Human rights concerns will be a luxury Britain can't afford

SAUDI Arabia is Britain's biggest trading partner in the Middle East. After the United States, it is the second most important purchaser of British weaponry.

What, then, should Britain - and the rest of the West - do if Saudi Arabia goes nuclear? Enforce punitive sanctions in the hope of slowing down global nuclear proliferation? Impose an arms embargo? Punish Pakistan for supplying the technology? Or help to devise a new regional strategy that fortifies Sunni-run states against the notional menace of a nuclear Iran?

Much of this discussion has to be conducted in what grammarians call the future real conditional tense. Iran does not yet have nuclear weapons, though it is close. And there are not many signs yet of the arms race anticipated by Western and Israeli officials; a nuclear Saudi kingdom joined by Egypt, Turkey and perhaps Jordan. But, as a senior Israeli official said yesterday, the Saudis could, with Pakistani help, be nuclear-capable "in a very short time".

It is the fear of Iran that has steered much of the conventional arms dealing between the US and Britain and the Saudi kingdom. The region has been nervously living with the prospect of a nuclear Iran for many years and has accordingly been spending big chunks of its oil revenues on defence.

BAE Systems has a large contract with the Saudis for the supply of Typhoon Eurofighters and hopes, as the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, made clear in Riyadh last month, to expand it. Britain has granted licences for the export of sniper rifles, aircraft components and armoured personnel carriers to Saudi forces.

All this has sat rather awkwardly with British support for the Arab Spring, especially after Saudi security forces moved into Bahrain to help the Sunni ruling family against Shia-led protests, and critics see much of the business as a cynical attempt to create or hang on to British jobs.

But a nuclear Iran does change, radically, the terms of Middle East thinking. So, too, does a Saudi bomb. First, an arms race in the region makes a nonsense out of any naive assumption that a nuclear Iran could somehow be contained in the same way that the Soviet Union was held back during the Cold War. Iran would flex its muscles, encourage its various proxy forces - and the chances of a miscalculation, an itchy trigger finger, would rise. Secondly, an Iran with the atomic bomb would run a coach-and-horses through the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The region already has one non-NPT nuclear power - Israel - and if it were to be joined by a cluster of other countries, there could be no mutual deterrence, only dangerous confusion.

There is a strong argument for ensuring that Iran does not move to the next stage and acquire nuclear weapons. If it does, and Saudi Arabia seeks to shield itself, we should not condemn it out of hand. Whatever our reservations about the human rights records of Saudi Arabia, this will be the moment when we have to side with the kingdom, when our idealistic support for the Arab Spring makes way for realpolitik.

The Times


(2012-02-11/theaustralian)