What Will Make Them Stop?

For

eign policy never seems to come easily to the Bush Administration. Consider the controversial light-water nuclear plant that Iran is building, with Russian help, at the Persian Gulf port of Bushehr. The prospect of Iran's mullahs controlling a 1,000-MW reactor capable of generating plutonium has worried Washington for years. With Tehran facing an Oct. 31 deadline for coming clean on its nuclear ventures, you'd think the Administration would have a clear take on Bushehr. Think again. There's the conciliatory view: "We could conceive of them keeping the reactor," says a senior State Department aide. If the Russians took back all the spent fuel, as they have proposed, "that would be acceptable." And the hard-line slant: "No way. That's not the policy," says a senior Administration official. The U.S. will never accept Bushehr "as long as we think they have a weapons program."

So what is it? Conciliation? Hard line? Such divisions have plagued President George W. Bush's approach to nuclear-security issues with both Iran and North Korea, the remaining points on the "axis of evil." The neocons argue that the only way to curb the suspected atomic ambitions of these regimes is to depose the rulers. The moderates believe that engaging adversaries in dialogue can diminish the threat more easily and cheaply. So the Bush team has alternately ignored, threatened, cajoled and coerced the two countries, driven not by a coherent strategy but by a disorderly struggle at the highest levels to find common tactical ground between two irreconcilable approaches, engagement and confrontation.

For the moment, a President viewed abroad as a go-it-alone cowboy is looking more like a born-again multilateralist. The potentially important deal that Iran signed with European leaders last week to slow its nuclear program could push Bush to accept a level of engagement with Tehran that his hard-line advisers have resisted. And his offer of a written, multinational security guarantee for North Korea if it gives up its nuclear ambitions could commit the U.S. to protracted negotiations there as well. A President famed for his harsh, admonitory tone struck a conciliatory note aboard Air Force One last week, telling reporters, "I've been saying all along that not every policy issue needs to be dealt with by force."

Bush has uttered similar words on occasion, but they have tended to get lost in the confrontational politics that the hard-line part of his Administration espouses. In the heady days after Saddam Hussein's statue fell in Baghdad's Firdos Square, when regime change seemed so easy, some hawks even suggested that North Korea or Iran should be next. But with the U.S. military still busy in Iraq and Afghanistan, intervention — if it ever was an option — seems out of the question. And as Bush heads into an uncertain election year, he may wish to avoid creating any new international crises.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Iran has long been considered one of the world's most active sponsors of terrorism. With nuclear weapons, it could pose precisely the kind of threat Bush argued was so dangerous in prewar Iraq. North Korea is the world's most active proliferator of advanced weapons and the self-proclaimed possessor of a bomb or two. Backed into a corner, it might react with reckless irrationality. What comes next will depend on whether Bush's turn to diplomacy is a temporary expedient or a sincere strategic shift. Wise observers note that the twin efforts last week to cool these nuclear threats represent a beginning, not a resolution. Washington's hard-liners aren't about to give up easily, any more than the tough factions in Tehran and Pyongyang will. If things go badly, the U.S. could easily find itself back in confrontation mode.

Here are the twin threats and the Bush Administration's efforts to contain them.

Iran
The Bush Administration already had grievances with Iran, like its export of revolutionary ideology and support for terrorism. Although two-way contacts kept Iran from meddling in the Afghan and Iraq wars, Administration hard-liners successfully rebuffed periodic State Department proposals to reach out to the modestly reformist government of President Mohammed Khatami, under the fundamental axiom that the Bush Administration does not do business with outlaws.

Then earlier this year, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) learned that Iran was cheating on nukes. Since it signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970, Iran is allowed to pursue peaceful nuclear development under the watchful eyes of the IAEA. But in August 2002 exiled dissidents revealed that Iran had secretly built an underground uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz equipped with centrifuges that could spin out weapons-grade uranium. If not stopped, the plant could give Iran enough enriched uranium for two bombs a year, with the first available by the end of the decade (says the U.S.) or maybe in just two years (says Israel). Inspectors also wanted to know why Iran had conducted experiments converting unreported uranium tetrafluoride into uranium metal — a process necessary for bomb production. And then IAEA inspectors found the Natanz centrifuges were tainted with traces of highly enriched uranium, a telltale sign that Iran could be brewing fissile material. Iran denied that it was covertly making bombs and claimed that the centrifuges had been contaminated before they reached Iran.