Neo-konnat voimattomia

Surely, the Tehran summit and its results represent a serious setback for Washington's Iran diplomacy, but they also show the defects of its Russia diplomacy and the fact that Moscow and Washington have reached a dead end. Putin has held his ground against his Washington detractors, wooing various European leaders such as Germany's Angela Merkel and snubbing the pro-US Nicolas Sarkozy, while working on a new model of Russia-EU relations that is not dominated by US prerogatives. There is undoubtedly an element of risk here and Putin's new Iran policy may backfire, particularly if he does not generate more Iranian cooperation on the nuclear issue.

Regarding the latter, Iran is apt to reciprocate Putin's gestures by accommodating itself to more IAEA demands, and next week's meeting of Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, with the EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, is an important occasion for Iran to appease Putin and his foreign policy circle, some of whom are openly worried about a parallel corrosion of US-Russia relations because of the new Iran-Russia developments.

Yet this is not a "zero-sum game" and US policy makers can draw the right impression about Iran's good neighborly policies benefiting regional and global peace, presently deepened in part thanks to Russia's singular influence on Iran. That is highly unlikely, however, and the continuation of the one-dimensional coercive policy toward Iran, so deeply entrenched in Washington, is the more likely scenario, no matter how out of sync with the rest of the world community.

The "lonely superpower" that Samuel Huntington once wrote about now appears dangerously on the verge of losing its "coalition of the willing" against Iran, both inside and outside the United Nations. The only choice is either stubborn refusal to make the necessary policy adjustments toward Iran, along the lines of a non-threatening civil diplomacy, or to face what is certain to be a diplomatic defeat in the global arena.

Iran's soft-power diplomacy should be given much credit for both the summit's success and the related frustration of the US's coercive diplomacy.

(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)