottom line in all this is pretty positive: traditional powers like Russia and China are edging away from Iran, while potentially constructive new players, like Turkey and Brazil, are pushing their way into multilateral diplomacy. On the other hand, unfortunately, Iran is still merrily enriching uranium at levels that are approaching weapons-grade, and it isn't likely to stop anytime soon.

 

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