Summit Prospects

President Barack Obama expects 47 heads of state or their representatives Monday evening (local time) for a “nuclear summit” in Washington. To set the proper mood, he has started stirring things up. To do so, he has borrowed heavily from George W. Bush’s closet of old rags such as “international nuclear terror” being the “greatest threat.” If al-Qaeda were successful in obtaining nuclear weapons it “would have no compunction at using them,” Obama said on Sunday. For that, he garnered strong applause from Angela Merkel, who used the occasion to again call for stronger international sanctions against Iran. Despite the fact that Iran isn’t listed in the summit’s agenda, it’s common knowledge in Washington that Obama hopes to get the support of the German chancellor, Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, and other attendees in adopting a harder line against Iran in anticipation that the recalcitrant duo, China and Russia, might not concur.

As proof of his peaceful nuclear intentions, Obama doesn’t want to just rely on the Russian-American arms reduction treaty he just successfully concluded; he also wants to divest himself of the worst aggressive instincts of his predecessor, George W. Bush, to which he just resorted with the announcement of new U.S. nuclear weapons policies. These call for a pledge not to use nuclear weapons against any nation that doesn’t possess nuclear weapons itself — with the specific exception, however, of Iran and North Korea. Obama claims these two countries have not complied with provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The fact that he has no conclusive proof for such a claim, at least in Iran’s case, doesn’t seem to bother him. American critics have also said his policies toward India and Pakistan not only encourage a nuclear arms race in the region, but that his new nuclear cooperation agreement with India, one of the few countries that has not signed the NPT, actually encourages the spread of nuclear weapons.

A further indication that Obama may not find it so easy to gain support among smaller nations against Iran came last Wednesday from Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdoğan. In contrast to Obama, he doesn’t buy into the story that the greatest danger to Middle East peace comes from an al-Qaeda potentially armed with nuclear weapons. He believes that distinction belongs to Israel and its actual nuclear arsenal that he says is “the principal threat to regional peace.”

He went on to say that Iran is constantly threatened by Western nations for its civilian nuclear programs, but that Israel is allowed to do whatever it pleases. He said he would seek an answer to that question at the Washington Summit. He may find an ally in Brazilian President Lula, a fervent defender of Iran’s rights under the NPT to pursue peaceful uses of nuclear energy and a critic of what he derides as the West’s hypocrisy concerning the fact that there’s no ambiguity about Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Neither the United States nor the “united Western world” is apparently powerful enough to bend the rest of the world to their will. That’s possibly another reason why Prime Minister Netanyahu abruptly begged off attending the summit.