Abstract
Now that Tehran knows who will occupy the White House for the next four years, talks may soon resume in earnest. But Iranian eagerness to talk should not be mistaken for willingness to compromise.
Most of them having breathed a sigh of relief at the outcome of the US presidential election, legions of America-watchers around the world now wonder how President Barack Obama will use his renewed mandate in the foreign policy arena. They are acutely aware that foreign-policy issues played little role in the election campaign. Even the presidential candidates’ debate that was supposed to bear on global matters pivoted back to domestic economic and education issues. No foreign-policy initiatives were enunciated during the campaign. The logical conclusion is that Obama will carry on as he has been in the foreign-policy realm, avoiding impossible issues such as the Israeli–Palestine quagmire and managing inescapable problems through the application of reasoned pragmatism. Knowing first-hand the aphorism attributed to Harold Macmillan of how it is ‘events, dear boy, events’ that blow governments off course, his policies are likely to be reactive rather than proactive.
There will be exceptions to this management style. With an eye to his legacy, Obama can be expected to identify one or two foreign-policy issues to which to give priority. The election dynamics suggest one such issue which a White House source said is already on the president’s to-do list: climate-change mitigation.
What then about the nuclear theme that was Obama’s signature foreign policy issue during the first term? The vision he laid out in his speech in Prague in April 2009 on reducing nuclear dangers and the eventual coming of a nuclear-weapons-free world sprang from the heart. Later that year he took the unprecedented step of chairing a UN Security Council session which he devoted to nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. The following spring he hosted the first-ever global summit on preventing nuclear terrorism. The New START nuclear arms reduction agreement with Russia in March 2010 was another seminal achievement, showing that arms control was again an American priority after a dormant decade. Another successful international conference that spring reknitted the fraying fabric of international support for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
After these achievements, however, Obama’s nuclear agenda ran aground. Important work continues on many fronts, but the other major objectives he laid out in Prague have all encountered immovable obstacles. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) he hoped to get ratified, the negotiations on a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT) he hoped to get started, the new arms-reduction talks with Russia he hoped to initiate and the measures to strengthen the NPT he hoped to see adopted all look likely to remain unaccomplished four years from now.
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