Big five powers’ unified stance faces severe test

By Daniel Dombey
January 31, 2006
The Financial Times
Original Source: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/4d0faf8c-9280-11da-977b-0000779e2340.html

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, at the British foreign secretary’s London house, the world’s most important diplomats signed up to a momentous deal to maintain a united front against Iran’s nuclear programme.
Over the next five weeks that agreement, reached by all five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, could be tested to extinction.
The prize coveted by Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, and her French, German and British colleagues is a Security Council resolution backed by the widest possible majority. Such a measure would censure Tehran for breaking international agreements and planning to end its suspension of uranium enrichment – the process that can create nuclear weapons- grade material.
“This is going to be discussed and decided upon by the UN Security Council,” Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister, told Reuters on Tuesday. “That is a very important step. We couldn’t get agreement on that before, we’ve got agreement on it now.”
The risk is that much could yet occur during the intervening five weeks to throw the US/EU plans off course. The US and the Europeans have made the calculation that since it would be extremely difficult to agree international sanctions on Iran, the most the international community can do at the moment is to unite in the Security Council to reprimand Tehran.
The good news for the EU and the US is that with temporary members such as Slovakia, Qatar and Japan, the Security Council is favourably configured for efforts to censure Iran.
But the stances of Russia and China – both of which have strong energy ties to Tehran – are still far from given. Tuesday’s agreement among the five permanent members merely obliged them to vote at an emergency meeting this week of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, to “report” the dossier to the Security Council.
It left open what the Security Council would then do.
In the meantime, the EU and US will try to win as big a majority as they can at this week’s 35-government IAEA board meeting. However, countries such as Cuba, Venezuela and Syria are likely to oppose any effort to report Iran, while India has said it will abstain and South Africa has endorsed Iran’s “right” to enrich uranium.
Iran has also warned that it will end voluntary measures to co-operate with the IAEA if it is reported to New York. But the focus of the next month is likely to be on Moscow’s attempt to broker a deal based on the principle that if enrichment takes place in Russia rather than Iran it cannot be diverted for weapons use.
European diplomats tell themselves that the proposal is bound to fail, since Iran will never agree to the basic idea that all uranium enrichment take place outside its territory. They add that Tehran’s own proposal to put industrial-scale enrichment on hold is meaningless, since the Islamic republic is physically incapable of beginning any such activity for months, if not years.
But while the Russia-Iran diplomatic duet continues, no Security Council resolution can be taken for granted – particularly since Iran is also stepping up its co-operation with the IAEA.