The United Nations has agreed a third package of sanctions on Iran, targeting particular individuals and raising the pressure on key banks, but it has also re-asserted its desire for an early negotiated settlement on alleged military ambitions in the use of civil nuclear power.

What is interesting is not so much the position of the two main protagonists, the US and Iran itself, but what the negotiations around the sanctions regime say about the power and position of other players in the global game.

China has turned away from the emerging world as little more than provider of resources in a classic ‘informal imperial’ strategy, while Russia seems indifferent to the world outside Eurasia and was perfectly happy to have the others impose minimum sanctions that have merely increased its own leverage with Tehran.

The Rise of Germany - Again!

The emergence of Germany as an equal power to the ‘big five’ in the politics of sanctions is probably the most remarkable development. It is not on the UNSC but it was treated as if it had full rights by the big countries who matter. It is as if, in being consulted with such care and attention, Germany is already being groomed for a UN seat which must raise the hopes of Japan and the concerns of India and Brazil.

German influence is partly a function of its central role in squeezing Iranian credit in Europe but it is also a reflection that the Merkel Government has been highly effective in using German economic power as a tool for representing 'Core Europe' as a partner of the original Atlantic '45 states in a common project to impose order on a disordered world.

If we add the tense negotiations surrounding German engagement in West Asia and Germany’s front-line role in the war on tax evaders to its key role in developing a European foreign policy in which Kosovo is a front line operation and the way that it has dismissively kicked French President Sarkozy's plans for a Mediterranean Union into touch in favour of the near-moribund Barcelona Process, then we are undoubtedly seeing something new emerge under the leadership of Chancellor Merkel.

Shifts in Post-Imperial Attitudes

Although four non-permanent members of the UN [South Africa, Indonesia, Libya and Vietnam] questioned the original Great Power resolution against Iran, in the end only Indonesia held out.

Whatever the public reasons given for the final vote in favour of the Western position, this is telling us something about the emerging world’s positioning of itself within a new global system in which the major states are mostly concerned with creating a new balance of power in which both insurgents and non-players like Iran are to be fully contained.

As ‘liberation countries’, all four rather dislike the tactics of the West in bullying an admittedly extreme resister into compliance with a global order that still is very much biased in the old imperial Great Powers' favour.

South Africa’s compliance required the direct intervention of Sarkozy on his visit to the country. The French President is offering some sort of ‘new deal’ on French policy in Africa and Mbeki has undoubtedly seen the opportunity to encourage the former colonial power to change its ways and show more respect for African interests and concerns.

But what is most interesting is that the ‘liberation countries’, in the end, placed their vote with a global system from which they still hope to benefit in trade if not aid terms. Vietnam, in particular and following China, is developing its own strategy for international trade with the Middle East and Africa.

You would hardly know that the Vietnamese Prime Minister had been in London recently from reading the newspapers (the Financial Times being an honourable exception). Some trade insiders were astounded that a British Minister was not present at one important function and read this, rightly or wrongly, to mean that the Foreign Office had still not fully understood the importance of these emerging countries to national prospects.

All three 'compliers' see themselves as states that can gain from integrating with an international community in which the West is beginning to need them only slightly less than they need the West.  The realisation that the balance of power between the West and the developing world is beginning to shift - albeit slowly - seems to be imperfectly understood in the West but change is taking place nevertheless.

Indonesian Dissent - A Sign of Changing Times

Of the four ‘liberation countries’, within the last thirty years, one was waiting to be liberated from racism by activists with a distinctive communist tinge, one was a rogue state and one was a military enemy of the US while the one that held out against the Third Resolution, Indonesia, has always been a longstanding American ally, prepared to employ considerable brutality internally to remain so against communist and other subversion.

This really is a turn-around and quite unpredictable if our thinking had remained locked into the world before 9/11. The explanation for Indonesian resistance probably lies in a combination of food riots and Islam.

Major populous countries are at most risk from global inflation. Many of these major populous countries that are most at threat, like Indonesia, Egypt and Pakistan, are Muslim. Indonesia is probably the most populous Muslim country that has yet to push itself into a BRIC category and is at most risk of internal chaos from a malign combination of hunger and ideology. 

Radical Islam has a potential hold as an explanation for life's discontents on poor people whose conditions may deteriorate sharply during the current global economic adjustment. Security can cope with suicide bombs a lot more easily than with mass protests that capture the Presidential Palace and the radio station.

Now add to this the fact that Western and Indonesian activists are about to open up a political can of worms by targeting the past alleged corrupt conduct of very major figures in the country’s recent past and you have a tendency to caution in any international affairs concerning a fellow Muslim country.

The Food Factor

Food inflation matters. Rice prices have just surged to a 20-year high. This might not mean much when deciding whether to choose risotto or not in a European restaurant but it does amongst the Asian masses and even middle classes.

Rises in living standards in much of Asia have depended on the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of tiny capital surpluses created by newly stable and reasonable staple food prices in populations that were recently living on the margin.

The rising and new lower middle classes have no intention of becoming pauperised again, having tasted the early benefits of consumerism, education for their children and not going hungry, so governments are going to have to deliver on food or go under.

