The month of July 2012 saw delegates from more than 150 countries descend on New York City in an attempt to negotiate a global arms trade treaty under the vaunted auspices of the United Nations.  Although regulations govern transactions between states in areas as diverse as agriculture, commerce, manufacturing and travel, no such regulations exist for conventional armaments.  Efforts to regulate the international flow of weaponry can be traced to the early 1990s, but the UN first addressed the issue in 2006 in a General Assembly resolution.  It was hoped that July’s United Nations Conference on an Arms Trade Treaty would end in some form of agreement after the United States, which accounts for 40% of global arms exports, expressed support for the issue back in 2009 after years of Bush Administration opposition to the treaty.  Critically, this support was tempered by the condition that negotiations would be “under the rule of consensus decision-making,” effectively giving any one of the UN’s 193 member-states veto power over treaty agreements.  Nonetheless, this development galvanized the international community’s interest and set the stage for two years of preparatory committees meant to lay the groundwork for a draft treaty that would be ready in time for last month’s summit in New York.

Unfortunately, no final treaty emerged from a month of intense deliberation.  Instead, 90 states seeking to save face contributed to a joint statement: “we are disappointed, but we are not discouraged.”  The Control Arms Campaign – a collaborative project between Amnesty International, Oxfam International and the International Action Network on Small Arms – blames this breakdown in negotiations on the “lack of political courage by major players.”  Essentially, what this means is that the world’s biggest arms producers (the United States, Russia, France, United Kingdom, China, Germany and Italy), which together account for 80% of all sales, refuse to negotiate away one of their countries’ most lucrative export industries.  The executive director of Amnesty International USA, Suzanne Nossel, is much more direct in her condemnation: “This was stunning cowardice by the Obama Administration, which at the last minute did an about-face and scuttled progress toward a global arms treaty, just as it reached the finish line.  It’s a staggering abdication of leadership by the world’s largest exporter of conventional weapons to pull the plug on the talks just as they were nearing an historic breakthrough.” 

While it is a shame and a pity that the collective will of the international community could not agree on the principles and implementation of a treaty for global arms production and distribution, why is this regulation even needed?  The simple argument is that making the global arms trade more open, transparent and accountable will reduce the likelihood that these weapons are used for purposes that contravene international law.  This is because states that openly flaunt these norms would be exposed to the name-and-shame game, which would not only discredit them internationally but would also make them liable for violating existing international law, including human rights and humanitarian law.  In turn, this situation would render the offending government vulnerable to prosecution from national and international courts of justice, thereby providing an enforcement mechanism for the treaty.

But there is also a deeper argument with a more complex logic at play here: as a direct result of the systemic violence and instability engendered by the unregulated flow of conventional arms, socioeconomic development in the poorest countries is negatively affected, and progress towards the UN Millennium Development Goals is hindered significantly.  In addition to the incalculable human losses, armed conflict is estimated to cost the continent of Africa $18 billion per year – more than the amount of official development assistance directed its way per year – in lost foreign direct investment, destruction of property, criminal enterprises, corruption and a whole host of related societal ills.  With nearly 2,000 people dying every day as a result of gun-related violence, the pernicious outcomes of an unregulated global arms trade are becoming more and more difficult to ignore.

And yet, even if such a treaty did exist, illicit arms sales would continue to flourish.  Peter Herby, head of the Arms Unit at the International Committee of the Red Cross, warns that “all the core provisions of this draft treaty still have major loopholes which will simply ratify the status quo, instead of setting a high international standard that will change state practices and save lives on the ground.”  Brian Wood, head of Arms Control and Human Rights at Amnesty International, points out that arms sent abroad as aid or donations would be exempt from the latest treaty draft’s vague definition for arms transfers, meaning that “these loopholes could easily be exploited to allow arms to be supplied to those that intend to use them to commit serious human rights violations, as the world is seeing in Syria.” 

Other practical impediments to the realistic implementation of an arms control regime cannot simply be swept under the proverbial rug either.  Third-party countries and corporations can be used to facilitate the transfer of arms from a supplier-state to an outlawed client-state without attracting any unwanted attention.  National laws can be bypassed by manufacturing the weapons themselves in the blacklisted, recipient country’s sovereign territory.  Corrupt politicians, resource rivalries, fragile state institutions and offshore banking practices all contribute to the difficulty of identifying and impeding the proliferation of these armaments across national borders.  A noteworthy trend also compounding this problem is the increasing privatization of security and military services by governments all over the world, which can lead without much imagination to further exploitation of the treaty’s weaknesses.

