A Firebrand in a House of Cards

While under the crosshairs of international scrutiny, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad boldly moved to break the seals of his nation’s nuclear facilities, raising the ire of governments from Moscow to Washington and increasing the possibility of large-scale UN sanctions on the Islamic Republic. But an op-ed in the New York Times insists that, despite the longstanding tensions and enmity between Iran and the United States, compromise, not conflict, must prevail. A military confrontation would prove disastrous for the United States, overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, and further polarize the troubled Middle East. Even sanctions authorized by the Security Council may send inflation skyrocketing, “wipe out the savings of a large part of the [Iranian] middle class” and distract Iranians from an already troubled economy. Instead, the op-ed contributors maintain that both sides have an incentive to abandon their ideological posturing in favor of pragmatic solutions: Iran ought to accept Russia’s latest proposal to process Iranian uranium gas into fuel outside its borders, while the US must rescind its unilateral sanctions, which “harm Iranian civilians” and do little to control Iran’s effort to build nuclear capacity. – YaleGlobal