So far, however, the administration has been reluctant to put the squeeze on potential partners. Many Obama officials took the view outlined by Poneman in his article -- that asking states to renounce ENR could make the situation worse. (It is important to note that I am not aware of Poneman's view inside the interagency deliberations.) So the administration has largely avoided pressuring states to renounce enrichment and reprocessing capabilities. Despite early talk of the "gold standard," this January the administration announced it would take what officials described as a case-by-case approach. In bureaucratic terms, this amounts to having no standard at all. It is hard to imagine a less restrictive policy. I suppose the administration could announce it would not even try. As it is, they will try -- but not very hard.
The reaction on Capitol Hill to the "case-by-case" approach was bipartisan and hostile, in no small part because the UAE's pledge contains an "out" in the event another country in the region receives a 123 agreement without a "no ENR" pledge. It is one thing to not get a nonproliferation pledge; it is another thing to lose such a pledge, especially in a region as volatile and proliferation-prone as the Middle East. The possibility of losing the nonproliferation assurance in the UAE agreement became a central matter in negotiations with Jordan, and it looms as an issue with Saudi Arabia. Congressional Democrats and Republicans, including Howard Berman and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, have introduced different pieces of legislation that would make it very difficult for any new 123 agreements that did not contain a pledge to forgo enrichment and reprocessing to receive approval on the Hill. In response, the Obama administration announced it would undertake another review. But it keeps negotiating.
Enter Taiwan. According to the National Journal report, the Obama administration, through an interagency review process, had agreed that it would not begin negotiation of a new 123 agreement with Taiwan until 2013 or 2014. Instead, it would first pursue its negotiations with a series of other countries such as South Korea. The State Department suddenly jumped Taiwan to the front of the line, sending a draft 123 agreement to the Energy Department -- at a time when that department was busy with other matters -- that contained a "no ENR" provision basically identical to the one found in the UAE agreement.
Why? Because someone in the State Department is apparently not willing to give up on the gold standard. Like many interagency fights, a battle over process is really a battle over substance. In this case, the order the agreements are negotiated may matter a great deal. Proponents of the gold standard would rather start with their best chance, hoping to create a precedent for following agreements. Taiwan is almost certainly the most likely candidate to make a no-ENR pledge because it has very little leverage. Taiwan is not a state, and it is not a member of the IAEA. Its safeguards agreements are administered through the United States. If Taiwan walks away from its agreement with the United States, it has no other partners. We should not be at all surprised that someone at the State Department who would put a no-ENR provision in the Taiwan draft would also try to jump it forward in the queue.
By the same token, if you believe that the "gold standard" is a dangerous illusion that will prevent the United States from reaching many important 123 agreements, you do not want to negotiate with Taiwan first. You would see Taiwan in the same way you see the UAE -- a sui generis case unlikely to be replicated that creates a misleading impression about U.S. leverage over certain partners. And you would hope no one spoke Latin.
Happily, I can explain this in plain English: "One is an accident; two is a coincidence; three is a trend." Someone at the State Department is trying to start a trend. He or she is probably tired of hearing the argument that negotiating another "gold standard" 123 agreement is not possible, when he or she knows opportunities do exist. If the administration really can persuade Taiwan and Jordan to agree to accept the gold standard, doing so will demonstrate that the United States can negotiate nuclear trade agreements that also have strong nonproliferation provisions. And this, in turn, will put pressure on the tougher cases, like South Korea and Saudi Arabia, to conform with what will appear to be an emerging global standard -- 24 carats and nothing less.
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