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Analysis

Rouhani and Obama UN speeches and Netanyahu’s response by Dr Toby Greene

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Key points

  • Rouhani’s UN speech reflected what has already been clearly established, that his election has brought a new Iranian diplomatic posture, but he offered no hints of what concrete concessions Iran was willing to make to address the international mistrust of Iran’s nuclear programme.
  • Obama’s speech reflected his desire to find a new basis for relations with Iran, which he has sought since he entered office, and this was couched within a wider restatement of a pragmatic Middle East policy.
  • Netanyahu fears international resolve being softened by Rouhani’s diplomatic offensive, whilst Iran’s nuclear programme marches forward. This explains his attempts to deflate the balloon of optimism that has surrounded Rouhani, which we can expect to see more of when Netanyahu addresses the UN next week.

Rouhani’s speech: the global charm offensive continues

Rouhani’s UN speech reflected what has already been clearly established, that his election has brought a new Iranian diplomatic posture. He repeated his message, already widely promoted, that Iran is ready to seek a ‘political solution’ to remove doubts about its pursuit of nuclear weapons and secure its right to civilian nuclear technology.

But he offered no hints of what concrete concessions, if any, Iran was willing to make to address the international mistrust of Iran, which is borne of over a decade of proven Iranian deception and prevarication.

Though he stressed Iran had no intention of building nuclear weapons, this was nothing new. Iran has claimed all along it only wants civilian nuclear technology. It is the repeated discovery of clandestine nuclear sites and secret weaponisation research, and Iran’s refusal to fully cooperate with IAEA inspectors, which have made the world wary of these words.

At the same time his speech, whilst lacking the more overtly offensive elements of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric, reflected the same anti-Western, anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist world view that typified his predecessor. Rouhani railed against, “Coercive economic and military policies and practices geared to the maintenance and preservation of old superiorities and dominations,” claiming that Iran by contrast was a source of peace and stability and a model of democracy.

Many will have been struck by the hypocrisy of all this, given the extent of Iran’s own brutal internal repression, its support for Hezbollah, the al-Assad regime, and armed extremists in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, and its attempted assassination of diplomats around the world.

The world’s focus right now, however, is the narrow issue of Iran’s nuclear programme. Iran’s goal appears clear: to lower tensions with the West and bring about a relaxation of costly sanctions to help improve Iran’s economic situation, whilst giving up as little as possible of its nuclear capacity. Recent comments of the Supreme Leader, the ultimate decision maker in Iran, indicate that he is in favour of this new strategy.

Obama’s speech: reaffirmation of a pragmatic US policy

It was in Obama’s first inauguration in 2009 that he offered a famous outstretched hand to those who would unclench their fists – rhetoric that was followed by an attempt to enter a direct dialogue with Iran. It was a policy left flat footed by the Green Revolution and Iran’s bloody efforts to repress it. The Iranian regime hunkered down in both its domestic and diplomatic policy. But now with the Iranian regime seeking to narrow the gaps with its own public, and improve relations with the West to ease economic pressures, Obama sees a new chance to open the dialogue he hoped for all along.

His lengthy UN speech reflected this, but set within a broader redefinition of US Middle East strategic priorities: the defence of its allies, the free flow of oil, confronting threats of terrorism, and stopping the use or development of WMD. Absent from this list of core interests was the promotion of political and economic reform, which Obama launched in his May 2011 speech following the onset of the Arab Spring. The troubled direction of the Arab Spring has pushed this agenda item back down to a lower tier of priority.

Obama said the US would use, “all elements of our power, including military force, to secure our core interests in the region.” But this was a day for holding the olive branch higher than the gun. Whilst Obama stressed that Iran’s, “conciliatory words will have to be matched by actions”, he avoided threatening language with regard to Iran. Overall he repeatedly stressed his preference that the use of force, and the responsibility for international intervention, should be multilateral wherever possible.

When coming to specifics, Obama placed resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict as a priority along the Iranian issue saying, “While these issues are not the cause of all the region’s problems, they have been a major source of instability for far too long, and resolving them can help serve as a foundation for a broader peace.”

Israelis will have welcomed hearing Obama reaffirm that the “United States will never compromise our commitment to Israel’s security, nor our support for its existence as a Jewish state.” However, the linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and other regional security issues is one that Israeli leaders have resisted, and the nature of the linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian issue and Iran’s nuclear threat has been a source of tension between Netanyahu and Obama in the past.

No doubt when Netanyahu meets Obama in Washington next week, he will seek reassurance that the threat of force remains on the table to stop Iran reaching nuclear weapons capability.

Eyes turn to Netanyahu

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Iran policy faces a number of challenges, which he will no doubt seek to address in his own UN speech next week, and which he is already trying to deal with in his public statements.

Firstly the replacement of Ahmadinejad with Rouhani has given the Iranian regime a much more acceptable face. In the past few years Netanyahu has succeeded in rallying international efforts to pressure Iran through tough sanctions, an effort which was made easier by the extreme rhetoric of Ahmadinejad. Now he has reason to fear that the US and the EU, keen to take an apparent opportunity offered by Rouhani to de-escalate, will either be strung along by Iran to buy time, or soften their demands to make a deal which does not satisfy Israeli concerns.

A second challenge is what is happening with the Iranian nuclear programme itself. Netanyahu appeared to impact Iranian thinking directly by drawing his graphic and tightly defined red line at the UN last year. Iran has technically stayed under Netanyahu’s red line – equivalent to around 240kg of 20% enriched uranium, sufficient for one bomb if further enriched. But Iran has found ways to blur the line. Iran has already enriched more than 240kg of 20% enriched uranium. It has stayed under the red line by converting some of that material into an oxide form, but nuclear experts say it could quickly be turned back for further enrichment.  Iran has also accelerated the installation of new and faster centrifuges, meaning it has shortened the breakout period to creating fissile material from its stockpile of 3.5% enriched uranium to just a few weeks.

A third challenge is that the credibility of the international threat of force against Iran – which Netanyahu has long argued is essential for the success of any negotiations with Iran – is in question, given the trouble the US faced rallying both domestic and international support for military action against Syria. Netanyahu’s frequently articulated belief that Israel can ultimately only rely on itself, and must have an independent military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities, will only have been reinforced by recent events.

Netanyahu’s desire to address these three challenges is driving his attempts, though his own rhetoric, to deflate the balloon of optimism that has surrounded Rouhani, which as far as he is concerned is filled with hot air, and nothing else. We can expect to see more of this when Netanyahu addresses the UN next week, and a concerted effort to inject urgency and clarity into the forthcoming diplomatic process with Iran over its nuclear programme.