In reality, the vested interests in a $60 billion industry would inevitably find and exploit the loopholes in any eventual treaty, but this does not excuse the failure of the world’s major powers to at least agree on a draft resolution of a treaty that would regulate the import, export and distribution of conventional armaments, including everything from tanks and combat aircraft to warships and missile launchers.  At the same time, this is no reason to sound the treaty’s death knell before it has even been given the chance to work in practice.  It is a necessary beginning to a less violent and more prosperous society of states, even if it is also for the time being insufficient.  Any consequent deficiencies in the core principles or implementation procedures of the treaty should be dealt with in a rigorous and systematic manner, but the moral imperative and overwhelming logic behind a regulatory framework for the global arms trade can simply not be disputed and should not be delayed any longer.

The latest round of nuclear talks between Iran and the West has once again failed to deliver concrete results, resolutions (of even the most minimally binding nature) or serious agreement of any kind; besides of course, agreeing to reschedule previously scheduled meetings for a future-but-as-of-yet-undefined date in time.  The West in this case refers to the P5+1, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States) plus Germany (or the EU3+3, named after another Iranian negotiating bloc in the mid-2000s).

This patently predictable turn of events, this lack of progress on a potentially globally destabilizing hot-button political issue, has not surprised a single analyst or political expert on Iranian nuclear affairs.  Western-Iranian nuclear negotiations have become almost as endlessly protracted and hopelessly intractable as Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations; to paraphrase the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, these nuclear negotiations have become the only continuation of politics by other means.

A decade without progress

Timelines are wonderful organizing tools for demonstrating any political issue’s historical significance and why it matters today.  Though Iran’s nuclear program ostensibly has its roots in the 1950s with the Shah of Iran and the United States’ Cold War-inspired Atoms for Peace program, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear program lay largely passive and uncontroversial until the early 2000s.  In August 2002, an Iranian dissident group publicized information that Iran was secretly constructing two nuclear facilities, an underground uranium enrichment facility in Natanz and a heavy water facility in Arak. Since then the International Atomic Energy Agency has released several critical reports on Iran’s nuclear work and Western powers have begun to heed these developments more closely.  As knowledge of subsequent clandestine facilities has emerged, Iran’s combative stance towards the West in general and many of its neighbours in the region in particular (Israel and Saudi Arabia, along with the Gulf States) has pushed the West towards confrontation with Iran over these nuclear and geopolitical issues.

As of 2007, the United Nations Security Council has imposed a series of sanctions on Iran demanding that it cease its uranium enrichment activities, targeting Iran’s leadership personnel, its banking and financial industries, its military-industrial complex, and most importantly, its energy export and shipping capabilities.  These sanctions have recently begun to bite as Iran acknowledges that its oil exports have fallen by 20-30%, from 2.2 million to 1.54-1.76 million barrels of oil per day.  After little progress in 2011 on the Western-Iranian nuclear negotiating front, the first half of 2012 has already seen two damning International Atomic Energy Agency reports in February and May, both of which accuse Iran of essentially failing to provide nuclear inspectors with the access and cooperation needed to conclude on its nuclear program’s non-military, civilian dimensions.

A false hope?

The latest flurry of diplomatic activity between the P5+1 and Iran has also seen no breakthroughs, first in Istanbul in April, then in Baghdad in May and most recently in Moscow in June.  The positive attitudes and constructive dialogues that supposedly permeated these meetings resulted in no movement whatsoever on the Iranian delegation’s part towards complying with Western demands that it freeze uranium enrichment and open its nuclear program for inspections.  Due to this embarrassing lack of progress, these nuclear talks have been effectively shelved until further notice, pending Western talks in Istanbul on July 4.  One can only wonder what these countries will disagree to agree on next – or how long it will take them to even do that.

While some actors have aided and abetted Iran’s intransigent negotiating position (Russia is a close strategic partner while China is a primary energy-importer), much of the international community has been mobilized in line with the mainstream position and against Iran’s recalcitrant defiance of the West.  Impatience with Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program has even led many countries to push for more action more quickly.  A war of words between Iran and Israel has seen top-level Israeli politicians, intellectuals and military brass openly debate the costs and benefits of a preventive strike on Iran aimed at destroying its nuclear capabilities.  The Saudis have long been wary of a nuclear-armed Iran, as their foreign minister is quoted as saying that negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program are a “waste of time” and should concentrate instead on time-limited talks.  Iran’s historical conflicts with Iraq, its territorial disputes with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, its involvement in the ongoing Syrian civil war as well as its support for the anti-Israel militant groups Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza have all placed Iran in a dangerously precarious, extremely sensitive geopolitical situation.

