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『哲学のヤンキー的段階』のための備忘録

Crisis between the United states and Iran

 Yemen’s Houthi rebels launched drone attacks on the world’s largest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia and a major oil field Saturday, sparking huge fires at a vulnerable chokepoint for global energy supplies. It remained unclear hours later whether anyone was injured at the Abqaiq oil processing facility and the Khurais oil field or what effect the assault would have on oil production. The attack by the Iranian-backed Houthis in the war against a Saudi-led coalition comes after weeks of similar drone assaults on the kingdom’s oil infrastructure, but none of the earlier strikes appeared to have caused the same amount of damage. The attack likely will heighten tensions further across the Persian Gulf amid an escalating crisis between the U.S. and Iran over its unraveling nuclear deal with world powers.

 

 Iran denied that it was involved in Yemen rebel drone attacks the previous day that hit the world’s biggest oil processing facility and an oil field in Saudi Arabia, just hours after America’s top diplomat alleged that Tehran was behind the “unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply.” The attacks  claimed by Yemen’s Houthi rebels resulted in “the temporary suspension of production operations” at the Abqaiq processing facility and the Khurais oil field, Riyadh said. The amount Saudi Arabia is cutting back is equivalent to over 5% of the world’s daily production. While markets remained closed Sunday, the attack could shock world energy prices. They also increased overall tensions in the region amid an escalating crisis between the U.S. and Iran over Tehran’s unraveling nuclear deal with world powers.

 

 The U.S. officials previously alleged at least one recent drone attack on Saudi Arabia came from Iraq, where Iran backs Shiite militias. Those militias in recent weeks have been targeted themselves by mysterious airstrikes, with at least one believed to have been carried out by Israel. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi  dismissed Pompeo’s remarks as “blind and futile comments.”


 President Donald Trump called Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to offer his support for the kingdom’s defense, the White House said. The crown prince assured Trump that Saudi Arabia is “willing and able to confront and deal with this terrorist aggression,” according to a news release from the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

 

 Among the states in the Middle East, Iran has perhaps the most coherent experience of national greatness and longest and subtlest strategic tradition. It has preserved its essential culture for three thousand years, sometimes as an expanding empire, for many centuries by the skilled manipulation of surrounding elements. Before the ayatollahs' revolution, the West's interaction with Iran had been cordial and cooperative on both sides, based on a perceived parallelism of national interests.

 

 The United States and the Western democracies should be open to fostering cooperative relations with Iran. What they must not do is base such a policy on projecting their own domestic experience as inevitably or automatically relevant to other societies', especially Iran's. They must allow for the possibility that the unchanged rhetoric of a generation is based on convinction rather than posturing and will have had an impact on a significant number of the Iranian people. A change of tone is not necessarily a return to normalcy, especially where definitions of normalcy differ so fundamentally. It includes as well-and more likely- the possibility of a change in tactics to reach essentially unchanged goals. The United States should be open to a genuin reaconciliation and make substantial efforts to facilitate it. Yet for such an effort succeed, a clear sense of direction is essential, especially on the key issue of Iran's nuclear program.

 

 The future of Iranian-American relation will depend on the resolution of ostensibly technical military issue. As these pages are being written , potentially epochal shift in the region's military balance andits psychological equilibrium may be taking place. It has been ushered in by Iran's rapid progress toward the status of a nuclear weapons state amidst a negotiation between it  and the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (the P5+1). Though couched in terms of technical and scientific capabilities, the issue is at heart about international order-about ability of the international community to enforce its demands against sophisticated forms of rejection, the permeability of the global nonproliferation regime, and the prospects for a nuclear arms race in the world's most volatile region.

 

 The traditional balance of power emphasized military and industrical capacity. A change in it could be achieved only gradually or by conquest. The modern balance of power reflects the level of a society's scientific development and can be threatened dramatically by developments entirely within the territory of a state. No conquest could have increased Soviet military capacity as much as the breaking of the American nuclear monopoly in 1949. Similarly, the spread of deliverable nuclear weapon is bound to affect regional balances-and the international order-dramatically and to evoke a series of escalating counteraction.

