If confidence building measures (CBM) were people, the TRR refueling deal would be a college student partying it up in Cancun, complete with all the risky behavior usually associated with that lifestyle. Why didn’t the West simply say, “Thanks, but no thanks” when Iran started to try to change the terms of the deal? Instead, the West responded by elevating the deal to such an extent that it seems it is the goal of US policy: this CBM is the tail that wags the dog. It has taken the place of the real issue, enrichment on Iranian soil. Now, of course, a new deal brokered by third party countries Brazil and Turkey is moving the center of initiative farther and farther from the EU3 and Washington.
This problem, and here I mean the problem of the West not being in the driver’s seat, was foreshadowed by Moscow about a week ago when it warned that the West was not being sufficiently flexible. Moscow said, as reported on BBC Monitoring on 8 May 2010, that there were clear signs Tehran was willing to ship the LEU out of country. But the West’s inflexibility on Iran goes much deeper than simply not recognizing a shift in Iran’s attitude toward the refueling deal. Throughout this crisis, which has now been going on for seven years, Iran has been much more diplomatically agile than the West! This is strange since the Islamic Republic has few friends internationally and little experience or even inclination toward diplomacy. (For a good portion of its history since the Revolution, ideology had been running its international diplomacy, often at the expense of Iran attaining its goals.)
I think the reason the West is losing the diplomatic war with Iran is pretty clear: it takes forever to get just the EU3 plus the US (and, yes, other interested parties like Israel) to reach an agreement on not only a goal but the diplomatic tactics to use. This painful process of arriving at a united stance has made unity between Western partners an end in itself with some governments unwilling to follow their firmly held beliefs simply because they do not want to be accused of breaking with their Western partners. The result has been rather ineffectual demands—such as demanding that Iran cease converting yellow cake into uranium hexafluoride—followed by retreat, i.e. acquiescing in uranium conversion. It has also resulted in a diplomatic strategy completely lacking in a “Plan B.” It is both unnecessary and dangerous to always consider the future as either Iran backs down or military action takes place.
The West needs to break this cycle of demand and retreat by building into its system enough flexibility to respond to events in real time. We need to appoint a single person for handling the Iranian crisis and actually give him or her the power to make real deals.