Jim Hoagland in today's WaPo does a good job of shining the light on Iran's new bellicose attitude regarding its nucular ambitions, and predicts that the issue will require the attention of Bush and Kerry, probably around debate time.
Quote:
The combined efforts by the EU negotiators and by U.N. inspectors did accomplish this much: They slowed the Iranian effort by about a year. Western and Israeli estimates, which originally foresaw 2005 as the earliest probable completion date for the assembly of a nuclear weapon, have been revised to 2006.
With no obvious workable military option, the next American president will be confronted with a growing feeling among Europeans that the best available strategy may be to try to keep an Iranian finger off the trigger of fully developed and deployed nuclear weapons.
Iran would then come to resemble Pakistan, which froze its development at the screwdriver stage in 1989 and then exploded its first device nine years later to respond to India's nuclear testing. The thrust of international diplomacy since the 1998 tests has been to prevent deployment of nuclear weapons by India or Pakistan.
Iran is a living, moving foreign policy quandary that is just over the horizon in voters' concerns. Kerry and Bush should move now to spell out the actions that would prevent this crisis from worsening as the campaign proceeds. That forces each candidate to think about the future and gives voters a chance to see each's judgment at work in real time.
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The shortcoming of that Iran/Pakistan analogy, though, is that Iran has been more actively involved in challenging the American infidels than has been Pakistan, and the threat is a bit more direct.
The interesting tactical point is that Bush will have to articulate a new policy for Iran, at a time when his credibility on foreign policy is low enough that, as Hoaland notes, Kerry can "gain points simply by uttering the name of the country." Kerry also has challenges, because here he can't just slipstream in Bush's wake as he has on Iraq by pointing out the Administration's serial fuckups.
Any thoughts among the great minds here about how the US should react?
As my personal foreign policy outlook is shaped largely be Aaron Sorkin, I'll have to consult TiVo and browse back episodes to see WBartletWD, but doubt that this particular scenario has come up. Likely, in the absence of meaningful leverage points (and I don't see any obvious ones, as Iran doesn't seem worried about international isolation), I think we're probably screwed. Welcome, my friends, to the increasingly proliferated world.