Some key global suppliers [India, Vietnam, Egypt] are already restricting exports and food is already becoming a geo-political bargaining tool [between Vietnam and the Philippines for example]. Net importers with hungry urban masses or countries with poor internal distribution systems remain ripe for radicalization until the food price falls again.

Is Iran Worried?

In fact, the next round of sanctions are not devastating to Iran. They are rather milk-and-water. They inconvenience some significant players within the regime and (with Chinese support for the sanctions and increased Emirati action to enforce US demands on Dubai) they eliminate some economic work-arounds on previous sanctions. Credit is going to be increasingly expensive.

Similarly, future work-arounds may well be (by Western standards) classed as criminal but criminal is as criminal seems - and the rule of law will always beg the question, whose law? The sanctions in themselves do not do anything fundamental to change a policy that is led from the very top – and we mean Khamenei, not Ahmedinejad.

They are, of course, designed to squeeze the 'bazaar' (the business class) and fuel a 'bourgeois' reform resistance to the current leadership. We will see if this works in the forthcoming Parliamentary Elections but Iranian constitutional arrangements permit little lee-way for 'reformers' (actually pro-Western conservatives) to get a grip on foreign and security policy. 

It is noticeable that 'reformers' try to avoid discussing their pro-Western aspirations in a domestic context. As a result of sanctions, Iranian national resentment probably just increases and 'reformers' will have to rely on economic discontents to propel themselves into power.

The IAEA's New Hawkishness

There is one other aspect to the case that is worth noting. The US are said to have shot themselves in the foot with their Iran Intelligence Summit late last year but there is another way of looking at this.

Prior to that report, the US were positioned as dangerous unreasoning ‘hawks’ and the IAEA as a bunch of collaborationist appeasing surrender-monkeys too ready to accept Iranian assurances. Now those roles are slightly reversed.

The US presents itself as still ‘hawkish’ perhaps but is diplomatically more collaborative with other Powers who are the more easily seduced into compliance, while it is the IAEA which is presenting ‘new evidence’ that Iran may have continued nuclear weapons research as late as 2004.

One has the suspicion that realist Western strategists were persuaded (and persuaded the US Administration) that ‘hawkish’ attitudes from Washington were not merely counter-productive but that they threatened to undermine the core vehicle for countering nuclear proliferation, the IAEA.

To be characteristically cynical, the ultimate purpose of the IAEA is certainly world peace but world peace on the terms of the existing holders of military nuclear capability.  

The IAEA was also designed to halt further ‘progress’ in this area (given that the West itself had allowed proliferation in the case of Israel and was certainly ambiguous about the Pakistani national programme under AQ Khan) in order to ensure a Great Power lead.

Undermining the IAEA through neo-con rhetoric is not a good strategic idea (from a Western perspective) and it is probable that intelligence material is now being redirected towards the IAEA so that it, rather than Washington, can announce evidence of Iranian intent.

The net result is that the ‘soft’ IAEA, when it announces something scary, looks as if it is really scared because its historic bias was (in the popular mind) with Iran. In fact, any new intelligence should be addressed with care whether it comes from Washington or the IAEA since both rely on similar networks of sources that are hard to corroborate and have proved somewhat dodgy in the past.

Late 2004 is not early 2008 and Khamenei has asserted peaceful use on terms which require the West to call a major religious leader a self-serving conniving liar or a fool. Our view remains that militarization is almost certainly a continuing Iranian option but that there might be more imaginative ways of halting its resumption than aggressive sanctions and threats of air strike.

Conclusion

The third Iranian sanctions resolution is not just another tool in an ongoing cold war between the US and Iran but it is a lightning rod for a whole series of developments in the global political system ...

• it represents the new 'soft' diplomacy of the US in which it negotiates its allies back into the coalition of the willing by trading benefits, such as status, for pragmatic results like sufficient cover for allied enforcement of its policies against its enemies
• it shows how allies can be used to undertake equally pragmatic sub-negotiations with emerging countries to persuade them to see the benefits of supporting the 'international community'
• it shows how China and Russia are quite happy to let this informal and complex system of non-ideological pragmatic negotiation proceed on the basis that it is a system in which it has bargaining power in its own right for the pursuance of their own national interests
• it shows how this project is not about war with Iran but the containment of Iran so that, like the old Soviet Union, it eventually implodes as an ideological regime

 .. but it also shows how populous vulnerable Muslim states have to tread carefully in collaborating with the Western project and that an entire culture zone still remains vulnerable to the effects of shifts in the economic climate and historic perceptions of Western imperialism.

Most emergent countries are, in fact, prepared to put history (for the moment) to one side in a highly pragmatic assessment of their own interests so, noting a few other exceptional cases like the Bolivaran in Latin America, the Muslim 'resistance' is still really sui generis within the developing country experience of the changing world order.

And so, putting all this together, we are seeing a new realism in Washington, amidst the death throes of neo-conservative ideology, busily working out its opportunities before the cards get shuffled again with a new US Presidency in 2009.

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