A complex and tangled web

Ultimately, the fate of these long-stalled nuclear talks rests on Iran’s side of the bargaining table.  As Iran calls for a loosening of the crippling sanctions that have been imposed on it by the United Nations and several key countries before it accedes to any of the West’s demands, negotiations have all but ground to a halt, crawling forward ever-so-agonizingly-slowly.  Meanwhile, outside factors prevent a simple resolution to this ongoing political stalemate.  The presidential election season in the United States has clearly increased the domestic political incentive for American presidential candidates to ‘talk tough’ on Iran while a bolstered governing coalition in Israel amplifies the pressure on Iran to take the threat of a preventive strike seriously.  At the same time, the Arab Spring’s political fallout in the Middle East continues to send ripple waves through the established regional order, with Syria being the latest staging ground for proxy wars between Iran and its detractors over the past 15 months.  All of these potential conflict points could tip the scales of war towards their breaking points, which means that Iran-watchers better strap in their seatbelts and brace themselves for a non-stop, always bumpy ride.

Iran.  The country is without a doubt one of the most geopolitically sensitive states in the international system.  It is also one of the most challenging and chimerical countries for its immediate neighbours, the region’s rising powers, the world’s great powers and the international community as a whole to fathom.  Just this past weekend (April 14, 2012), the first nuclear talks between the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council – China, France, Russia, the U.K., the U.S. – and Germany) and Iran in 15 months took place. During the past decade, subsequent rounds of these talks have led to little or no progress.  The most recent talks in Istanbul have been hailed by the Americans, Europeans and Iranians as ‘constructive and useful’, although nothing of substance was actually achieved at these negotiations.  If the universally positive atmosphere emanating from Istanbul lasts for another month, the real negotiations on Iranian uranium enrichment and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections will begin in earnest on May 23 in Baghdad.

This tenuous breakthrough in Western-Iranian relations is as fragile as it is unexpected.  The West is understandably uneasy with Iran; as a Shiite Islamic fundamentalist theocracy, it is unique in the world and wholly alien to the Westphalian conception of secular politics and sovereign statehood.  Already at odds with traditional Western norms of international order and ideology, Iranians are also wary of foreign interference in their internal affairs after centuries of colonial adventurism and imperial domination from abroad.  The damage done to Iranian-American relations after the 444-day hostage crisis following the 1979 Islamic Revolution certainly did nothing to alter the situation.  As it exists today, Iran is naturally poised to play a role as a regional power at least on par with that of Egypt or Turkey.  All three dwarf their immediate neighbours in size, population, military might, strategic location, systems of alliances, and so on.  This enables them to effectively craft their own spheres of geopolitical influence, and Iran has done an exceptionally good job of manipulating Middle Eastern politics to its advantage.

Take the conflict with Israel as an example.  Opposition to Zionism and any peacemaking or normalization of relations with Israel has been a hallmark of the Iranian regime’s domestic national identity and coloured its foreign policy priorities since the Ayatollahs assumed power in 1979.  This policy has been championed with a renewed urgency since the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the beginning of the Madrid to Oslo Palestinian-Israeli peace process, a fact which has arguably derailed Middle Eastern peace talks for nearly twenty years.  Iranian supreme leaders Khomeini and Khamenei have both prophesied Israel’s impending demise before, but fast forward to the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 and the increasingly anti-Israeli genocidal rhetoric coupled with his by now infamous habit of flamboyantly denying the Holocaust and it is easy to see why Israeli security interests would be threatened.  Israel has for its part loudly beaten the drums of a preventative war with Iran if nuclear negotiations with Western countries fail to disarm its potential nuclear arsenal, but Iran has done nothing to assuage Israeli fears or alleviate international concerns about its nuclear program.

