Balanced insecurity

A new global system is in the wake as power moves away from regional superpowers to the periphery, analyses Ayman El-Amir

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The international security situation has developed into such a dangerous configuration that it is not totally outlandish to envision the emergence of a new system of global security based on the underlying principle of balanced regional insecurity. The fundamental assumption is that if the sense of inordinate political and military supremacy encourages aggression and intransigence, then mutual deterrence promotes respect and responsibility. This recalls how the old- fashioned global superpowers ensured their own, and the world's, survivability.

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Amnesty International activists demonstrate outside the US Embassy in Athens against the notorious US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

If this sounds like a call for the revival of the Cold War situation on a regional scale, it is. It should be remembered that the Cold War years were relatively peaceful, compared to the 19th century's spate of wars, conquest and colonization. This was made possible only by the balance of power, albeit nuclear US-Soviet superpower, between the end of World War II and the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The two superpowers never came to nuclear blows and never allowed their regional surrogates to drag them into nuclear war, despite the progressive nuclear arms race. It is from this perspective that the protracted confrontation with Iran should be considered.

The dispute major Western powers have with Iran is fuelled by the suspicion that its quest for nuclear technology covers up a program for the development of nuclear weapons. Iran, perceived as a fundamentalist state that provides sanctuary for terrorists, thus poses a threat to the region and to the world. In order to give their argument international sanction, the United States-led group is trying to hold Iran in violation of its obligations under the 1970 Nuclear Non- proliferation Treaty, or NPT.

The treaty has been both ignored by the big powers, which are committed under its terms to reduce drastically their nuclear arsenals, and spurned by non-nuclear nations that were frustrated by its flaws and managed to develop their own nuclear weapon programs. True to the spirit and conduct of a lone ranger, the US is focusing instead on a parallel counter- proliferation program -- the Proliferation Security Initiative. It actively seeks to intercept suspected nuclear shipments transported in the sea, on land and in the air, as well as busting international nuclear sales networks, like that of Pakistan's Abdul-Kadeer Khan. At the same time, the big Western nuclear powers have consistently failed to meet a key provision of the treaty -- to assure non-nuclear states that they will not be attacked.

The month-long NPT Review Conference that was held at the United Nations in New York in May 2005 only served to show how wide the gap is between nuclear and non-nuclear countries. While the US wanted the conference to focus on North Korea and Iran, the majority of non-nuclear nations wanted the major powers to re-commit themselves to a substantial reduction of their nuclear arsenals, as originally provided for in the treaty and reiterated by the Clinton administration six years ago. At the same conference, held once every five years, the US declined to commit itself to the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), claiming it was now outdated.

The failure of the NPT Review Conference rekindled the spirit of the nuclear arms race. Nations of the world find no redemption in a dangerous system of international injustice where the powerful behave on the grounds that 'might is right.' This was exemplified by the US and Israel.

Non-nuclear nations are dismayed at the selectivity by which the fraying standards of the NPT are applied. When the treaty entered into force in 1970, three of the now 188 signatories stayed out: India, Pakistan and Israel. These were countries on the threshold of nuclear armament in a situation of regional belligerency. Egypt, which had built a nuclear research reactor at Inshas in 1956, was among the early signatories of the 1968 Treaty -- perhaps as a consequence of the dispirited national mood that gripped the country in the wake of the 1967 war defeat.

Some 35 years after the NPT became a legal international treaty, non-nuclear nations are waking up to the fact that it has become more of an instrument for the protection of the privileges of a few nuclear powers than a safeguard for the security and safety of the majority non-nuclear states. No wonder that some of the latter are bolting out of the ranks. North Korea withdrew from the Treaty in 2003, and the US, on the other hand, has founded its own counter-proliferation network that proved more effective when it impounded a Libya-bound freighter, the S/S BBC China, with a cargo of uranium enrichment equipment in 2003. Libya renounced its nascent nuclear program soon afterwards.

The double-standards attitude of Western nuclear powers towards the NPT enforcement regime subverted the system. Israel was the first case in point. Initially, the U.S. softened its position on the monitoring and inspection of the Israeli nuclear "research" reactor at Dimona, ultimately ending such inspections by 1970. The consensus of international strategic studies institutes estimate that Israel now possesses up to 200 nuclear warheads, with the Jericho I and Jericho II missiles as short and medium range delivery vehicles.

When Pakistan was developing and testing its nuclear capability in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Reagan administration looked the other way. Pakistan was a vital transit route for US arms and equipment to the Mujahideen fighting a war of liberation against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. To divulge Pakistan's nuclear activity would have resulted in banning arms shipments to it under US law. But to the Reagan administration, arms delivery to the Mujahideen was more important than obstructing Pakistan's pursuit of a nuclear weapon capability.

India, which absorbed and survived sanctions imposed by the U.S. Congress 30 years ago for its nuclear weapon program, is now regarded as an important strategic U.S. ally. Congress is now considering a Bush administration request that would exempt India from US Atomic Energy Act sanctions under a nuclear partnership program that would give India access to US nuclear fuel and reactors, in return for opening its civilian, but not military, facilities to IAEA inspection.

Although India and Pakistan had fought four wars since 1947, two of them before they became full-fledged nuclear powers, they have shown more restraint and responsibility since they turned nuclear. Likewise, the two superpowers, the US and the former Soviet Union, came to several standoffs during the 1961 Berlin crisis, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the 1973 US nuclear alert during the October war. They consistently acted responsibly as nuclear powers.

In the current Western showdown with Iran over uranium enrichment and the development of nuclear technology, Israel is certainly the eminence grise propelling the confrontation. It is probably re-living its own acts of subterfuge as it developed its own nuclear weapon program while Western powers pretended to believe that it was only building a reactor for water desalination and looked the other way.

US and Israeli policies and actions have demonstrated that exclusive superpower, whether on a regional or global level, is more dangerous to the world than the risk of bipolar power as the world previously knew it. That is why power will have to devolve from its global and regional epicentres to the fringes. This is what is now happening in Asia and will necessarily develop in the Middle East and elsewhere. The world's sole super and regional powers will have to come to terms with this reality to fight the rising tide of injustice, violence and terrorism.