The looming death of diplomacy

Strategic interests steer international diplomacy, but safe silences must not legitimise US transgressions in West Asia.

Just at a time we are about to mourn that Prime Minister Narendra Modi  missed a shot at global recognition by not making use of his friendship with the United States President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – often expressed in intimate forms of hugging, hand-holding, and other chummy ways – to stop the raging war in West Asia, here comes a small window.

Frankly, no one can seriously believe that the PM, acting as a peace broker, would get a leveller to get even with Trump, proclaiming for the umpteenth time that he stopped a nuclear war between India and Pakistan.

While the US is consistent in its position that Iran must not be allowed to have nuclear weapons, it was Trump who pulled out of the Iranian nuclear deal in his first term.

His positions are ambivalent; as far back as 2016, he held the view that the US should consider allowing Japan and South Korea to develop nuclear weapons, as this would enable Japan to deter China and South Korea to deter its northern counterpart, without the US spending a single cent.

Two weeks into the war, experts believe Modi can play a role. “To stop the US-Israel-Iran war, we need an intermediary, and preferably, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi,” Colonel Douglas MacGregor, a retired US military official, said in a podcast with Tucker Carlson.

The UAE’s former envoy to India, Hussain Hassan Mirza, in an interview with India Today TV, suggested that Modi was the best person to help end the war. “PM Modi has good relations with Iran and Israel.

India is not involved in this war in any way. India is a neutral state and the only neutral state that is growing in stature, power, and influence,” Colonel MacGregor said. To show the world that India is not anyone’s stooge, and to give mettle to its stance of strategic autonomy, and its apparent neutrality, it is time for the PM to act.

If he cannot act based on the imperatives of strategic autonomy – even if those transgressions include kidnapping a head of state as in Venezuela, or assassinating the top religious leader of a sovereign nation as in Iran – then symbolic optics of gratuitous intimacy become meaningless. Such optics often create an illusion of statesmanship for a leader who has the wherewithal to stop a war.

While the tragic truth of international diplomacy is that we are all bound by a complex web of strategic interests and mutual misdeeds, we cannot turn a blind eye to the consequences of a long list of US actions in West Asia: killing innocent schoolchildren; the sinking of an Iranian ship; unending bombing of the Iraqi people; support to despotic regimes; and pandering to the military whims of a nation, destroying many.

To be fair, India criticised Iran in the IAEA and the Security Council for its lack of cooperation with international powers to reveal the exact extent of its nuclear capability.

Many in India exhorted Iran to improve upon the “credibility problem” that its years of “clandestine proliferation efforts... created for it in Europe and the West”, from 2003 to 2015.

Both the Indian political class and security establishment pitched for a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear crisis within the framework of the non-proliferation regime, even though New Delhi has always endorsed Iran’s right to a peaceful nuclear programme within the NPT regime.

It bears recalling that India’s former external affairs minister, Natwar Singh, visited Tehran in September 2005 and was reported to have pledged support for Iran’s peaceful nuclear energy programme.

The Obama administration decided against air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities or launching a full-scale military attack, apprehensive that such action might trigger a war between Israel and Iran that would involve the US.

It concluded that an American attack might cement solidarity among millions of Arabs, Sunnis and Shiites, causing them to side with Iran, rekindle the terrorist jihad, destroy the Israel-Palestine peace process (and whatever remnants are left of it), and end America’s attempt to restore its global leadership role. The most telling assumption was that they would probably not stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons anyway.

The nuclear cover

Modi could tell Trump that he was as opposed to nuclear proliferation as much as nuclear apartheid, or that if attacking Iran to denuclearise it was legitimate, other nations with rogue credentials previously active in clandestine nuclear proliferation could also be made a fair target.

The trouble with nuclear weapons is that one wants to have them for the exact reason others want to prevent them.

In 1963, the Kennedy administration was secretly fighting Israel’s nuclear weapons development programme, contrary to what the Trump administration is doing. Trump has previously defended the strikes on Iran, likening them to decisive actions taken in World War II.

“I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima or Nagasaki... but that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war. This ended the war,” he said, completely impervious to the deeper ramifications of his own statement pointing to why nations fight tooth and nail to put an end to nuclear apartheid and explaining why at various times in recent decades, four potential regional challengers to US interests in the region have sought nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles: Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria.

Now that the war is raging in full fury, the search must be on to find a middle ground between the neoconservatives for whom reality means a war against “Islamo-fascism,” and the anti-Zionists who see Israel at the root of all evil in West Asia. The death of diplomacy is no less scary than the death of civilians.

The writer is a Kolkata-based commentator on geopolitics,
development and culture.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)