Obama’s U.N. Disarmament Meeting Highlights U.S. Rifts Over Approach
Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2009
By Elaine M. Grossman
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to chair a U.N. Security Council meeting tomorrow on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament has drawn to the surface dramatically different views of his approach (see GSN, Sept. 21).
(Sep. 23) – U.S. President Barack Obama, shown addressing the U.N. General Assembly today, plans to chair a U.N. Security Council meeting tomorrow on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament (Stan Honda/Getty Images).
As the first U.S. president to lead such a gathering, Obama is expected to seek Security Council sponsorship for some specific measures to grapple with the dangers posed by atomic weapons. However, he appears intent this week on largely steering clear of singling out nations like Iran or North Korea, where nuclear work remains of international concern.
Some conservative pundits see his strategy of pressing the Security Council to address proliferation challenges generally, rather than focusing on specific punitive measures from the outset, as a reckless gambit that could signal weakness to the world.
“The [Obama] move represents one of the most dangerous diplomatic ploys this country has ever seen,” according to Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Others see the approach quite differently.
“I applaud the Obama administration for seizing this opportunity” to focus the Security Council on global nuclear dangers, said Sharon Squassoni, a nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“I think this is a preview of some of the issues that the Obama administration is going to want to raise in 2010,” when world leaders gather for conferences on nonproliferation, she told Global Security Newswire.
“Let me be clear, this is not about singling out individual nations — it is about standing up for the rights of all nations that do live up to their responsibilities,” Obama said this morning in a speech before the U.N. General Assembly. “Because a world in which [International Atomic Energy Agency] inspections are avoided and the United Nations’ demands are ignored will leave all people less safe, and all nations less secure.”
That said, he went on to rap Iran and North Korea by name, stating that they “must be held accountable” for violating international norms and that “the world must stand together to demonstrate that international law is not an empty promise, and that treaties will be enforced.”
The U.N. event tomorrow is widely expected to offer Obama another international stage for underscoring a set of ambitious nuclear-related objectives that he first described as president during an April speech in Prague.
“The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one,” the president told a huge crowd in the Czech Republic. “Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global nonproliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold.”
To bolster security, Obama said his administration “will take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons,” to include negotiating with Moscow a new set of arms cuts and reducing the “role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy.”
The White House would also push the U.S. Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and seek a new global pact to end the production of fissile material usable in nuclear weapons, he said (see GSN, Sept. 22).
Obama reiterated those goals in today’s speech before the General Assembly.
“We must stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and seek the goal of a world without them,” he told global leaders in New York. “The threat of proliferation is growing in scope and complexity. If we fail to act, we will invite nuclear arms races in every region, and the prospect of wars and acts of terror on a scale that we can hardly imagine.”
Exercising its prerogative as this month’s rotating chair of the Security Council, the United States drafted a resolution on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament that the Obama team hopes the 15-nation body will adopt unanimously this week.
The five-page statement leads off with support for “[creating] the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons,” noting that this is a facet of implementing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The nonproliferation accord, which is to undergo a periodic international review next year, also bans non-nuclear states from acquiring atomic weapons and promises them access to civil nuclear energy technologies.
The draft resolution reaffirms in detail many of the Security Council’s past efforts to stem the spread of nuclear weapons and offers support for some new nonproliferation initiatives. New items include support for imposing penalties on any NPT signatory nations that withdraw from the treaty, and a call for countries to minimize the use of bomb-grade uranium for civilian purposes.
Writing online for the National Review, Bayefsky took issue with Obama’s effort to seek the council’s consensus on a more general set of standards for countering proliferation, rather than castigate specific nations like Iran and North Korea.
The tactic “shamelessly panders to Arab and Muslim states,” implicitly giving an opening to Iran or other Middle Eastern nations for demanding that Israel eliminate its undeclared nuclear arsenal before Tehran disbands its program, Bayefsky said.
Moreover, a failure to clearly identify rogue-nation nuclear programs in Obama’s agenda for the meeting “stretches his ‘beer summit’ technique to the global scale,” she said, referring to the president’s recent effort to address racial sensitivities by holding an informal gathering on the White House lawn.
“This feel-good experience will feel best of all to Iran, which has interpreted Obama’s penchant for form over substance to be a critical weakness,” according to Bayefsky.
