President Barack Obama's always risky initiative in agreeing to negotiate with the Iranians over their legal duty to the international community in relation to their nuclear program is coming unstuck. The Iranians are seeking to worm their way out of the effects of damaging economic sanctions while at the same time pressing on with their illegal fuel enrichment activity which is due to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Were Obama to have any doubts about the ultimate pointlessness of the much ballyhooed Geneva negotiations, which head into a fourth round next month, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ought to have disabused him when he announced this week that “no one has the right to bargain over Iran's nuclear achievements”. This typically obdurate statement from the real power in Iran clearly raises the question of what Iranian negotiators are doing jetting in and out of Geneva for these earnest talks, talks in which President Obama is investing an ever-greater amount of political capital. The message ought to be crystal clear. Iran is simply not going to live up to its obligations under international law to permit the unfettered inspection of its nuclear facilities by experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The White House may have thought it was on new ground when it began dealing with a fresh presidential face in the form of Hassan Rohani. Anyone would have been an improvement over the intemperate and loud-mouthed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yet Obama and his people overlooked the reality that the real power lies with the mullahs led by Khamenei. They also chose to ignore the distinct probability that the “surprise” victory of Rohani was in fact carefully planned and engineered to trigger just the reaction that has come from Obama. One is reminded of past delusional international relationships. Returning from a trip to Germany, a British prime minister once famously said “The German leader is the sort of man with whom we can do business”. He was of course speaking, in 1938, of Adolf Hitler. And just in case Obama is not paying attention, the Iranian regime wants to send to New York as its ambassador to the United Nations one of the men responsible for the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran and the kidnapping of 52 US diplomats for 444 days. Such a provocative proposal is hardly in the spirit of conducting negotiations on the treaty commitments the country has made to the international community in terms of its nuclear activities. Moreover, a new variable has entered into the shadow dance of negotiations in Geneva - Crimea. The Russians along with China, the US, the EU and France, Germany and the UK have until now been sitting on the same side of the table facing the Iranians. With the exception of freelance smugglers, there has been little in the way of sanctions-busting from Russia. But now Moscow is talking to Tehran about a $20 billion oil-for-goods deal, which if it comes off, will drive a coach and horses through the sanctions program and make it even more unlikely that the Iranians will give up their nuclear fuel enrichment. Meanwhile, the Russians are facing their own raft of US-led economic sanctions thanks to their seizure of Crimea. Thus they are likely now, with considerable enthusiasm, to frustrate Obama's ill-judged Iranian appeasement. Time then surely to quit talking to Iran and resume the sanctions.