 

 All Cold War American administration were obliged to design their international strategies in the context of the awe-inspiring calculus of deterrence: the knowledge that nuclear war would involve casual-ties of a scale capable of threatening civilized life. They were haunted as well by the awareness that a demonstrated willingness to run the risk- at least up to a point- was essential if the world was not to be turned over to ruthless totalitarians. Deterrence held in the face of these paralel nightmares because only two nuclear superpowers existed. Each made comparable assessments of the perils to it from the use of nuclear weapons. But as nuclear weapons spread into more and more hands, the calculus of deterrence grows increasingly ephemeral and deterrence less and less reliable. In a widely proliferated world, it becomes ever more difficult to decide who is deterring whom and by what calculations.

 

 The complexity of protecting nuclear arsenals and instalations and bulding the sophisticated warming systems possessed by the advanced nuclear states may increase the risk of preemption by tilting incentives toward a suroprise attack. They can also be used as a shield to deter retaliation against the militant actions of non-state group. Nor could nuclear powers ignore nuclear war on their doorsteps. Finally, the experience with the "private" proliferation network of technically friendly Pakistan with North Korea, Libya, and Iran demonstrates the vast consequences to international order of the spread of nuclear weapons, even when the proliferating country does not meet the formal criteria of a rouge state.

 

 The United States and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council have been negotiating for over ten years through two administrations of both parties to prevent the emergence of such a capability in Iran.Six UN Security Council resolutions since 2006 have insisted that Iran suspend its nuclear-enrichment program.Three American presidents of both parties, every permanent member of UN Securuty Council plus Germany, and multiple International Atomic Energy Agency reports and resolutions have all declared an Iranian nuclear weapon unacceptable and demanded an unconditional halft to Iranian enrichment. No option was to be off the table in pursuit of the goal.

 

 The record shows steadily advancing Iranian nuclear capabilities taking place while the Western position has been progressively softened. As Iran has ignored UN resolutiona and built centrifuges, the West has put forward a series of proposals of increasing permissiveness-from insisting that Iran terminate its uranium enrichment permanently(2004); to allowing that Iran might continue some enrichment at low-enriched uranium levels, less than 20 percent(2005); to proposing that Iran ship the majority of its low-enriched uranium out of the country so that France and Russia could turn it into fuel rods with 20 percent enriched uranium(2009); to a proposal allowing Iran to keep enough of its own 20 percent enriched uranium to run a research reactor while suspending operations at its Fordow facility of centrifuges capable of making more(2013). Fordow itself was once a secret site; when discovered, it became the subject of Western demands that it close entirely.

 

In the spring of 2013, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran- the figure then and now outranking all Iranian government ministers, including Iran's President and Foreign Minister- delivered a speech to an international conference of Muslim clerics, lauding the onset of a new global revolution. What elsewhere was called the "Arab Spring", he declared, was in fact an "Islamic Awakening" of world-spanning consequence. The West erred in assessing that the croweds of demonstrators represented the triumph of liberal democracy, Khamenei explained. The demonstrators would reject the "bitter and horrifying experience of following the West in politics, behavior and lifestyle "because they embodied the "miraculous fulfillment of divine promises".

 

 In Khamenei's analysis, this reawakening of Islamic consciousness was opening the door to a global religious revolution that would finally vanquish the overbearing influence of the United States and its allies and bring an end to three centuries of Western primacy. Following "the failure of communism and liberalism" and with the power and confidence of the West crumbling, the Islamic Awakening would reverberate across the world, Khamenei pledged, unifying the global Muslim ummah(the traditional community of believers) and restoring it to world centrality. Khamenei had explained upon this topic previously. As he remarked to an audience of Iranian paramilitary force 2011, popular protests in the West spoke to a global hunger for spirituality and legitimacy as exemplified by Iran's theocracy. In any other region, such declaration would have been treated as a major revolutionary challenge: a theocratic figure wielding supreme spiritual and temporal power was, in a significant country, publicly embracing a project of constructing an alternative world order in opposition to the one being practiced by the world community.

 

 The Supreme Leader of contemporary Iran was declaring that universal religious principles, not national interests or liberal internationalism, would dominate the new world he prophesied. Had such sentiments been voiced by an Asian or a European leader, they would have been interpreted as a shocking global challenge. Yet thirty-five years of repetition had all but inured the world to the radicalism of these sentiments and the actions backing them. On this part, Iran combined its challenge to modernity with a millennial tradition of a statecraft of exceptional subtlety.