However, to Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, the decision to frame the Security Council’s nonproliferation objectives as a set of universally applicable standards is exactly the right approach.
“There is no reason to go after Iran by name in this context, because it would give Iran every reason to push back and disrupt the opportunity to reach consensus on the very actions necessary to deal with Iran and the Irans of the future,” he said in a Monday telephone interview. “This is an attempt to … build support around a set of nonproliferation and disarmament goals.”
Kimball said it “might make certain individuals feel good [to call] out Iran for its violations.” However, Obama is pursuing a different strategy that lays the groundwork for even “stronger action against Iran” in the future, based on this resolution that makes nonproliferation measures applicable to everyone, he said.
By choosing wording that applies to all potential proliferators, the new resolution “gives Iranian leaders less of a foothold to complain how everything is so unfair [to them],” Squassoni said. “This does signal a shift back to principled diplomacy.”
In fact, a close reading of the resolution reveals backing for tools that could be used specifically to hold Iran to account for its nuclear program, Kimball said. For example, the text states that the right of non-nuclear nations to pursue civil nuclear energy depends on their adherence to Nonproliferation Treaty safeguards provisions.
Tehran has insisted that its efforts are focused solely on the peaceful development of nuclear energy, but has resisted allowing international inspectors full access to its nuclear facilities and key personnel.
The U.S.-drafted resolution also cites a number of prior Security Council measures but refers to them only by number, without specifying the individual nations to which they applied, Squassoni noted. These subtle references are actually reaffirmations of four earlier resolutions condemning North Korea’s efforts to build nuclear weapons, and five resolutions taking Iran to task for its suspected development activities.
Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, criticized the U.S.-drafted resolution for including allusions to the eventual global abolition of nuclear arms before laying out a much larger agenda for stopping the spread of these weapons worldwide.
“They are trying to rally support for their arms-control agenda,” he told GSN this week. “But someone could easily argue that, [once] this resolution has passed, we can’t make progress on nonproliferation objectives described in this resolution before we make progress on disarmament.”
“The order of the words I don’t think dictates what you’re going to do,” Squassoni countered during a Monday interview.
The resolution’s disarmament provisions, including support for U.S.-Russian negotiations aimed at further shrinking their strategic stockpiles, are “not gifts to the non-nuclear weapon states,” Kimball said. “These are manifestly in the interest of the United States.”
Sokolski also voiced concern that the resolution is not ambitious enough when it comes to listing initiatives that could be taken to stem proliferation. For example, he said, the draft statement uses modest language to “encourage” a stronger International Atomic Energy Agency without investing the nuclear watchdog organization with greater authority to challenge proliferators.
“It’s unclear to what extent this resolution will be used to promote the further spread of dangerous nuclear technology,” he said. “They should have been more ambitious. It’s OK to fail, but it is inexcusable to shoot below what’s needed, and that’s what they did.”
A bipartisan panel last year recommended curbing the civilian use of highly enriched uranium and imposing penalties on nations that withdraw from the Nonproliferation Treaty, initiatives that are now captured in the U.N. resolution.
However, the advisory group also listed a number of additional measures to thwart proliferation, including discouraging the use of financial subsidies for nuclear power and giving the International Atomic Energy Agency the resources and authority it needs to fully enforce nuclear safeguards (see GSN, Dec. 2, 2008). Sokolski is a member of the nine-person commission, which is chaired by former Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.).
Kimball agreed that the U.N. resolution could have included stronger and more specific nonproliferation commitments. However, he said, the wording used was likely necessary to attain multinational support for the measure.
“It does not break radically new ground, but it is very helpful in stitching back together a broad-based consensus on the nonproliferation system,” Kimball said.
One nuclear arms expert sees the upcoming U.N. meeting as a tool with which Obama might signal to his own national security bureaucracy just how committed he is to implementing his disarmament blueprint. The new president’s administration has been splintered by internal debate over how best to maintain a nuclear deterrent, even as the number and roles of nuclear weapons are reduced (see GSN, Sept. 18 and Aug. 18).
At the Security Council, Obama could advance the objectives outlined in Prague by winning international consensus for key details, according to Jeffrey Lewis, who directs the New America Foundation’s Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative.
“Since then, his bureaucracy has undermined much of what he said,” Lewis told GSN, noting Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ recently stated interest in updating some U.S. warheads with “new designs.” “This is his opportunity to put the focus back on his vision.”