Lacking the proper context, it's easy to read -- or misread -- efforts that appear designed to resolve serious conflicts as a positive development. But as Ralph Peters writes in a New York Post commentary, "Nukes Gone Wild," the growing desire by geopolitical up-and-comers to join The Club -- the nuclear club -- suggests some recent diplomatic efforts are less than they seem:
The future just got uglier
The world changed this week and we yawned. Our government and media utterly failed to grasp the meaning of the Iran-Brazil-Turkey nuke deal.
Undercutting the sanctions-lite bargain Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thinks she has with Russia and China was the least of it.
We're so obsessed with the single (albeit important) issue of terrorism that we're missing profound global realignments and the rise of grave new threats.
Iran's "agreement" to ship a slice of its enriched-uranium pie to Turkey for reprocessing is pure gamesmanship. We expect that from Iran. The alarming part is that, this time, Turkey and Brazil are in on the game.
The ludicrous terms of this con-job have long since been overtaken by events. Brazil's President Lula da Silva and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan aren't trying to stop Iran's nuke program.
They're eager to facilitate it.
What Brazil and Turkey just did wasn't intended to impede Tehran, but to make it harder for Western powers to impose sanctions. Both countries want Iran to run interference for them.
Once Iran gets the bomb and takes the (slight) heat, Brazil and Turkey both intend to go nuclear.
Brazil wants vanity nukes to cement its position as South America's hegemon, a regional alternative to the US. Turkey's slow-roll Islamist government dreams of a new Ottoman age -- as it turns from the West to embrace the Muslim states it ruled a century ago. After easing Tehran's path to the bomb, Ankara will claim that it needs its own nuclear capability to maintain regional stability.
But the coming widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons will be profoundly destabilizing. Each Middle Eastern country, especially, that goes nuclear increases the probability of a nuke exchange exponentially.
As Western states fantasize about a "nuclear-weapons-free world," their developing-world darlings are scrambling like mad to develop nuclear arsenals. And we don't get it.
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Amen! I agree completely.
Posted by: Independent Accountant | May 23, 2010 at 04:37 PM
I can think of no better illustration of the saying:
Men make their destiny, but cannot control it.
Posted by: roger | May 23, 2010 at 06:55 PM