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When President Vladimir Putin was in Tehran last week, one image from the trip was indelible: Putin meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei while President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sat in the corner of the sofa. Putin apparently made an offer directly to the supreme leader about a way to move forward in the nuclear standoff. According to the proposal, the six parties negotiating with Iran would pause on seeking sanctions in the United Nations Security Council if Iran would pause on its enrichment program.
Last week, the six-party negotiations (which include the United States, China, Russia, Japan, North Korea and South Korea) agreed on a second phase of a plan to denuclearize North Korea that has under discussion since 2005. This plan goes further than the agreed framework by requiring "disablement" of North Korean plutonium production facilities, but is troublingly silent on a few things.
The Iraq war will be the turning point that changes the basic parameters of our security picture for decades. The war's monopoly on our political energy, which has now stretched to five years -- an eon in a time of fast-moving global change -- is one of its greatest uncounted costs.
The Iraq war’s monopoly on America’s political energy has now stretched to five years. During what is an eon in a time of fast-moving global change, a number of international security problems have grown into full-blown crises. Unless a major effort is made to reverse current trends, the fissures now spreading across the global nonproliferation regime could easily become the worst of these crises.
Legal ambiguities and contractual loopholes in provisions of the NPT and IAEA safeguards agreements usually serve the purpose of those who wish to evade their obligations while claiming that they are doing nothing illegal.
A report from the IAEA laying out a timeline for Iran to resolve outstanding issues related to its nuclear program may give Iran as much as eight months of continued centrifuge installation and operation.
Top 3 Upcoming Challenges to the Nonproliferation Regime
Top 3 Best New Policy Proposals
Top 4 High Impact Ideas to Implement by 2010
The White House reached a deal late last month to provide India with U.S. civil nuclear cooperation, reversing a ban on such cooperation that had been in place since 1978. After India's first nuclear test in 1974, the United States decided to halt nuclear exports to countries that have not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and persuaded the rest of the world's nuclear suppliers to make this a global rule in 1992. India, Israel and Pakistan refused to sign the treaty and instead produced nuclear arsenals. The Bush administration now wants to remove the longstanding restrictions on India, and to persuade the rest of the world to do the same.
George Perkovich says that among the current problems with North Korea, India, and Iran, Iran is the most important to resolve because the Iranians are trying to defy international opinion and produce a nuclear weapons capability after having been exposed in the act of trying.