Europe and Iran’s nuclear program

14 January 2006, 1449 EST

A great many right-wing blogs advance a strange interpretation of the latest developments in Iran’s apparent quest for nuclear weapons: the current failures of European-Iranian negotiations provide more evidence that Europeans are soft, ineffectual, and otherwise feminized.

What are the problems with the argument?

1. It ignores the obvious comparison between Iran and North Korea. The Europeans haven’t convinced Iran to drop its nuclear program, but the United States, for its part, hasn’t exactly had much success with the North Koreans either.

2. The failure of the talks is also a failure of US policy. The US has no effective “Iran policy” and few significant diplomatic channels with Iran, so it decided to back the European-Iranian negotiations.

3. It really isn’t very clear whether, or how, a more militarized approach to Iranian proliferation would work. It is difficult to believe the Iranians haven’t taken countermeasures against air strikes and the costs of military action for American Iraq policy might very well be enormous. We now recognize that the Israeli bombing of the Osirik reactor – the most obvious analogy for preemptive action against Iraq – was a long-term counter-proliferation failure.

I recommend the following exercise. Imagine that you are leader of the Iran. Would you want nuclear weapons? If so, why? What would it take to convince you to give up their pursuit? Now add domestic political considerations into the mix.

Filed as: Iran and Iranian proliferation

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.