Dangerous diplomacy Dec 19th 2006 From The Economist print edition China and Russia are helping make the world a much more perilous place EVERY diplomatic road has its turnings. North Korea, which in October provocatively tested what it said was a nuclear bomb, has just rejoined the six-way talks with America, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia that it has been boycotting for more than a year. At the United Nations Security Council, agreement seemed closer, after months of haggling, to a resolution that would impose sanctions on Iran for refusing to halt its suspect uranium-enrichment and plutonium work (to make nuclear-reactor fuel to keep the lights on, it claims; to make fissile material for weapons, others worry). Both moves ought to signal advances in the global effort to stop the bomb's spread. In fact, both may instead end up confirming that the diplomacy is failing. Talking is not an end in itself. Strong-armed back to the table by China, North Korea's boss, Kim Jong Il, still shows no sign of preparing to abandon his bombs. Despite an earlier agreement in principle to disarm, he may already have enough fissile material for up to a dozen bombs. And his list of demands has lengthened. He wants to be rewarded for his weapons test with a Western-designed nuclear reactor, interim energy supplies and the like, all of which he forfeited four years ago when he broke a 1994 agreement to end his illicit plutonium-making by messing about with uranium too. He also wants the UN to abandon sanctions announced in response to his test and America to remove the pressure it has put on banks to freeze North Korean funds that come from currency-counterfeiting and drugs-running, and are used to buy the black-market supplies to feed his bomb habit. Needless to say, lifting sanctions and paying bribes in the hope that Mr Kim, who has reneged on every nuclear agreement he has made, will get around to disarming some fine day would have the opposite effect: to legitimise his bomb. Just a cheeky opening gambit in a tough negotiation? The diplomats' job is to test hope against experience. But the signs are that Mr Kim has a different purpose than disarmament: to keep an angry China off his back while he sits out the Bush administration in the hope that the next American president, and the world, will learn to live with a nuclear North Korea. The strategy could pay off. Although it backed UN sanctions on North Korea after its bomb test, China has been dismayingly slow to see them enforced. Meanwhile, Iran's fiery president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been gambling that Russia will do the same for him, by helping his regime to avoid paying any real price for its nuclear defiance. Iran was reported to the Security Council in February by the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear guardian, for a string of highly suspect safeguards violations that had inspectors deeply worried. Russia agreed with America, China and three European countries (Britain, France and Germany) leading the effort to get Iran to comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty About sponsorship (NPT): incremental sanctions should follow unless Iran suspends its uranium and plutonium work. Iran refuses. But Russia has spent the past months whittling away the proposed list. Its selfish aim has been to exempt from sanctions the Bushehr nuclear-reactor project it is completing for Iran, and to ward off a financial squeeze that might put at risk the profits Russia hopes to earn from providing nuclear fuel for the reactor, which is due to be commissioned in 2007. More airily, President Vladimir Putin argues that Iran, unlike North Korea, has not expelled nuclear inspectors, flounced out of the NPT or set off a weapons test-and should be dealt with gently. Wrong turn All this is dangerously short-sighted, for Iran may yet do all of these things. It has already blocked inspectors' efforts to delve into some of its suspect nuclear past. There is no need for the regime to threaten to leave the NPT now, since it can apparently break the treaty's rules with impunity. But if suspicions are correct that Iran has been secretly learning how to build and trigger a nuclear device, and shape a missile cone to carry such a warhead (as well as publicly developing nuclear-capable, far-flying missiles), then once it has fully mastered uranium enrichment it will soon be poised to break out at short notice, at a moment of its choosing. If neither North Korea nor Iran is shown to pay a heavy price for breaking the NPT and defying the Security Council, others nervously rethinking their nuclear ambitions will be tempted to follow suit. By enfeebling diplomacy, China and Russia are taking the world into more dangerous territory. Copyright © 2006 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
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