Federico Bordonaro

In un lucido articolo su AsiaTimes Online, l’analista Gareth Porter individua le ragioni storiche e strategiche del contrasto tra Washington e Teheran, troppo spesso ridotto alla disputa sul nucleare:

In pushing for a showdown over Iran’s nuclear program in the United Nations Security Council, the administration of US President George W Bush has presented the issue as a matter of global security - an Iranian nuclear threat in defiance of the international community.

But the history of the conflict and the private strategic thinking of both sides reveal that the dispute is really about the Bush administration’s drive for greater dominance in the Middle East and Iran’s demand for recognition as a regional power.

Secondo il neoconservatore Donnelly, citato da Porter, i “realisti” minerebbero la strategia politica di fondo dell’Amministrazione Bush. Questa infatti concepisce la propria politica mediorientale come mezzo per rimodellare il “Grande Medio Oriente”, favorendone un riorientamento filo-occidentale. Tale politica entra fatalmente in conflitto con le ambizioni iraniane di aumentare la propria influenza nella regione.

In 2003 […] Tehran offered concrete, substantive concessions on those issues. But on the advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Bush refused to respond to the proposal for negotiation. Nuclear weapons were not, therefore, the primary US concern. In the hierarchy of the US administration’s interests, the denial of legitimacy to the Islamic Republic trumped a deal that could have provided assurances against an Iranian nuclear weapon.

Donnelly writes that a “nuclear Iran” is a problem not so much because Tehran would employ those weapons or pass them on to terrorist groups, but mainly because of “the constraining effect it threatens to impose upon US strategy for the greater Middle East”.

The “greatest danger”, according to Donnelly, is that the “realists” would “pursue a ‘balance of power’ approach with a nuclear Iran, undercutting the Bush ‘liberation strategy’”. Although Donnelly doesn’t say so explicitly, it would undercut that strategy primarily by ruling out a US attack on Iran as part of a “regime change” strategy.