Non-Proliferation after Iraq

January 22, 2004
By Ira Straus

Why were the non-proliferation standards set too low before the war in Iraq? Why had WMD-interested states been able to trick their way through the inspections game? Why can the standards be raised now? Why was a war needed to raise the standards?

Low standards were all that was possible during the Cold War. America and the Soviet Union were, first of all, competing strategically, only secondarily cooperating on proliferation issues. The standards were set by multipolar negotiations among enemies, not by a cohesive leadership group. The result was a system aimed at slowing proliferation, not stopping or reversing it.

The problem was that there was no single country or group of countries willing and able to act as a reliable power center on proliferation issues, pushing through the necessary standards and taking the necessary steps to enforce them. To be sure, in the early 1960s, Jack Strachey, a reformed Labour leftist, advocated that the U.S. and USSR band together to constitute such a power center, enforce tough inspection requirements and apply preventive war in extremis. But the Cold War rivalry forbade it.

Rather than a forerunner of a future cohesive world order, Strachey’s proposal looked like a fading tail-end of efforts to get a truly robust global non-proliferation regime. Back in the late 1940s, the Baruch Plan, backed by the U.S., provided for global control and management of uranium and for UN enforcement actions without veto. It was meant to stop proliferation before it got started; but the plan itself was stopped by the Soviet veto.

Bertrand Russell and James Burnham advocated the only way out of this logjam: a threat of preventive war against the Soviet Union, to keep the atom bomb from spreading beyond its initial unipolar home in America. To improve chances of success and broaden the bases for this policy, they advocated a Union of the free countries of Europe with America, as a nucleus of world order which might expand and bring in other countries as they became free and modernized. Even then the outcome would have been uncertain.

By the 1960s, far less seemed possible. To be sure, the Maoist regime in China accused the two superpowers of conducting a Strachey-style global “condominium” or “co-imperium”, but it was in a sense attributing too much rationality to them. Similarly, in the 1940s the Soviets accused America of following Russell’s and Burnham’s policy; they were attributing to America what they assumed any rational power would do.

Of course, it would have been a risky, heroic form of rationality to follow a policy of preventive war against a great power. In the 1940s, it would have required not just nerves of steel, but, as Burnham and Russell explained, a huge effort at expanding the base of action by constructing a political union on the Atlantic level. America, with half of the world’s functioning economy and a nuclear monopoly, could have probably built such a union had it wished, but it would have been no small effort, and the unipolar strength of America, while then temporary, created an illusion of lack of need. In the 1960s, it would have required an even more daring effort: to build a quasi-Union, with a reliable joint policy-and-enforcement structure, across the Communism-democracy divide. Arguably that task was impossible.

What was done was more modest. The U.S. proposed the Baruch Plan, but let the USSR veto it. The U.S. meanwhile sponsored the building of a Euro-Atlantic community, as Russell and Burnham advocated, but here it went only half-way; it left all the heroic work of deep integration to the European level. On the Atlantic level, it built a military alliance and an economic cooperation regime, which it also extended indirectly to Japan. By providing military security and economic stability and transmuting occupation into an assymetrical alliance, it maintained and enhanced its levers of influence and was able to prevent proliferation within the alliance to Germany and Japan. It was also able to slow proliferation beyond the alliance through “suppliers clubs” for regulation of dual-use sales. But a goal of reversing proliferation was beyond its reach.

In the 1960s, similarly, the two superpowers did not reject the Strachey proposal in total. They acknowledged a joint interest and joint responsibility for non-proliferation, but implemented it in a watered-down form: by playing a leading role in creating the NPT-IAEA regime.

This regime declared any further proliferation of nuclear weapons illegitimate, and provided mechanisms to slow it down. It was a continuation of the traditional Westphalian view of the special responsibility of great powers, a responsibility that always included special rights and discriminatory enforcement -- nothing else would be realistic or workable in a system of primarily independent states. The responsibility had grown only more urgent with the advent of nuclear weapons, and the concomitant boiling down of the five great powers into two superpowers.

However, as long as the Cold War continued, with its mutual ideological enmity and the sometimes-nihilistic enmity of the USSR toward the overall world order, the responsibility could not be carried out adequately. The superpowers were not cohesive allies, but enemies competing for client states. The reality of competition trumped the need for cooperation on counter-proliferation. Each nuclear-seeking regime would lean to one or the other side; a preventive attack on it would change the strategic balance between the superpowers. It would have required a miracle to agree on mutual compensatory terms for proceeding with such actions, much less to do so with consistency time after time. Yet without consistency and reliability, no strong enforcement regime could be viable or legitimate. One reason why Russians eventually eliminated their Communist regime was to put an end to this situation: they came to realize it was against the true interests of their country to be undermining the world order, weakening the West whose civilization was closest to their own, building up extremist client states and movements against a West that was doing likewise in reverse and competitively dissipating WMD technologies around the world.

