Perkovich: “ElBaradei and Iran have won this round”

Foreign ministers from the major powers met today to iron out their differences on how to deal with Iran's nuclear program. Given the importance of the meeting, I asked George Perkovich, vice president here at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a top expert on nonproliferation, to weigh in on today's statement, which was issued by the so-called P5+2, the United States, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom (plus the European Union). Here's Perkovich:

ElBaradei and Iran have won this round. In August the IAEA Director General accepted what were essentially Iranian terms for answering the IAEA's outstanding questions about Iran's suspicious nuclear activities. This agreement seemed to surrender the IAEA's rights and responsibilities to conduct follow-up investigations and pursue new leads. The agreement also neglected the U.N. Security Council's legally binding demands that Iran suspend uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities as long as the IAEA is unable to satisfy itself that Iran's nuclear activities have been entirely peaceful. Yet Iran and Mr. ElBaradei hailed it as a breakthrough. ElBaradei and others who are convinced the U.S. plans to go to war against Iran felt the agreement would spare the world another catastrophe.

The P5+2 statement reveals that the Iran/IAEA deal effectively neutralized the U.S., French, U.K. effort to tighten sanctions on Iran in response to Iran's ongoing refusal to accede to U.N. Security Council resolutions. The statement basically says the world should wait and hope that Iran gives the IAEA full answers and that somehow all the outstanding issues are indeed resolved. (If this were so easy, why has Iran waited more than four years to provide such answers and suffered U.N. sanctions for failing to cooperate?) Then, in November the P5+2 will reconvene and, if Iran has not satisfied the IAEA, they will huff and puff some more.

When President Ahmadinejad said last week that the Iran case is closed in the Security Council and the matter is with the IAEA where it belongs, he was absolutely wrong from a legal standpoint. The U.N. Security Council Resolutions remain active and binding. But now some members of the Security Council, following the lead of Director General ElBaradei, are showing that President Ahmadinejad is having his way, at least for now.