Maybe, as Rafsanjani was suggesting, the Iranians will be satisfied only to foster the appearance of having nuclear weapons without actually producing them; for Rafsanjani, so long as Iran’s neighbors assume it has nuclear weapons, they’ll become responsive to Iran’s wishes. But can we count on Iran’s maintaining such a posture indefinitely? And even if we could, what would the Middle East look like if Iran gained far greater coercive leverage over all its neighbors? Wouldn’t oil production policies be used to separate us from our allies or further manipulate the world’s economy? Wouldn’t we face a region increasingly hostile to our interests? Wouldn’t we see the prospect of Arab-Israeli peace diminish as Iran worked to weaken, isolate, and demoralize the Jewish state? And to avoid being at the mercy of Iran, wouldn’t the Saudis decide to go nuclear--and wouldn’t that impel the Egyptians to do the same?
The point is that even the image of Iran as a nuclear power carries with it very dangerous consequences, including that the Middle East might become a nuclear-armed region. It is not an accident that the British, the French, and the Germans have sought to get the Iranians to stop their nuclear program. Similarly, it is not an accident that two U.N. Security Council resolutions have imposed limited sanctions on Iran to get it to stop its enrichment efforts.
Consider the irony that the sanctions resolutions adopted by the Security Council were not about Iran’s covert nuclear arms program. The Russians, among others, have not believed that the Iranians had one. Instead, the international community in these resolutions was making it clear that it saw Iran’s enrichment program--and its rejection of offers of light water reactors for purely civil nuclear purposes--as indicators that Iran intended to develop a nuclear weapons capability at some point.
While nothing theoretically has changed, the NIE has created a new story line. It framed the issue differently and shifted the attention away from enrichment to the weapons program. Well, if the weapons program has been halted, can’t we relax? Certainly, that is the conclusion that the Chinese are drawing, given their mercantilist approach to Iran and foreign policy in general. They are now saying there is not a need for another sanctions resolution against Iran. The Russians, too, are joining them, no doubt reflecting, at least in part, Putin’s desire to demonstrate in the Middle East and on the international stage that Russia is an alternative to America.