The Nuclear-Free Middle East Ploy

Jeffrey Herf, professor of modern European history at the University of Maryland, writes in today’s New Republic Online about the coming pressure on Israel to disarm itself in order to appease Iran. 

Herf notes that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s resolution referring Iran’s nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council included a clause calling for the creation of "a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, including their means of delivery" — a “pointed jab at the region’s only nuclear power, Israel.”

But he notes there is an historical parallel to be considered:  in the early 1980s, in the US-Soviet negotiations on intermediate-range nuclear forces, the Soviet Union argued the nuclear arsenals of Britain and France had to be included — a proposal that London and Paris adamantly opposed:

Aware that the slogan of a "nuclear-free Europe" might lead to demands for their unilateral nuclear disarmament, the British and French governments persistently rejected this Soviet negotiating ploy. . . .

Britain and France held firm, arguing that their own nuclear arsenals were weapons of last resort intended only to deter attacks on their homelands. Besides, they pointed out, their weapons had been deployed long before the [Soviet] SS-20s appeared. . . . [T]hey also understood that a nuclear-free Europe of this sort was simply another name for unilateral disarmament . . . [T]he British and French arsenals remained intact. . . .

The same principles, Herf argues, apply to the current situation:

Now, more than ever, Israel needs a strong deterrent against its enemies. At such a moment, the Jewish state’s nuclear weapons should be just as much a non-issue as Britain and France wanted their own nuclear arsenals to be during the early 1980s. . . .

[T]he more terrified Europe becomes at the prospect that religious fundamentalists in Tehran will possess nuclear weapons, the more the logic of the nuclear-free Middle East clause in the IAEA resolution could lead the EU to pressure Israel to eliminate its nuclear weapons.  Iran could, with the world watching at the Security Council, condition an end to its nuclear program on an elimination of Israel‘s nuclear arsenal. . . .

 

If, as the European governments say is the case, Israel‘s right to exist is not a subject for negotiation, then neither are the means that Israelis decide to use to insure their existence. . . .   

Britain and France should understand the logic of all this. After all, it is the same logic they used themselves, and not so long ago.

(Hat tip:  Ed Lasky).