Another factor complicating American and Israeli relations with Iran is the so-called Arab Spring.  As the domino-effects of revolutionary upheavals in key Arab states permeate throughout North Africa and the Middle East, geostrategic relationships of power are shifting in similarly revolutionary ways.  Since Ben Ali fled Tunisia in a panic and Mubarak stepped down from the Egyptian leadership over a year ago, the Arab World has witnessed unprecedented institutional pressures.  Libya has inaugurated a new chapter in its history with the elimination of Qaddafi while Yemen has initiated a transitional period of governmental change without Saleh in power.  Some Arab monarchies like Morocco and Jordan have ushered in constitutional reforms and allowed for modest political democratization while oil-rich Gulf sheikhdoms spend their way to security.

But the most delicate power play of all is materializing in Syria, where the Assad government is a critical component of the Tehran-Damascus-Beirut-Gaza link.  The Palestinian militant resistance group Hamas has even pulled its headquarters out of Syria’s capital, evidently finding it no longer defensible given its vocal support for popular revolutions elsewhere in the Arab world.  Despite repeated rounds of sanctions and diplomacy from the Arab League and the United Nations, including Kofi Annan’s latest 6-point plan and the inbound monitors meant to stabilize a days-old and already faltering ceasefire, conflict between the Syrian opposition movement based in Turkey and the Damascus-based Assad government will persist because the fundamental issues at the core of it remain unresolved.

Clearly, Iran’s unfaltering support for Assad in this regard is rooted in its strategic interest in the Syrian government’s survival.  Aside from support among Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon – which is not representative of the majority of public opinion in either of those countries – Assad’s Syria is Iran’s only lever of influence in the Arab Middle East and represents one of its closest strategic allies in the never-ending hostility against Israel.  The irony is that while Iran originally praised the Arab masses for ousting secular autocrats and facilitating Islamist competition in Tunisian and Egyptian elections, the regime has found itself in an extremely awkward position in Syria by taking the exact opposite approach.

This pragmatic reality has pitted Iran’s interests diametrically opposed to Turkey’s in the Syrian theatre of conflict.  As Turkey shelters tens of thousands of Syrian refugees and protects the military defectors of the Free Syrian Army, Iran has found it doubly awkward to attend the latest round of talks on its nuclear program in Istanbul – the very same city that hosted the ‘Friends of Syria’ conferences attended by dozens of countries’ representatives in support of the opposition Syrian National Council and aimed at ultimately dislodging Syrian President Assad from power.  Iran almost cancelled these talks completely less than two weeks before they were set to begin because of Turkey’s outspoken role in criticizing the Syrian government’s brutality and aiding the opposition’s efforts.  All this merely indicates the unpredictable and counterintuitive nature of the Arab Spring on the Middle East’s balance of power.

One final observation: the next round of nuclear talks will take place in May in Baghdad, an interesting venue given Iraq’s relative isolation from the region for the past two decades.  The recent Arab League Summit hosted by Baghdad in late March was widely seen as a key step for Iraq along the arduous path towards renewed integration into Arab affairs and largely focused on the ongoing crisis in neighbouring Syria.  Given the long-simmering fears of Iranian influence over Iraq, especially with a Shiite-led government in a Shiite-majority country, even the locale for these talks could be explosive.  Only time will tell if the Iranian government will genuinely compromise with Western powers over its nuclear ambitions, but the P5+1 countries will need to accommodate Iran’s legitimate national interests in terms of energy and security as well.  One thing is for sure, though: the Iranian enigma continues to confound and beguile policymakers and pundit machines alike.

Quite often, good intentions lead in unforeseeable ways to bad outcomes.  This fact of life can be tricky enough on the personal level but downright disastrous in the realm of international politics.  The political drama playing itself out in Mali is a good example – complex and ambiguous as it is – of how good intentions can lead to bad outcomes.  The law of unintended consequences seems to have played an unusually powerful and strikingly ironic part in the power play still reshaping the very contours of this landlocked West African state.  Now the destinies of nearly 16 million people, almost half the Canadian population, hang in the balance in a desert country roughly twice the size of France.

A military coup d’état in Mali led by disaffected junior officers on March 22 was supposed to oust a government incapable of quelling an armed rebellion in the north of the country and defeat the rebels themselves.  These junior officers are led by Amadou Haya Sanogo, also the head of the National Committee for the Return of Democracy and the Restoration of the State (CNRDR), an ironic name for the sheer fact that Mali has been a democracy ever since its people overthrew a military dictatorship in 1991 until this very coup last month.  Incidentally, elections scheduled to replace the current president would have been taking place in late April – right about now.  The coup leaders detained President Amadou Toumani Touré immediately and were censured in return by the international community’s collective opposition and by sanctions led by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), West Africa’s preeminent regional trading bloc.

