“Russia is the only country that is helping Iran to realize its nuclear program in a peaceful way.” So spoke our bearded friend in the perpetual gray suit today after an historic visit by Vladimir Putin to Tehran–the first by a Russian head of state since Stalin in 1943.
Putin been building, albeit at a willfully sluggish pace, the Bushehr nuclear power plant for the mullahs, and he's clearly impelled to lock arms with Ahmadinejad in order to buck U.S. military expansion in the Caspian (we have a base in Kyrgyzstan and have financed the upgrade of a Soviet airfield in Azerbaijan). Time's Tony Karon explains the significance of the visit:
Russia agrees that Iran has, in some of its activities, failed to meet the transparency requirements of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is the basis for the Security Council demand that it suspend enrichment until it can clear up questions raised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and restore confidence in its intentions. But the IAEA and Tehran have agreed to a "work plan" and timetable for Iran to resolve the outstanding questions, which is why further U.N. action has been tabled pending the outcome of that process.
And should that process falter or fail, another process will of course be initiated buying Tehran yet more time to do what everyone, including Vladimir Putin, knows it's trying to do with enriched uranium.
I doubt very much that Ahmadinejad is as pleased with his Kremlin counterpart as he makes out to the media. For one thing, this landmark visit could have happened years ago. (How many trips have Hugo Chavez and some grizzled apparatchik from Cuba made to Tehran since the war in Iraq began?) For another, Iran has learned the hard way that being used as a buffer in a game of Great Power intimidation rarely benefits Iran because everything is contingent on external factors such as who our next president will be, whether or not the Caspian states will get their oil pipelines built, breaking Moscow's energy monopoly, etc. Putin knows that he wields more power as a threat to the United States before the mullahs have got the bomb than he will after they've got it.
It seems to me that a major strategic blunder is being made by Washington and Paris (notwithstanding the fact that Bernard Kouchner is easily the best foreign minister France has had since Charles Gravier). Iran's biggest historic rival in the region is now its handmaid for Shiite dominance. Another frequent guest of Ahmadinejad is our own permanent ally Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president, who spent some time in Iran when his party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, was at war with Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party. There is no chance now that Iraq will ever have nuclear weapons, leaving Iranian deterrence all about one fear: regime change at home.
The U.S., by reactivating diplomacy with the Islamic Republic, could easily assure that regime change is not, nor will it be, in the offing. A deal similar to the one just struck with North Korea could be struck with the mullahs without necessarily sacrificing our commitment to funding opposition groups and NGOs inside Iran. (How's this for neocon realism: plausible deniability. It worked for the Congress for Cultural Freedom for a spell, didn't it?)
At the very least, a willingness on our part to negotiate will deprive Iran of its facile sensationalism and its attempt to depict itself as an "anti-imperialist" stalwart in the Middle East. We might make it a condition of such negotiations that Ahmadinejad call it quits on the grandstanding, his threats to Israel, and his creepy talk about the Holocaust, which does more damage in the Arab polities than it does in the Persian one. (If nothing else, it'll make my blog reading easier to see the New Left types sputter and grumble about "hegemony" and counterrevolution.)
But what do you suppose means more to Ayatollah Khamenei right now: Photo ops with Chavez, or getting Condoleeza Rice's undivided attention? Wouldn't it be worth the price of admission just to see the first American head of state touch down in Tehran since the era of the Shah, and to see it broadcast on Venezuelan, Cuban, Bolivian, Chinese, Russian televisions? What then, Al Jazeera?