Today the Cold War is over. Russia is, by the nature of things, a partner of the West, even if the West has put off its overtures for an organic alliance. Conditions are ripe for upgrading the non-proliferation standards. Multipolarity and bipolarity have been replaced by unipolarity, making possible much tighter multilateral negotiations and much more effective enforcement coalitions. Meanwhile the urgency of non-proliferation has only grown: nuclear knowledge and products have spread, and rogue states and terrorist organizations have gotten into the act.

However, standards once lowered are not easy to raise again. A major jolt was needed to raise them back upward. Diplomacy alone would not have sufficed.

At the same time, war alone does not suffice, either. Success has come by supplementing coercive action on Iraq with semi-coercive diplomacy on Libya and Iran.

More diplomacy will be needed, as well as more threats of force and the readiness to act on them. Among other things, it will be necessary to consolidate the upgrading of the non-proliferation regime through new multilateral agreements. For this, America will need its major allies like France and Germany and its big power partners like Russia and India, not just an ad hoc coalition. A cumulative diplomatic effort will be needed, and effective use of a series of international institutions -- NATO, suppliers clubs, IAEA, UN --including a possibility of creating new ones to consolidate a semi-global coalition into a working regime. Initiatives will have to be taken, creative ways will have to be found out of diplomatic logjams, innovative methods will have to be proposed for combining the interests of the major powers. And arms will have to be twisted, diplomatically. The chances for success would be good, because the upshot would be an upgrading of the interests of all the responsible powers, that is, an upgrading of the overriding common interest in non-proliferation; and because the U.S. has plenty of instruments for quiet arm-twisting without torpedoing the whole effort.

The first Gulf War, while it was fought to free Kuwait, went on to create UNSCOM as part of the terms of truce. This set a precedent of a new level of intrusive inspection and of sharp limitation of Iraqi sovereignty. But there was little follow-up on the precedent until the present Iraq war; in the interim, the inspection regimes waned and weakened.

The period from the end of Soviet Communism in 1991 to the terrorist attacks in 2001 was a wasted decade, from the standpoint of the opportunity for reversing the tide of proliferation. The intense, active counter-proliferatory cooperation with Russia, which Jack Strachey had envisaged in the 1960s, had finally become possible; but was not pursued. All three Administrations in this period let the chances slip through their fingers, while the dangers metastasized as the worst clients of the two sides of the Cold War proceeded to spin out of control after the Cold War ended.

Mistake after mistake was made. Diplomacy alone was relied on, not force, apart from a few feel-good retaliatory bombings. Coalitions and enforcement regimes were allowed to wither; no energy was pumped in to regenerate them. The West concentrated, not on integrating Russia and developing a common global strategy with it, but on integrating the small states of Eastern Europe and on supporting the new despotisms in Central Asia and the Caucasus in their independence from Russia. This was the underlying reason for its acquiescence, or near-support in the mid-90s, to Pakistan’s plan of bringing the Taliban to power. By 1998, many Americans realized they were on the wrong side, and for a moment in 1999 the President spoke of alliance with Russia and India against terrorism, but he lacked the character to carry through. America continued to oppose any military action by Russia against the Taliban, and Russia reciprocated; each continued, as if on autopilot, to fear the other’s influence in the region more than the actual threat from the Taliban.

September 11 finally changed that. The period since has seen the problems addressed seriously. It started with coercive diplomacy against the Taliban, coupled with high-pressure diplomacy against pro-terrorist activities of other regimes such as Pakistan. It moved on to preventive war against the Taliban, laying a potential basis for stronger diplomacy against pro-terrorist regimes elsewhere. It moved on further to coercive diplomacy against Iraq on proliferation issues, and thence to war. It has continued with semi-coercive diplomacy against proliferatory programs in other countries: diplomacy that is now bearing unprecedented, although as yet uncompleted, fruits in Iran and Libya, and significant, if still only preliminary fruits, in Pakistan, North Korea and elsewhere.

The roll-back of nuclear proliferation has finally begun. The question today is how to proceed farther, and how far it can go.

Ira Straus is U.S. coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO, and a lecturer in Atlantic studies for universities in Europe and Russia.