These sanctions threatened devastation for Mali’s people and its economy since the landlocked country would have been incapable of importing food or fuel, accessing sea or airports, exchanging currency within the West African monetary union, and would only have a few weeks of supplies left before mass starvations and deprivations resulted.  Fortunately, the swift and collective imposition of these sanctions convinced Sanogo’s forces to negotiate with former president Touré and cede power to an interim president, Dioncounda Traoré, until recently scuffled elections can be rescheduled.  But the sanctions were not the only reason that the coup surrendered power so quickly; a string of sudden and surprising military victories for the rebel movement in Mali’s northern deserts effectively divided the country in two, necessitating outside help for the beleaguered government in Mali’s capital, Bamako.

Rebellions are rarely monolithic movements, and in the case of Mali they are best described as consisting of two broad factions.  The indigenous insurgents are the ethnic Tuaregs, nomadic people spread across several West African states that have been fighting for independence from the southern-dominated Malian government since the country’s decolonization from France in 1960.  This is the group that under the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) declared a ceasefire on April 6 after conquering the northern two-thirds of Mali and declaring its territory for their national homeland (Azawad).  The second faction is led by Islamist-inspired fundamentalists, also ethnic Tuaregs, but allied with other North African Islamist groups, most notoriously al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).  The main Islamist group Ansar al-Din originally fought alongside the MNLA and against the Malian military but has since asserted its own independence by shunning MNLA authority and declaring Sharia law in Mali’s three main northern cities: Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal.  As a result, the refugee crisis in West Africa has worsened considerably, with some estimated 200,000 non-combatant civilians living in Mali’s north fleeing in every direction to neighbouring countries in the past month alone.

So who’s responsible for this epic example of state failure?  Clearly, there is plenty of blame to go around, whether among the Tuareg rebels in the north (the nationalist and the Islamist brands), the junior officers led by Sanogo that initiated the coup or the Touré government that lost the confidence of the people and the military by failing to combat the rebellion but also refusing to address other rampant problems in Malian society.  Two novel interpretations are worth mentioning, however. Christian Caryl in a Foreign Policy article contends that Mali’s Tuaregs only succeeded in carrying out their own drive for independence because of Western intervention in Libya, which resulted in Muammar Qaddafi’s training, funding and use of foreign mercenaries (Tuareg groups among them) and in the free flow of cash and small arms to other North African rebel movements (Islamist groups among them).  Another article by Susanna Wing in Foreign Affairs, however, finds fault in Mali’s government for inadequately addressing ethnic Tuareg demands for decentralization of power and increased autonomy in the north, which after a half-century of missed opportunities led inexorably to the success of the rebel movement today.

More generally, West Africa is experiencing profound political turmoil, partly as a result of North African geopolitical shifts resulting from the revolutionary changes inaugurated by the ‘Arab Spring’ and partly because democratic institutions and economic development have failed to solidify themselves there.  Mauritania, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Niger have all experienced military coup d’états in the past few years, with Guinea-Bissau’s outgoing government on April 12, 2012 having just experienced an attempted coup d’état as ruling party headquarters and the national radio station were seized by the military, the capital city’s central district was occupied and the outgoing prime minister went missing.  Ivory Coast just last year (April 2011) emerged from what was potentially a civil war when an intensely contested internal power struggle dragged on between the outgoing president Laurent Gbagbo and his military supporters against the opposition candidate then but duly elected current president now, Alassane Ouattara, and his allies in the international community.

Still, the success stories are not as noticeable precisely because they succeed at stabilizing national handovers of power, though Mali enjoyed relatively peaceful democratic transitions of leadership for nearly 20 years before this most recent Tuareg-led crisis and rebellion.  The Senegalese elections of February and March 2012 stand out in marked contrast to these more recent examples of troublesome African state-building efforts since an opposition candidate defeated the president’s controversial motion to seek a third-term in office without much incident.  ECOWAS has been far from pleased in having to deal with several of these recurring crises in such close succession to one another without being able to tackle the more arduous and longer-term problems of democracy, development, desertification, drug and human smuggling, corruption, poverty, disease and health, and others.  But such is the law of unintended consequences, and so the future remains impenetrable to the predictions of the most seasoned veterans of international political analysis.